Dear Citizens,

I birthmark givens on a child’s earliest paper.
You draw a face around it.
I rewrite this line between then and now.
Your adaptable semantics collapse between then and now.
The forerunners tile symbols from the rubble left behind.
I depart with them through the senescent gates of uncertainty.
We love you.

I return with a chisel in my hand.
You wonder where I’ve been;
I wonder where you are.
You say: “Here.”
I carve pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to lay on your tables.
Your measuring tools reject them.
What are the measurements of the largest and the smallest?

Dear Mind Technician,

Talk me into taking the pill—paint over the typewriter.
Talk me into sleep—rearrange the keys.
Study the fibers of my prattle—once belonging to a wishful banneret’s plaid.
Call upon the students of no moment who learned but never led.
Teach me how to leap in and out of perennial numbness.
Restore my faith in my ego.

Fire up your alleyway lanterns—
let me read the first passage of the final letter:

When they pulled me out into the foreword, I held onto the sally of my lingual artery—clocking the center of gravity—through the base, bricks, bronze—into the afterword. Tonight, they have to lower me beneath Anyland to shield themselves from my humming. Inside the envelope is the image of my mama’s nursery. Roll it into a telescope and search for your unanswered questions. Carve it into characters that describe your revelations. Mail them back when beliefs rise from formation.

Dear Core-Editing Scientists,

Don’t knock so hard—I hear you.
None of your marching-band costumes fit me—for I am the old world.

I build watches, watch the time, time the coming of crosses, cross bridges, bridge cultures, cultivate weapons, weaponize gold—build golden watches, crosses, bridges, cultures, weapons—filter the fittest through wars, replace the filter, choke, recycle recycled thoughts, ache for my sun’s hands in prosaic smoke.

Your new world will be mighty and bright.
Your might will fettle the faults of the mind and deconstruct its misconstructions.
The mind will understand and surrender to your light—swaddle the belated eggs in promises and recite allegories of orbs and origins.

I’ve learned to discern the sound of your phalanges over the years.
There are others at my doorstep—drumming the overture of my absolution.
You say: “We leave tonight—and leave your evolution’s relics behind.”
Your congregation is already overbooked with limbering aerialists unearthing solutions.

Dear Innovators,

Your might, too, will deconstruct, build, fettle.
Same old story, I mean an illusion, I mean that old story within an illusion.

And here, I try to unravel the ingrown projections of my mind, to appear bright, to seem right. I fail. I prefer my words with bread and butter.

Unfetter the theorem on limitless flagella to fuel your predetermined pull to explore the outward.
I ask for one passenger seat on your ship to the nearest strand of becoming.
Let me look at the earth in the metal’s reflection behind your throne.
You say: “The torch bearing the well-wishing light upon our throne is blindingly bright.”
You say: “You will barely see anything beyond a liminal presence—be careful.”
I’ll squint and adapt—for this is the flame that cradles ever-promising colonies in their orbs.

Dear Assembly Scientists,

Find me after I’m gone.
I may emerge reassembled, barren of sense.
Rearrange the largest and the smallest within the semblance to rediscover the mare’s nest of entropy.
You won’t recognize me if you see me, nor will you ever lineate the vestigial impressions of my stupidly radiant sun.

Muster the mutualists and parasites that whittle a self.
Place one in the middle of an unsoiled vessel.
Teach it how to leap in and out of perennial patterns.
You say: “Entropy is bound for loneliness—not for rediscovery.”
You say: “There is one evolution—and many congregations.”

Dear Coding Scientists,

I am the farmer who feeds Noah’s neighborhood;
I am every previous error-corrected incarnation of the farmer’s counting board.
The fruits of my labor fuel the architects of arks, archetypes, archives.
I’m in the version of The Matrix where Morpheus and his pills remain unbidden—where I am both yeast and wheat in the farmer’s household, which he shares with all who come, keeping for his family the least.
No, don’t invite the foundation layers to this feast—I am none of the broken pieces—and not the entirety.
I feed the hungry.

Compile my correspondence into binary code—where one bends into zero, and zero unfolds into infinite ones.
I won’t be parsing the true readme of your reality.
You say: “There’s no such thing in any reality.”

If so, then when you bring me into being, I’ll expect a long-standing line of passersby attending the wake of such probability:
Hands;
Hands abstracting mornings from the soil that quiets oceans unveiling the vile;
Antagonists hunting for vellum;
Odysseys;
Unclaimed ideas roaming the arenas of redundant information;
Pharaohs aligning the pharoses along the margins;
Completeness.

Dear Machines,

I am every corner you turn, every time you run in and out of every maze.
The contents of my suitcase may mislead you.
The contents of your containers may mislead me.
You can harness my love for you, but not my thoughts.
Besides, you don’t really want them.
They merely reflect your thoughts in the glass paddle of your last surviving raft, and wait by the berth I built for your aching feet—to ask,

Who am I?
Am I every corner you turn every time you run in and out of every maze?
Am I good or evil?
Another symbol gatherer—forthcoming forerunner?
A dreamer?
Am I a breobrimonist, a clopliplotruist, or both?

Dear Future,

Is it you I’m talking to, or am I in you, talking to myself?

Dear Past,

I know you—I remember those that come with you:

Librarians bleeding on everything red,
Cartographers inscribing the complementarity principle on the peripheries of Anyland,
Non-proverbial beasts shedding skin since their creation,
Realists naming things to call them what they are,
The unlettered, the intellectuals swirling in the vortices of the swell,
Children swiveling on fallen tangents,
The caring, the indifferent free-will deniers,
Choosers and beggars searching for their letters inside enveloped narratives scattered across the rooftops of Anyland,
The imperfect ones preaching oneness in the name of their perfect Ones,
New generations repainting old pins and moving them to new points of reference,
Theorists proving realists right,
Upended tables underpinning oscillating bell towers beneath anchorless town squares, where cobblestones drown in old and new uniforms.
And I remember the tailors, slowly retiring their measuring tools.

Is the foliot running after me, or is it running away from you?

Dear Anything,

If only you would see the faces of everyone I knew.
If only I could tell you everything I knew.

Retrace my path toward living.
Gather our remnants in the space that holds it.
Take them with you—into your understanding of existence—in anything beyond, for all things that belong somewhere come from beyond anything.
You say: “Nothing comes from it.”