Lost postcard 2

The man begins to panic as he feels along the overgrown wall, rustles into darkness and back into broken light. Twice he falls, first in a patch of spilled soil, then into a pile of decaying and nail-filled wood, soiling and tearing his fine suit. The atrium seems barely to be an interior, barely to have a floor or walls, and only the barred glass of the ceiling lets him know he is enclosed. He again hardens himself against his fears. He finds a door as intransigent as the others and attacks it with violent brute force, tearing at the undergrowth and hitting the door with whatever is at hand. His hands and arms are bruised and cut, sweat befouls his combed hair, but he finally vanquished the door which opens with a creak and a bit of rusty dust, then swings as smooth and free as a flimsy whorehouse partition. Now he is in the real anteroom, thick carpeted and cove ceilinged, with a window in one wall that has a pretty girl behind it, then a man on a stool and behind him, another door. She is a coat check girl and he a bouncer. He has nothing to give her and the bouncer gives him no trouble, only an fake intimidating sneer. The door shuts behind him and he is in a grand and crowded ballroom. Everyone is chattering and drinking and smoking and dancing rapidly. All urgent and quick,  and every eye is restless and searching. The man is suddenly self-conscious of his tousled hair, scratched hands and torn suit. The image he has of himself -- a tempered and sophisticated man of the world -- trembles, but he grasps it hard and heads to the bar, muscles himself through the crowd and orders the same whiskey that he has in his flask. He ignores the bartender and turns to the crowd. Some girls try to catch his eye. Some don't. Some men catch his eye in challenge. Most don't. He feels the familiar warm burn of power and influence.

Postcard 87

Here is what is real in layers beat like sword steel.
Here is what is real:
What we see with eyes, with hands, with tools;
the glass perspires and stains the table,
the moon is falling forever away,
and the real miracle is mass and waves.
The real, as miracle, shows no concern, and,
but for wonder, we owe it no more.

Here is what is true:
In time, things move and pull
the space between now and then.
What is true is the stretch, the snap of strings.
You did this, and I did that, and they did other things.
It is true a bullet kills a man, but so
a stone, a fall and rust itself.
It is true that life seeks life and must consume and
every snap and stretch is -- even pleasure -- pain.
It is true I left this hammer here, and left my boots out in the rain
It is true you lost your car keys, and it is true that I complained.

It is true that we have leaders, so called,
but they are real and they speak false.
I expect nothing more or less of them, nor you nor me nor anyone,
but I'll not abide dishonesty
There is real and there is make-believe.
There is true and there is false, but lies lie in dishonesty
Honest is agreement of the why, that
what is spoken carries forth to what will speak again

It is wrong to torture, wrong to hurt, to speak
false against our fellow man.
Love speaks against the cynic's equivocating heart.

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 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 74

The room was fire warmed and candle-lit, dark in the corners. The room was a stone cloister with elaborately carved shelves of heavy wood filled with ancient books. The room held warmth like the bright hope of a monastic diaspora, like the wisdom sitting silently bound upon the shelves. In that room in that medieval port metropolis, a young man sat chatting earnestly with his friend Joshua, Joshua's father a rabbi, and the father's mentor, an elder Rebbe wrinkled and scarred, a tragic old face from tragic times and a gleam in his eyes. The four there, debated life, free of dogma or pedantry, debated passion and purpose and spirit. That night the two young men were preparing to go out to carnival, and they did just that. The streets were a riot of color and noise, or fires that tempted conflagration, of liberties that threatened damnation. In the tumult, the two young men, the jew and the gentile, strolled and marveled until they were happily separated, trusting always in their fidelity. The young man walked on till he came to a small square in a district he didn't know. There was a low platform in the middle, and upon it a dark woman sat alone, apart -- for a moment -- from the reverie. She was beautiful and harsh and, though he was attracted to her, he feared her. She caught him with her eyes like an arrow on a string. She pulled him to her and regarded him coldly, eyes locked on his. With her left hand she pulled up her layers and put his hand between her legs. The warmth that held his fingers passed through him with a shudder like strong wine. He had never been that close to a woman. Her lips parted but they did not move. She held him then released him. With cold kindness she sent him away with a kind and empty promise. He saw that their connection was true but also false and that he was at play for a moment in a drama that she had for herself in every direction.

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 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.