Lost Postcard 3

The bar is crowded and he is tired of being jostled. He doesn't like to dance and knows no one to join at a table. Twin staircases wrap around the ball room and meet at a balcony. He decides that would be a good vantage point. The insecurity is creeping up on him and he wants to get his bearings. He came here with a job to do. He turns to the bar for another drink, but considers his flask and changes his mind. At the top of the stairs, he spreads his hands on the railing and surveys the room again, this time from on high. The feeling of power returns. The restlessness of the drunk dancing crowd is writhing from up here. He considers them fools, complacent and dumb. A hand is on his shoulder, lightly. He smells the girl before he looks at her. She smells pleasant, like good perfume and good cigarettes. A hunger stirs in his belly. This way, sir -- she says. He turns and she opens one of two huge double doors behind him. Following the girl, his sense of exceptionalism is confirmed. But when the door closes behind him, he is alone in a dark red hall of darker red doors. Crimson, he thinks, or carmine. Names that mean something he cannot quite place. He walks down the hall calling out but no one answers. The doors are all locked. He starts walking faster, urgently and calling at each door, then returns and finally a 'What?'. Who's in there? he asks with glowing desperation. a long pause follows.       'Nobody.'                                                                 'Nobody.'

Lost Postcard 1

The man enters the building unimpeded. In fact, though it is large, heavy and foreboding, it draws him in as if its created gravity that obliterated other options. He is prepared as he entered. He has all the things he was told he would need. In the bustling neighborhoods surrounding the building were kiosks and stalls selling pamphlets, magazines and pinging his phone with guides, diagrams and evaluations, each informing him of a unique requirement that was of course, conveniently available at the same location. He was bright. He took these scams for what they were. But still, he succumbed to the atmosphere of caution and equipped himself minimally, but at great cost. Stepping across the threshold, he takes stock. He is trim and manicured, dressed stylishly but not at the expense of utility. His clothing is fitted but loose and durable. He brushes his hands over is pockets, reassuring himself of their contents: high-end multi-tool, unassuming pistol (very comforting), micro hygiene/first-aid kit, and of course his phone, uploaded with premier mapping, how-to, social connect and identifying apps. Finally, two flasks -- one hydration and one whisky, both high-end contents. No one could say he was unprepared,  he considered with confidence. Entering the anteroom, he is surprised to find it more of an atrium than a receiving room, or a hall. It's wild and feels vast, more dangerous and expansive than the manicured grounds. He moves through it, unable to determine where he should next go. Doors are bolted or rusted shut and overgrown. The phone offers no help and only says "seeking, seeking...". For the first time in his adult life, he man feels scared and groundless. He makes himself overconfident.

Postcard 92

My son, so far away -- farther and further -- today you are a man.
Not really, but sliding along, away and towards. You are a being, wrapping yourself in the costumes and customs of manhood, and of yourself, your name.
(A human being is either: hummus - of the earth, or hu-man - of man/as opposed to gods [opposed!] Yet, either way, a being, a noun derived from a verb - 'be' [present tense!])
It is cold out in the present, striving in earth, in opposition to the gods, and easy to get hurt. And so we wrap ourselves in garments of warmth and protection.
My son, here is a hatchet, a tool as everything is -- your name, your family, your actions. A tool for driving and splitting matter. It is a sharp tool and a blunt tool. It is sharp and it is falling apart and will easily hurt you, like any tool. keep it sharp and free of rust and sheathed when you are not using it.
My son, here is a coat, stained and stitched, and more than warmth it is a shell. There is majik in a father's coat, each arm a daemon. There are pockets full of incantations. There it is cured in sweat and beeswax. The sergeants stripes are chevrons of calm and capable.
Approach life with tools at ready and coat worn with a journeyman's cool confidence. It is a cold and lonely world and you carry me on into it, lightly I hope, like a worn stone rune, or a slightly out of date, wrongly folded map.

Postcard 86

That monkey on my back looks too much like me, perched up there on sharp knees. Old man of the sea, is there no end to his pestering? He pulls each ear to guide my steps and turn my path. He covers my eyes, each hand a screen. All about, this foreign world is protean and mean. His voice, thin and reedy, says: see what you may. I look along our pathless paths and see flowers and nymphs, anemone. He removes is reedy fingers and look: pestilence and pain. He leads me along flaking cliffs and ambuscades. All that is illusion too. His other fingers hold my face, and those he removes. We are in void of sea or space. He leers and speaks: to get what you wish, first you must catch simian me. And though he is all sharp elbows and stabbing knees, he's as hard to hold as mercury. And I feel old and godlike, and I feel young and horribly free. And what if what I would wish would be to catch and hold the beast? And what if 'simian me' is not him but me. And what if I'm just turning on myself, meaningless in a boiling sea?

Postcard 76

The dream family is a light burden. The dream family carries me. It is the whirl about me and the many selfs that are me. It is every iteration of family. It is every iteration of dream. Brothers that are not brothers, sisters not sisters. Lovers that are not lovers. My dream family sends messages, turns cards, visits me. People out of selves, only meanings. People changing faces, clearly who they are - but out of focus. My dream daughter came to me riding an arrow pinned dear. She died. She shrank to the size of a pea. She was my daughter, my son and me. My dream lover came to me, a witch, using me in archaic ceremony. My dream brother and his father -- dead -- passed away again. My dream son came to me, pure art confused and collapsed into music inarticulate. I walk, awake, along the streets. My brother/not brother passes and he is you. My dream lover is the past - a smoky ghost of rain and autumn leaves. I strum and she sings. Turned to the past, she is strings. My dream wife is the fire I offer my seed. Looking up, she is the galaxy. Looking down she is the sea. My dream family cries and celebrates. They grow and fade. We raise our glasses - we are wound, a knot of scars and warm embraces, ageless faces - heat in cold of time. My dream family is the silence when it speaks, the shock sit-up, awake. My dream lover is Kali, held on and released, my dream brothers are angry christ, and I am the cross, the cursed tree. With them, with you, I return to home. In my dream family, I am reborn.

Postcard 75

The woman had made empty promises with an honest deceit. To each other they had a scratch-deep desire. He walked away from her, internal in the tumult of the carnival. She was rich on his fingers but cool in his heart. Somehow, after blocks of ambling, his friend Joshua found him. How did he find him in the crowd and chaos of carnival? It is one of the indecipherable mysteries -- perhaps God's own hand, perhaps random chance, fate and coincidence, perhaps the bond between best friend beloveds. "He's dead," Joshua said, "come." Without explanation, he turned and the young man had no choice but to follow. They entered the gate, the old wood door and climbed the stone steps to the study. There, the body was being prepared by four priests while a wizened old rabbi looked on. The young man was shocked. It was not the old Rebbe, but Joshua's father who had died. The young man felt himself standing, alienated, outside the stained glass temple doors for the elaborate funeral ceremonies. When the doors opened and the procession to the grave passed him, the young man made the sign of the cross toward the body. It was as if he did not exist. Later that night, while Joshua mourned his father, and the young man felt helplessly adrift, the old Rebbe came to him and took him to kneel by the fire. From his robes he produced many esoteric objects foreign to both their faiths. He uttered strange quiet words and preformed subtle ceremonies. They sat there, upon their knees, genuflecting before a small fire in a cold dark room full of useless books. The young man began sobbing. He sobbed and sobbed desperately. Though they did not speak, the Rebbe spoke without speaking, "This is our atonement."

Postcard 73

In a rush from the car to the house in the too cool air, he remembered to grab the last few days' mail. Unease from the dark driven into, and sharpened with the headlights cut, followed him in. He fumbled keys and dropped the mail in a clumsy fan in his unnecessary rush. Sure to shut the door firmly behind him, he sought the lights. Switched on, he saw the postcard kicked past the threshold alone on the cool tile. What is this? Not a wish you were here, or majestic nature, nor mighty buildings in their dotage. Not even bikini-clad humor, but a chopped assemblage out of context: a masked, or unmasked and disembodied woman with hair cast like fire, the wrong hands crawled past her, reaching from and into some impossible gate, like a theory drawn out only to fulfill its uncanny form. The moon, or a planet, loomed and pulled and cast a ring of dripping black gravity. Behind all this random words floated down and settled in deep mysterious drifts. He flipped it over. It was only vaguely addressed to him and bore no return address. The text started and stopped in an irrelevant middle and was frustratingly self-descriptive. It sung along like a blind wire, and seemed even to attempt impotently to describe him in the moment. The strange epistle held in his hand had a charge as if written under moonlight. He looked away from the card and let it fall, fluttering silently away to a dark corner. He felt compelled to see himself and stepped further into the house to a half-lit mirror. The man gazing back did not menace, but was decidedly unfamiliar. They examined each other with curious unease.

Postcard 72

There was a woman who spoke only music. I say 'was' because she is gone now. I say 'music' because that is what came out of her, not words sung, no words. Not just humming, though hum she did, and whistle and click and clack and spit and sigh and warble and sing in any way you might imagine a person would make music without words, and many you would not because your imagination is not up to the task, bound as it is by words and syntax. That is how she would communicate, call and respond anyway. Her teachers, when she had them as a girl, were more than sympathetic. They were not martinets and she filled them with awe and wonder. She's not doing what she should, they would say, but we let her be, so unique and wondrous a child. The system of school, however, could not tolerate her and she was made to leave. Many people could understand the girl, a young woman by then. People from all walks of life: teachers, children, engineers, trash-men, doctors, fast-food-window workers, it did not really matter. Some did, some did not. There was no rhyme or reason, just a facility of reason open to her tones and rhythms. So it was perhaps just a series of misfortunes that led her through the people who would decide her fate, destroy her. The first was the social services worker who decided she needed to be evaluated, and who grew more resolute in her decision as the singing woman voiced her dissent in angry stochastic melody. Next was the evaluating clinician who could hardly be blamed for her evaluation, for her subject's songs grew confused and dis-harmonic in response to the dizzying evaluation questions. Of course, one could blame the sadistic operators of the institution that held the woman, who's neglect and torment tortured angry bellowing opuses out of her, filling the halls and rooms with ominous climbing and descending adagios. When they broke the woman, when she took her life, only the ignorant laundrywoman heard the haunting song.

Postcard 71

The white-hot moon holds the sheet-dark sky. The white-hot moon burns itself in your eyes. Carry that. Lay that bright hole on the pale body of your friend, naked in the grass in the sand: clarified moles, pure light bullet holes, surprise windows of a looking out soul. The sea sips at your feet and sighs its tickling shivers. At that moment, a triad: beautiful you, your friend/beloved and the white-hot moon. This pain pleasure is the top of an arc, is the gathering white chaos upon an inbound wave. This moment with your friend/your beloved, the pain-pleasure of giggling in the chill, is time suspended atop parabola. The past falls away and the future precipitous, and this moment is the pleasant tension, feeling salt-tight skin and that little grit discomfort. The burn in your eyes is the push-pull of whirl, of your beloved and their whirl too, sharing the feel: the smell of salt of smoke of sweat of chill, the cool radiance of other, the burn of now replaced by past. Hold tight let go the intermingle, the pause in arc of story. Hold tight let go before fear. Perceive and release your beloved and you in soft light, like the two of you and the dark sky in the grasp of the white-hot moon

Postcard 70

There was a couple with a child, a daughter, who lived in a small town in a distant wood. The couple lived at the edge of a forest that belonged to the village and they managed the timber and game. Their daughter ran freely and played in congress with the animals of the wood and with the children of the town. In the village was a manor with high walls, grass and gardens on one side, a cobblestone street far below on the other. The couple's child was one day playing and fell upon her head from the wall to the hard road. For a long time no one missed her. A cinder-woman found her crumpled and lifeless and took her to the owner of the manor who sent for her parents. You must take her to the healer in the next town, he told them, and he let them use his carriage and driver. The father held the listless girl who's head was swollen but did not bleed. She sighed and muttered but did not wake. As they travelled the road seemed to lengthen and the girl grew smaller in her father's arms. When they reached the healer, she was the size of an orange. They approached the healer, a proud and regal mandarin, with pleading. By the time he consented to see the girl, she was as small as a walnut. The healer took her in his hand and immediately put her in his mouth and swallowed her whole. "Where is girl?" The parents could only gape.

Postcard 69

I love you, he says. What does that even mean, she replies.  I love you, he says. You do but you're not very good at it, he replies. I love you, she says. He leaves the room, terrified. I love you, she says. Me too, she replies. I love you, she says. They change the subject abruptly. I love you, she says. I know, he replies. I love you, he says. You're a fucking liar, he replies. I love you, she says. Do you? he asks. I love you, they say. Then why do you hurt me, she asks? I love you, he says. Right now, in this moment, he replies. I love you, they say. I love you too, they reply. I love you, he says. You know better than that, she replies. I love you, he says. I didn't ask for that, she replies. I love you, he says. Its only fucking, she replies. I love you, she says. Prove it, she replies. I love you, they say. Please don't, he replies. I love you, she says. I used to love you, they reply. I love you, he says. Say it again, say it again, she replies. I love you, she says. She is asleep. I love you, she says. He is only a photograph, says nothing. I love you, they say. Goodbye, she replies. I love you, he says. You don't even know me, she replies. I love you, she says. That used to mean something, he replies. I love you, she says. Yes, you do, she replies. I love you, I say.