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letter from common nonsense:

good luck in your trip to the mountains that have already been charted. your exploration is useless, and we're happy to see you go. you're not going to forge a new path up the mountainside, nor improve the old, you'll only kick things around in the middle of thick forest where nobody's going to see your slight disturbance. we hope you don't find god up there. we hope you encounter caves that don't hold any bones or any smells. we hope that you come back to us emptied out, bowels full of dry rags--and have studied all the skies and become bored with them, so that we don't have to hear about the obscure coordinates to other solar systems, other annoyingly large and inexhaustible phenomena. our language is calm when we speak to you. or it is getting calm. don't ask us questions in the middle of this sentence please. we hope that you can enter shops without a scowl when you return. we hope that you don't want to discuss small icicles that descend through warm innards formerly ignored when you pass the treeline and think that you have seen the ice age encapsulated. we don't like that. we don't like that. don't cut the newspapers out of our sentences. don't look closely at the pictures of our children on the hallway walls. we only ask you to look at them because it's polite. we don't want to watch you eat, either--it's like watching somebody wash raw fish down their throat with gasoline, even if it's only a barely-salted cracker that you're consuming. we are upset when we have to see your face at our dinner table. we thought it was proper to invite you. we don't understand the expression on your face when you eat. we understand it perfectly, dammit. please put a napkin on your lap. we don't like to see the things that miss your mouth land on the floor where we have to see them. we don't like it. we don't like it. we don't like the way you try to find god in our faces at the dinner table. your posture is too good. sit up straight. your posture is too good. it's annoying. nobody asked you to come here. we invited you, yes. nobody asked you to come here. be sure to pack well before you leave. we don't have anything to send with you. stop staring. look at me when i talk to you. no, stop staring. the cat's claws on the door are not as immense as you think they are. that's just our pet, paid for. we weren't upset about these things before you showed up. now we have to think about them all the time. thanks a lot. thanks a lot. we think you are murderous when you smile softly like that, when you touch our pets or smile at our curious children. we think it's an act, buster. we want to talk to you, but we're afraid. we're not scared. we don't want to talk to you. you see the apocalypse roaring through our tv-room conversations, and we find this ridiculous. not ridiculous, something else. stop making us look for words.

a sleepy rebuttal:

hmmmmmmm. hmmmmmmm. let me think about the strange furs that lined the caves up there, the unsureness--i didn't know which of these things were alive. i ran my hand over all of them, the way a lover i once had used to bend over to drape her naked hands in the river and run those hands over the stones without looking down, perhaps not even feeling the temperature. i loved her when she did that. i have other things to think about now, like this bag of undefined stones and mashed berries that i brought back with me when i ran down the mountain, scattering leaves that made horribly truncated crisp yellow noises as my feet threw them into an uproar that was too brief. i ran so quickly that the birches looked like separate skies when i passed, the blur of white bark outwitting the moons. there are more than one--moons, that is. there were many fresh-water springs up there, but i didn't drink out of them, nor did i want to. i wonder why i didn't starve. i picked berries, leaves, and these discolored things that look like figs but have little fish-eyes. no, you can't have any...i haven't tried them myself, i'm sure they're poisonous. i'm not sure they're poisonous--i just think they might be. their eyes don't follow me, but the fact that they have eyes at all is unavoidably unnatural. i saw fish like the reflections of planets stretched by wind-whipped waves and made wild, calm but wild, by the expanse of the water, and their movements were colder than any winter i've experienced. i'm sad to tell you that i often feel this way in the middle of summer, when the fluttering green walls i need to feel comfortable have returned to the trees. i didn't try to eat those fish, i was afraid that their surface coldness extended logically to their innards. and that if i ate them the coldness would enter me. when i considered the way the textures of their penny-colored scales would feel under the hunger of my fingers, my fingers that stay delicate under drying layers of engine oil and rust, i became afraid, and couldn't enter a cave, but instead had to nestle myself in a cleft, a very slight gash that was too old, too eroded by time to give me much protection. but it lacked the darkness and the dank smells worse than basements that i found in the caves, whether in the coldest center or on the outskirts of their cool stone, where the plunking of the stagnant water resounds. i was afraid of finding the sun unavoidable behind their scales.

a third and possibly interested party:

i am not here to clean the stage blood from your pillow case, there's a maid for that, but we fired her and she now works for many cheap hotels, scouring away lipstick that you yourself left on the mirrors. she says she loves the words that you left there, but loves scrubbing them away even more, so that no one else can be entered by them, and when she finishes scrubbing she can see her reflection unobscured again, in a new mirror every time, if it's her first day on the job, if she can imagine that nothing else obscures her reflection, we have already forgotten her face and we advise you to forget it too, we advise also that you focus on your memories of large boulders, of the smell of pine like a dark invisible wall, the things you saw on your hike, these things are impersonal, if a person such as you thinks of physiognomy you will also be thinking about scalpels, and even if you think of jackhammers dynamite and chainsaws when you think of the obstructions on your way to the peak, these things are remote and we won't have to hear the noises like the chewing of distant gods getting closer, stay away from the faces of our daughter and keep your careful darkroom razors away from the yellowed books that hold photographs of our ancestors, and away from the admittedly jumbled timeline that holds them, the one that was bleached on the walls of your history class, you hate the innaccurately-numbered years themselves and that's too much specific hate for anybody to handle. god i love you. i want you to wake up in my bed, smelling me on the sheets, smelling next the sea urchin's bitter paste-green smells as i fry them in beer, looking like disconnected frog tongues, and i would leave the eyes in the fish when i bring them to you in bed on a wooden tray, no cold metals, no denial of the workings of any animal, the natural way that you like it, and i would leave the drapes open on the unsure abdomens of the distant but visible skyscrapers for you to look out, because i know you love the city only from a distance, and i want you to think of my hands running through your hair every time the face of that mannequin bitch escaped from showrooms filled with empty shoes with eyes like sunny-side-up eggs haunts you, every time that dead face takes you under the houses that line up so perfectly to gawk at you when their residents sleep waiting for the exotic things that i will cook you, the things that they won't be treated to while you will, i'm not going to apologize for my native language breaking down when i look at you, i'd rather you feel my tongue along your backbone from the taint to the neck and back, you can remain ignorant of my language so that it runs over you like the music of an instrument that you can't play, content to listen as i run the faucets uselessly for you to hear the white sounds of the plumbing surging like an unthreatening orgasm behind the walls, the knots of the wooden walls no longer leering ghoulishly when you turn your head toward them after the sunrise that hurts you, i will blot out the sun with your ink that has made you tired, i will be a hellish octopus of invincible media to confound the obscure threats of your enemies, to blast them with symphonies on the killed lizards of the sidewalks, to return to your bed with a girlish smirk smeared by their watery blood that doesn't bother me, i have walked through lifeless cornstalks and rivers made walkable by garbage to bring you the bodies of your advisors without adornment, they can no longer hide behind screens and headlines, we will shoot at them in our backyard with a shotgun full of mercury, kissing between the too-late atavism of their screams, our footprints becoming oily and bubbling under the unobstructed cycles of the planets, orbits differing distinctly in color, i will sign their letters and send them back with an aborted telephone pasted to the letter like a cooked eel, i love you in the constant dark of lost alaskas, in the constant light of never-seen alaska, i want you to take care of my vast aquariums that have made the oceans look unnecessary, and give me back-massages unpolluted by visions of kitchen knives and cancerous television static, i want your laugh that equals hell when you stand on wrecked bridges, waiting for me instead of the sun.

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