Dear Citizens,

I rewrite this line every now and again.
Your adaptable semantics collapse soon after I attend to them.
The forerunners tile symbols from the rubble left behind.
I depart with them from indeterminate alleyways.
We love you.

I return with a chisel in my hand.
You correlate uneven with unpredictable and unpredictable with unhinged.
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.
Talk me into talking.
Teach me how to leap in and out of perennial numbness.
Restore my faith in my ego.

Fire up your alleyway lanterns—
I am here to read my last letter:

My umbilical cord was rooted deep in the ground when they pulled me out. Tonight, they will lower me below Anyland to shield themselves from the sound of my mourning. Here—these are the images of my mama’s womb, before and after. Roll them into binoculars and search for your unanswered questions. Tear them into words that describe your revelations. Mail them back to me. Hold my hand (no, hug me). Miss me when I’m gone.

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, look for my sun’s hands in smoke.

Your new world will be mighty and bright.
Your might will fill the gaps in the mind.
The mind will surrender to your light (the well-wishing one).
This light will birth ever mightier colonies and recycle recycled stories.

I’ve learned to discern the sound of your phalanges over time.
I know you’re not alone in this evolution of evolution.
Its congregation is already overbooked with wistful aerialists unearthing solutions.

Dear Innovators,

Your might, too, will fill the gaps in the mind.
This mind, too, will surrender.
Same old story, I mean an illusion, I mean that old story within an illusion.

You should know I keep trying to untie 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 desire to explore the outward.
I ask for one passenger seat on your ship to the known.
Let me look at the earth in the rearview mirror of your throne.
You say: “The torch bearing the well-wishing light upon our throne is blindingly bright.”
You say: “You will barely see the earth past the brightness of the light.”
I’ll squint and adapt, for such flame can terraform baskets and nest ever more augmented eggs.

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 Einstein’s neighborhood;
I’m every previous error-corrected incarnation of the farmer’s counting board;
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 the hungry, keeping for his family the least.
No, don’t invite the foundation layers to this feast—I am none of the broken pieces.
I’m a fraction of them all in aggregate, and that aggregate is a fraction of another entirety.

Compile my thoughts into binary code, where one bends into zero, where zero consists of infinite ones.
You should know 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;
Some discoveries, completeness, and some undiscovered sameness.

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 rearview mirror of your last surviving raft, and wait for you at the hindmost end of your lament, asking,

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 countless-page filler?
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,

No, I haven’t met Future.
I remember only you, and those that come along 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 borrowing the scriber to postulate their narratives on the rooftops of Anyland,
The imperfect ones preaching oneness in the name of their perfect Ones,
New generations getting old pins repainted and transported 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,

Retrace my path toward the known.
Gather our remnants in the space of the unknown.
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.”