The world has been caught in a storm .
Since antiquity and forever.
As old cultures merge and new form.
Each claims to be lofty and clever.

There's a way out of this confusion.
Transcend your world and it's history.
Any firm understanding is an illusion.
Life is absurd and a mystery.

a curious family of raptor children, a lake of caterpillar carcasses (boulder soup), a grocer for the taliban, gas powered anything, the exposed midsection of a tree, bank robberies or bear maulings in progress, triangles, an irascible bus driver thinking in isosceles, the itinerant story of a mama mammoth, starquakes and extinctions, massive roaches, a neck bath in hot breath, sudden abeyance from behind, the way gravity kills caterpillars and spares us because all angles of gravity make 180 degrees and this is stillness. fear running a straight line from behind us, through us, and in front of us. what i consistently get caught up in, the third point might be my final resting. this is why i ******* hate triangles.

i waited for you to

deposit bumble bees down my

throat with your mouth

they will safely disarm their stingers

and bring them all to me in a square envelope

‘shake it’ i tell you

the stingers become the poem i wanted to write

a really lovely one that tells you you’re a campfire warming my nose

that you’re pretty


it isn’t all roses though

it feels thorny somehow

yeah, i say, ‘i meant to take those out’


my throat and limbs are

fuzzy i say

but you find this, contradictory

the creature has noticed me. it has thousands of broken legs on its face and keeps tabs, never wasting an hour without checking in, watching my home grow bigger in the corner. i am a long bodied cellar spider, suspended, inverted beneath the guitar case, just right of the bed frame. food is scarce, but i sense we share this hunger in the humid subterranean habitat. it takes on thinness, shakes at times, makes day into night, flips pages, tele-spells, turns night into day again.

micro-fibrous dust settles on my spinnerets, a twitchy sneeze draws attention, the cruelest of details. while unraveling undaunted one pseudo-day sort of night, a pulse was released comma intent to ****. it came like resolute qualia, something my eight eyes can’t see. the plastic cave, the broken allegory, all ghastly and converging. as soon as the web gets jostled, a switch will summon my stunning epileptic display. i am ready to give it a leg, but only from the calve. it has never come this close.

you wanna take a guess? you wanna take a guess at this? guess nice long and hard. take a second guess if you need one. it’s ok to second guess. in fact, i insist you take another and keep guessing because guessing is smoke. in this tight circle, we’re taking guesses.

i am an educated guesser.

bummed guesses for awhile. bought my first guessing glass one July. play the guessing game all my days and guess my days away. they make guesses into the same thing as candles and its spiritual. it feels like taking an infinite number of guesses in one breath.

your guess is as good as mine.

drop to the next level. it is the doctor’s thesis of guessing. It is conjecture and formality, but with the fractal reasoning of a true American pack of guesses. they’re the guesses at the end of something replete. the last guess you have left.

out of guesses.

There is a string of panic tied to the last guess, which we tuck, flip, hide in the bottoms of cardstock caverns. when the time comes to draw the last straw,

B. there is nothing to guess at but a missing paycheck. These are the only answers we ever get.

A. she is there, all smiles and fresh questions with a bunch of guesses. she is my best guess yet.

you heard me correctly darling when i said i was

going camping in the witherness. look in this bag i’ve already

packed sun strokes, swill trunks, an array of emptying

books and a flashlight that projects white moving dogs.

in the witherness, we stack silent burning gavels, achieving

the balance of a permanent new moon. we are arriving

by cheap chernobyl trucks and we’ll know when we’re there when

the engine dies and we open the hood to find a blanket-less

girl. don’t worry, she is environmental. made of mist.

we stomp on her sisters, **** like holy anorexics,

steady our foreheads on the ancient bark of

the witherness (dark hallways in a house of leaves)

Quiet now. lay your spine on eggshells so that your joints

may hatch asterisk chirp double asterisk something

akin to what asteroids do, but with a murmuring whistle

the only noise you can hear at the edge of the witherness.

Silence is now. The sun is risen 5 hours where you are. It is the deepest twilight here, traffic lights disrupting. My window is playing a videotape of an invisible sunrise. It was directed by viking film students. They included your paintings in the credits. i hate to spoil the ending, but i leave you. The soundtrack was going to be radiohead, but Yorke’s record label yanked it. So silent film. Silent students acting like they never learn for my benefit. If it isn’t already obvious, the film is me. And you’ll never read this letter, as i’m already loading it into the movie reel and projecting it into snowy pine trees somewhere in Canada that i’ve never been.

Previous Lover and Grateful Friend,