My Dear Correspondent,
We're back, and the good Uncle Screwtape is pleased. He knows better than
you or I that letters are the letter of the claw of evil. To rake the face of good
with impunity, with prepositional ill repute, with malicious marmalade--no
amount of pre-poisoning might have made our hemlock less certain death.
Abstruse, esoteric, faux-erudite laundry; it's our Aphrodite mistake, straight to the arrowed heel. I promise I won't go too Greeky on you, but it's a persecution that can't be fully helped. I clamor to hear you. I spray vocation into your void. I use
my first person past its expiration; that's called speaking after death (apparently
our theme, as usual). Chum, pal, my possessive possession. We are this together.
It's a sixth extinction; are you bothered? Do the great transformations trouble you,
or do you spool copper thread for the fun of it, electricity be damned? It was coal
steam and its smokers got us onto this stone couch. So faults, pretty monotheistic
for your taste, right? That's what guilt is meant to do, point the way toward the
one true truth.
Scratched that, vague easel, your erasures are my condemnations. But that's out
of line, outside our dialectic. It's the ten trillion things we're working with and
each one is itself, without word or image, only a reality that screams empirical
powder exploding suns, blinking from far enough away like the faint light of
our letters.
Warmest afternoon regards,
Poeis
Roman Ryan 