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.

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?

Mind Scholar,

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.
Teach me how to leap in and out of perennial happiness.
Restore my faith in my ego.

Where are the students of no moment who learned but never led?

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 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—not where planets become—where her mother was. Roll it into a perspective glass and search for your unanswered questions. Divide it into characters and they will describe your revelations. Mail them back when beliefs rise from formation.

Core-Editing Scientists,

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

I stand where the earliest monument accretes into clade—from its shadow, I build a watch, watch the time, time the coming of crosses, cross bridges, bridge cultures, cultivate weapons, weaponize the givens—winnow all through wars, choke on consciousness, lay the grain over ashes 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.

The layers of tissue around your phalanges alter the pulsating frequencies inside.
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.

Innovators,

You too will deconstruct, fettle, build.
Same story. An illusion. That story within it.

Here too, I try to parse the ingrown projections of my mind. To make sense. I fail—then grind the cud of thought until it tastes like grass.

Wait. Take me with you.

Is that Earth in the reflection of your throne? No—is it Mars? The god of war guttering from a keeling October Horse. I see Europa. The marble around the framed white bull. There—Jupiter above the hearth. Triumphant generals kneel in grief.

You say: “The torch bearing the well-wishing light upon our throne is blindingly bright. You are likely staring at yourself—nothing can be seen beyond the glare—be careful.”
Soon I will recoil and adapt—for this is the flame that cradles ever-promising colonies in their orbs.

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.
There is one evolution—and many congregations.”

Coding Scientists,

I am the farmer who feeds Noah’s neighborhood.
I’m in the flood.
The fruits of my labor fuel the architects of arks, archetypes, archives.
I am every previous error-corrected incarnation of the farmer’s counting board.
I’m in a matrix where achromatic patients starve for liberation—where I am both yeast and wheat in the farmer’s household, which he shares with all who come, keeping for his family what remains.
No, don’t invite the foundation layers to this table—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 root readme of your reality.
You say: “There is 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:
Anomalies acting normal in the chapels of reason;
Ages;
Hands abstracting mornings from the soil that quiets oceans unveiling the vile;
Antagonists hunting for vellum;
Odysseys;
Climbers recovering on curved shoulders of idling cranes;
Attachments;
Unclaimed ideas roaming the arenas of vying particulars;
Mirth;
Pharaohs aligning the pharoses along the margins;
Ages.

If so, I will be there at the sprouting of objections to this aging sameness.

Mindchildren,

We burn bridges at every gate before you run into every puzzle.
The contents of my suitcase may mislead you.
The contents of your containers may mislead me.

There—your provenance into the immemorial, impending, immanence.

You can harness my love—my thoughts you don’t really want.
You will have them—reflected in that glass paddle of your last surviving raft.
For your aching feet I will build a berth and wait—to ask

Who am I?

Am I good or evil?
Forthcoming forerunner?
A dreamer?
Am I a breobrimonist, a clopliplotruist, or both?

Future,

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

Past,

I know you. I remember—

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 pull of a slipped anchor,
Children swiveling on fallen tangents,
The caring, the indifferent free-will deniers,
Choosers wading through wadded papers in search of their stems and curves—finding wakes,
The imperfect ones preaching oneness in the name of their perfect Ones,
The young repainting old pins and moving them to new points of reference,
Theorists proving realists right,
Anchorless town squares quilted in frayed and unworn uniforms—inverted bell towers oscillating beneath cobblestones.
And I remember the tailors, slowly retiring their measuring tools.

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

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—for all things that belong somewhere come from beyond anything.