Dear (_____)

Dear naked sleepers,

I understand the struggle.  I understand your frustrations at sleep overs.  I understand the hardship when sleeping on a friends couch after a fun night is the only option.  I get forgetting you've wriggled out of your clothes under your blanket when you've had a platonic friend spend the evening a few feet away.

Above all, I understand your Winter.  I know the fakers are out there.  The ones who say they sleep naked, but really only in Summer and really only on some days in Summer and really only under certain circumstances on those days.  They don't get it.  They've never walked halfway to the kitchen after waking up in the middle of the night and turned back because they would rather be thirsty or go hungry for the rest of the night, then put on pajamas or sweats or clothing of any kind.  They've never turned back halfway to the ice cold bathroom because they'd rather try to hold it til morning than dress themselves only to undress again.  Once clothes come off for bed, that's it!  I will not put them on so long as there is a sleepy cell in my body and not a minute before my alarm demands I do!

naked sleepers, I salute,

Sincerely,

a brother in arms

Dear (_____)

Dear gender,

You can be fairly inscrutable sometimes.  Naked is power one day and object the next.  Homogenous is ideal one day and acidic the next.  Every other other week is another other.  One day art, one day pornography, one day enslavement, one day revolution, one day torture, and the next day pretension.  One day humble strength, then brutality, then "think of the children", then oppression, and the new home dynamic.

I know we can't all agree on what you should be or are, but can you please subscript your presence with over the counter instructions so that people, uninterested in exploring you, looking for an easily bottled, prepackaged consumable, can understand why they are feeling any one of the many particular effects of your consumption in that form and when to seek outside help.  Can you at least include a disclaimer?

Otherwise our discourse will, for the rest of human time, be jammed with people wondering why they are pissing blood and going blind & shouting at the sky about it every time someone takes off their clothes, wants to be seen for who they are and their intrinsic value, or does something slightly outside of the bell curve "by and large" norm for whatever gender is inside them.

I know you are impossible to simplify completely, but instructions and a solid list of symptoms could go a ways to help people understand people.  Or at least cut down on some of the unnecessary screaming and shouting.  I understand the pamphlet will be long.  And the people that don't read will continue not to.  I think it is fair to hope improvement would be contagious save for the incorrigible, vapid, ever present, tumorous nodules, consistent with a body of seven and change billion cells.



Sincerely,

the internet

That Instant

you sneeze on your computer screen and everything turns into rainbow dots, but you're "awww, cool" quickly turns into an "aw, gross" when you remember each beautiful rainbow lens of light is just booger sauce and electrons.

That Instant

you realize your sense of humor has dried up and, while experiencing humorous thoughts, the window has closed and those thoughts are going to land face down on the street below, shoved through that closed window in a spray of glitter and entrails and, though funny to you, the humor is still upstairs inside your room, the end result being a cryptic crime scene and you will have to wait for the window to open again.

At The River Near the Lowline and Clarity

Looking at my own reflection at the river, a wolf's head mask in the crook of my arm, I wonder how many there are like me.  I wonder how many times I can roll the dice with instability before an immovable object meets an unstoppable force again.  I try to skip rocks.  I try to bat rocks with an aluminum bat given to me as a gift after I left the last one I had at home, bent into the shape of a boomerang.  I wonder where I am going and if someone out there is going the same way I am.  If we will carpool together and shout at each other, trying to figure out where exactly "there" is while the driver tries to figure how to get two wolves out of his car and regrets being a Samaritan.

Many of the rocks hit the tips of breakers and sink.  One of us trots off to find a stick, because the only thing better than being good enough at whipping rocks across the waves, skip tip skip, is belting one clear across to the other shore with an eardrum pounding snapthud.  The other of us continues to troll the river edge for something shaped more like an atmosphere slicing star ship.  Found.  Away it goes: skip kip tick tink tock thock plop splash!  Mid-river.  The current continues.  I can't see my face, looking down.  The angles aren't right.  The light is not just so.  The sun is not cooperating.  Statistics tell me, with time, the chances only get better.

Thinking about how people find their perfect match.  At least, their better half, I worry that my best half may be a copy of me.  Should I meet myself, the fusion would be fantastic.  Impossible.  Incredible in its perfection and destruction.  Volatile and serene and volatile and serene and so far off of the periodic table as to exist for fractions of fractions of fractions of seconds, recorded only by some sort of quantum, liquid gas cooled, calculating machine, monitoring a torus of plasma whose only hint that the collision was made successfully is a slight fluctuation in its surface hundreds of meters in circumference, yet to be invented before its shear density of particles blew apart and ceased to exist.  Insofar as that, I am satisfied to be alone.

Happy and satisfied are two different things.  The instant of happiness would be without measure, however, exceptionally brief.  As much as I would like to, as much as I say it is the only match capable of closing my circuits, I know it is ... I want to say that I know it is not true.  Doomed.  I laugh typing that.  The two "oh's" in the middle make me giggle.  Dooooooomed!  Of course not.  Should you meet an element that can absorb nuclear decay and heat.  I wonder what quantum decay looks like.  I meet so many people with so many names and I know none of them.  Some of them, yes.  None of them, also yes.  Always at distance.  Minding the fence.  Minding the facilities.  On the off chance they might be me.  On the larger chance I am still myself and they are not.

A moat.  Sometimes the bridge is there.  The gates open and ambassadors cross.  I don't know what madness is.  Is it sleeping to protect yourself from yourself?  Is it sleeping to protect others from yourself?  Is it believing the best thing you can do is offer shade inside a bunker, outfit with everything you can desire and hold dear, in the shadow of your fusion climbing toward the exosphere?  Recite: I am here, this is what I wanted.  I am here, this is what I wanted.  I am here.  This is what I wanted.  Few things truly scare me, in life.  I would like to never meet my, atom for atom, better half.  Inside that reactor would lie our mutual, exceptionally violent, end.





///Groove Armada - "At The River"   ~ tempo and brass and sand and waving, not drowning.

Dear (_____)

Dear chance,

I never know who exactly it is I am going to meet or where, for that matter.  At least, with the drug trade, it is a calculated risk.  Alone often?  Yes.  The benevolence of strangers.  I like to believe they are taking a risk too.  Each one is a gate to a new network.  An interface.  Thrilling and horrifying in its own span of minutes.  No safety nets.  Out of network.  Fringe.  Where the rubber meets the road, so to speak...  or flesh.  Every time you walk out that door you may not come back.  I hate thinking about it.  So many dice rolls.  I never thought I'd reach, or understand, a place where high risk, high risk beyond my control, was the way forward.  Trying to figure out what's inside the black boxes I meet is tiresome.  I worry for the day I read one wrong.  I have no idea how that game ends.  I don't traffic in violence anymore.  I wonder if I had to, if I absolutely had to, would I have enough time to realize I had to and turn the switch inside me, hidden inside a safe inside a safe inside a safe, before the game ended.

Sincerely,

a glass combination lock wired to a dead circuit switch hooked up to fifteen piezoelectric crystals encased in a three inch thick asphalt sealed... beside the infrared lens array connected to... feeding into a phosphorous anti-warship grade mine.

P.S. safety first.

Dear (_____)

To whom it may concern,

When I ask you if you heard something while we are sharing leisure time or walking somewhere or simply sharing a common space in a face to face, the preferred response is a simple "yes" or "no."

If you answer "yes," I may have follow up questions for you.  If you answer "no," we will carry on about whatever business or pleasure or quietude we are on.

I do not need you to tell me "no, you are hearing things."  I know I heard something.  That's why I asked.  I am asking you if you heard it too.  I am not asking you if I heard it.  I know I heard it.  I need to know if it's from inside my brain or from the outside.

That's all.  Thank you.

Sincerely,

Sanity