Aeschylus, can you hear me in between the jazz pauses? I am the broken tomato stem—I am in need of twining. The dog’s anemic spine—the entrails of a thousand gutted horse flies. The hair in the window. The catatonic masses. Who will clean the plaque off my teeth?

The smoke, the haze, is like a monument of death—or a dream of what’s to come. The silent hill, the multiverse. What hangs beneath the sky now? Whose shoulders have become inflamed? I cannot tact this poster to the ceiling. I am regurgitating the snores. Still, people call, friends don’t.

I wrote to you last night in a dream. But I cannot recall the forwarding address. Those days of staring out windows to the street—gaunt and lustful. Our tragedy remains unnoticed—our guardian angel preoccupied. I wade my toes into desert salt, and mourn.

All that I acquire become lists on index cards—folded and shuffled away for their time in trash heaps. There are so many things left unsaid— that I can barely fathom, nor overcome. We are like fireflies blinking in and out of existence. We are the smoldering vapor carried across boarders.

Even so, I wake up on rainy day twenty seventh, wash my windshield and oil my car. There is nothing but time, until there is not.