100

Some of these went out on postcards; others as electronic shout-outs to friends on LiveJournal. Then there are a few of which I didn't keep a copy; I like the idea that they're out there as unique artifacts that I cannot reproduce. Here are the rest, for your entertainment.

p.s. I got this idea from Gaiman's "Nicholas Was...", although I didn't count the titles of mine toward the word limit.

Spectacles...
(for Jeff Spicer)

“… are not to be ignored,” she said. We stood on a wall that bent until it enclosed everything worth seeing.

“The gaudy, the fantastic, the in poor taste: only an idiot would walk by, blithely secure in his austerities. Ours is a world of shit! One must feast before one can defecate.”

An audience had gathered below us to hear our debate, and they made me hesitate. To try..? To hold up what light..? Or to damn everything with impenetrable obfuscations?

I glanced at what lay outside the wall. “Nothing is ever quite true,” I told them.


Nero, Octavian, Caligula, et cetera
(for Sean Landers)

I have witnessed the blades of butchers, and stand unmoved by their heavy deeds.

I have walked the paths first pressed into shape by the iron heels of empire. My shoes added some little pressure of their own.

I have confronted monuments, towers, obelisks; the steeds and the clubs and the honorifics of a war stretching back in an unbroken line to before when they write the books about.

Nothing gets through. These blank centuries do not trouble me. I can learn about this later, from my screen. In a way I can appreciate. When the technology has been perfected.


The Book of the Dead...
(for James Kobialka)

… is never the same twice. This is only a great irony if you are a fool. It can be written in up to six languages, illustrated, subdivided into a near-infinite diversity of chapters with caesuras, voltas, interjections, commentaries and inscrutable aporia. It can be rearranged, redacted. You may even try to find yourself inside it, editing a unique version singularly suited.

But it must always be written. It must never stop. Somewhere, someone must always inscribe it. Add to it, copy it down, enclose it in quotations. Only do not cease.

When it ceases to be written, we die.


Silent places...
(for S. Randolph Mills)

... were his workshops. They were tiny, sometimes: the gap between two bricks in an old wall, a hollow under an adventurous vine, the forgotten corners of rooms too large. His toil (and its fruits): quotidian.

But each day held moments, after the paying customers had left, when all the ancient streets were open to him. He reinvented history, labored at wonders, kept gods older than stone alive with extemporaneous litanies. The city on the mountain had known many owners; he was nothing so crude.

It was just the nightmares of imprisonment and torture that made him glance sometimes road-ward.


(untitled)
(for Nicole McConvery)

There was a bridge. It doesn't matter where. It crossed a river as wide and sluggish as the plutocrats who'd paid for its construction. It wasn't a bridge for crossing. It was where they'd decided to keep all of their most precious things. If it was over the water, they'd reasoned, it couldn't be under it; if it was between the two halves of the city, it couldn't be in either. Their various workers and functionaries eventually noticed this and began saying, “Safe as bridges.” They built bridges of their own and lived on them. Meanwhile, the city crumbled.


War memorials...
(for Jubal Slone)

… never stay blank. Their surfaces are palimpsests of rust and graffiti. The colors blend. The messages fade together. When you approach, you hear:

“Francesco I love you bravely fallen fuck the left behind never on the fields of Gloria I love you freedom freely isn't given give me a world people united states fuck you I love you give me a war I hate I love I fade the ages angels God has taken God I love you God give me a world without war our brave young boys I love eternal rest above below give me everything.”


When the meteorologists went on strike...
(for Brian Baker)

... everyone in the world burst out laughing in what could accurately be described as uncanny unison. Unkind jokes in endless profusion expressed one sentiment: "We didn't know what it would do when you WERE working, so enjoy your little break!"

It was only when the first wave of mass suicide hit the news that we stopped our chortles. Alert journalists read their final predictions; several succumbed to schizophrenia afterward. And while we tried to warm ourselves with remorse, seek shelter under it, shade our eyes against the glare of the pitiless, baleful sky with it, eternal winter covered the world.


(untitled)
(for Maria)

"I care nothing for oracles!" she bellows, unsolicited. "Fate is the excuse of the weak, whose appetites are as feeble as their palsied limbs!" I always was a sucker for girls who talked like that.

While she isn't watching, I draw the four draughts. Cast yarrow stalks. Toss bones. To say nothing of my recurring prophetic dreams (which technically aren't my responsibility). Rather than write them down, where someday she might find them, I reveal the results only in casual remarks, cloaked in metaphor. She isn't listening, anyway.

"I will devour this world!" she screams. And insists I stop smiling.


We have tilled this earth...
(for G. Myers Gilmer)

“...since God was a nameless infant,” they told me. I remain skeptical to this day but, at the time, said nothing. “Empires have come and gone. Religions fallen. Still the work of our hands feeds the armies of distant potentates. We care not. Our walls stand impregnable.”

I said thanks for letting me stay, and left it at that. I was only in town for a night, on my way to meet a girl in the shining city in the foothills. I ate their food and walked away, unchanged. I tell myself this nightly, or I can't sleep.