Communiqués (with Squelch.)

Communication on the radio:

--"What's your location?"
--"Negative."
---"Say again? Negative? You don't know your location?"
--"No, I do know--I told you it's negative."
--[silence]

****
Intercepted Fragments heard in the background while talking on the telephone:

"until...[laughter]...what they said...[inaudible]...we could have...opening at..."[silence]

****
Briefly overheard while walking past:

#1: ...and then what happened?
#2: He tried to give himself an enema in his driveway.
#1: You fucking kidding? How did he do that?
#2: With some kind of lubricant and a garden hose, that's how. No fucking bullshit man.
#1: What the fuck. Who called the cops on him?
#2: His neighbour. I guess he kept getting his windows splashed by this guy, so he called....

****
Communications from watchtower, isolated location. No one receiving:

Fragment: ...new moon tonight. very dark. wind out of the northwest. ground temperatu...[static]...there are voices out in the surrounding woods. lit flares, no visual contact.

Fragment: five inches of snow in the night....sound of crackling fire...approximately four a.m. no voices...

Fragment: ...have received no response f....will abandon post in three more days. [static]...traveling southward along river bank during early morning hours. Should take approximately forty-eight hours on fo...

***

Mr. Kurt Vonnegut *

Thank you so much for everything. You will be greatly missed.

Referent.

He wants to find out how to extend the insult onto himself, keep the embarrassment going. Self-flagellation, he has discovered, is an enterprise he enjoys. It's raining hard outside, but he goes to the stationary shop, picks out some paper that, under normal circumstances, he would never buy. Practices a handwriting with an awkward opposing hand. But, despite his meagre tricks, he composes a letter that clarifies nothing; he tries to sound firm and carefree, but the sadness is at home in his hands. He reads it over, re-acknowledging the fact that the letter is a pathetic show of faux-intelligentsia iciness and disregard. He hates it, feels an awkward blush rise up in his stomach, but he drops it into the box.

Nervous, he sits up all night, and comes to the understanding that his identity has been emptied and delegated unwillingly into a mere referent, truly, in the linguistic sense. Everything in his body is pointing outward, that way, in the direction of the departing letter. He has transformed himself into a symbol representing the letter's recipient. He is no pining lover; rather, he is a pedagogical tool, with a co-opted value.

improv on resurrection / improv on three cheers for. . .

He sees a bucket in his hands and all he can do is watch the water coming in. This is the form of his dream, but the content is in the helplessness. In his fear, he is struck immobile, frozen, much in the same way that others are struck dumb in utter amazement. The fear is a fathomless, waging fear, seething at the boundaries of the sleeping and the waking. A sensation so grand that it pushes forward and overwhelms him, reversing subject and object. Who is the one experiencing the fear? "He is experiencing fear?" No: "The fear is experiencing him." And then, with little warning, he wakes, fear subsides, and the syntax of the universe relapses into its rightful order.

***
Three cheers for the corners of the room, where walls meet walls, what makes a room for us to live in and huddle together for our lives. Three cheers for the nerves and the sweaty palms and the uncomfortable deliberate stares. Three cheers for the luncheon platter with the delicious souffle brought out by the dead grandmothers who sing "Jungle Love" by The Steve Miller Band and show a bit too much leg. Three cheers for how the world works and steers, like a beautiful, swinging, psychopath schooner. Three cheers for low lights at night, dim shadows in the day, those little moments that maintain a shaky equilibrium between the blank void and the over-profusion of life. Three cheers for the neighbours I don't have, who stare at us through their windows and play harp and timpani naked on the lawn. Three cheers for walking down a street in a massive city at dusk with two bags of groceries and a light heart. Three cheers for the words "boulangerie", and "Salsbury" "poop-tin" (just made that one up) and the Middle English pronunciation of "night" and "smoke."

***
Sleep, that sweet mendicant, is begging for her alms.
Goodnight.