An Open Letter to __________

Dear you,

I know a lot about you, for example that you can’t stop trying, even though it hurts you very much. Do you know:

• That you pick me up where we left off, that here in the reeds where Pan transformed his first lost “love” into music, that I am bound by blood, that I am blinded, that this book is in a bind.
• That A Crystal Speck of Sand—what came before, beat into disassembled pieces and scattered—divides a—
• That there’s Nothing Else, just this moment of falling—“falling,” indeed, as the implications would have it (??)—and that there is no BOOK strong enough to read me back to my senses, nor vice versa.
• That what remains elusive I am doomed to chase.
• That I would like to write here is “that there is no geometry to contain what I am full of” but that instead what I am compelled to offer is that I am capable of no such geometry or otherwise, that there are only these scrapings of dust, a broken fingerprint;
• That this mark threatens to break me up into words OH SHUT IT, SHUT YOUR MOUTH ALREADY
• That when I am “sad” that what this feeling is, if I could conceit to describe or “out” what sadness is, oh hell:
• That when I am “sad” that what this feeling is is this: a feeling of my brains being slightly overcooked—dried out, with all the good, fatty juices leaked out, collected in a small cup near the sink. Start over:
• That what sadness is is a concealing of oneself from oneself. That indeed it is a great conceit, a great conceit, to position the self as something that must be DISCOVERED, that it is something by its nature mysterious (from the Greek mysterion, “a secret”—there, that makes it easier, doesn’t it?), that the self must be sought out and reclaimed somehow. That indeed it is a great conceit, that what we are is aslkdfja;w3892 j3tka;, and that’s that OH SHUT IT, SHUT THE BOOK
• That I am a writer of gimmicks and I am indeed a forest of gimmicks, for example this one: THAT by making a show of abusing myself on the page in this way, THAT I somehow escape my douchebaggery as a writer: THAT I somehow make up for the fact (simply by accounting for it) THAT I don’t know anything about what “people” want unless they’re standing in front of me and I can read them. Please dear paper allow me to explain why: because
• This is an exorcism of sorts: to speak what hurts in order to claim power over and finally reclaim it;

• That I just want to punch everything;
• That I miss you very much, your breath (sometimes good sometimes bad) and your wicked sex and the tiny mammalian hairs on my back that I become aware of only inasmuch as you make them stand on end with a certain manner of looking at me which only you possess;

Amen and what have you,

A hooligan.