Indorum

The flowers that grow around the city of Indorum are nearly all violets. Scattered among them are a sparse collection of yellow tulips. It must be here that a woman might recline on a soft blanket, spending warm mornings waiting for word from the governor. And, when the evening draws near, it is from this place--among the tulips that the little girl accompanying her has been gathering--that the stars begin to show their brightest. The sky a richer sort of black than we are used to.

When in the absent hours of the day we begin to discuss the mystery of the city's disappearance, it is always with a thought to hold a glass of beer. Our search is not so earnest as we might lead others to think. We have come to believe that she will return in her own time.

And when she does, it will be one of us she chooses to love.

Missed Connections: to the one I forgot out of a dream

I came across you first in the pages of a National Geographic I had held for my grandfather when he went into the operating room. In many important ways, these years later I am still waiting to return it to him, just as he wakes up. I don’t remember what year in college I was rummaging through old things while unpacking into a small apartment, and decided finally to read it, sitting on a pile of blankets and surrounded by boxes and cleaning supplies. I don’t recall if it was your name or your sentence, whether you were the subject or narrator, but it gnawed on me in quiet moments on hot evenings of too much whiskey, and it was in these moments I began to get a picture of you, the way you stand at bars on work nights and complain about the state of the bodies you are delivered, the work you must put into them; even though you once considered this your art, your contribution to the grieving process; your exuberance has faded. Now it is only flesh upon a butcher’s slab, sinews to fill with chemicals, application of delivered clothing and make up, hair—you are digging through mother nature’s sewage. Or the way you order tea only when no one is around to notice.

And only recently, I saw you for the second time in a dream. I felt that I could see everything that you were, and that I held in proper perspective all the minor details of your life, your readings, the boxes in your upstairs closet, but since I woke, I have not been able to remember any particulars of the dream. And so, even revealed, you remain a persistent mystery.

I want to make plans to see you again. I’ll be searching through newspapers, window advertisements, traffic alert screens, something encoded into the horoscopes, something from the one who prepares the damned for judgement. I may or may not check candy wrappers, that all depends on some personal things.

every word i ever loved was composed while waiting

a moon is without memory--regret, love,
it is only gravity, a cause for tides; the earth now oblong and wet

her skin, when it is night. she leans against a light wind--the absent satellite of early morning. waning from recollection, hair stained with coffee.

Leonard emerges after seeming dead, and interrupts everything

I have to find a confidence again in putting words on a page. It’s been too much of a struggle to face a processor document on the computer, so I place small sketches on a blog, or scrawl germs into a journal. It has gone on for nearly four years, and now I am faced with the prospect of being enrolled in a writing program with no sense of who I am as a writer. I am hoping that by buying this large screen, setting it on a good desk, and placing that desk in a space on this planet that holds true beauty and tranquility, that perhaps a music might arise from my attempts at the bigger canvas

—so you have trouble staring at a blank canvas, here, let’s blow it up five times as big, five times the empty, unused space. It will either scare you to death, or you will see the necessity for that canvas to be filled with your ideas. It will be clumsy at first, and dispel yourself of the notion that you will get your confidence back. That writer is gone. He died years ago, and good riddance I say. He was a liar and a brigand, and a poor wordsmith. The one who fills these canvases will plumb his very depths, he will sacrifice, he will love his art and the art of others truly, lie only to kings and gatekeepers, steal only from thieves, and you might call him any rich name you like and adorn him in golden robes, but he will be anything but confident in those words he keeps. It will be the source of his struggle. The reason he will continue striving for better. When I killed this other author, and held his head in my hand as the life left him, staring madly into his face, that he might see the image of his tormentor, that he might die in terror of what he had unleashed, weaved between the lines of narrator and author, and brought forth as his murderer, you did not know then that I was paving the way for this other, golden fellow. You ran from me, even conspired with other writers to have me killed in what turned out to be more than twenty distinct fashions. And you still may not understand, but you soon will.

re: the emailed request

done.

(it was never my intention to offend)