an open letter to my enemies

Dear sir or madam,

You may prick my sides with your yards of countless demanding letters, but never shall I yield to your blunt arrows or cowardly entreaties.

We have mapped utopia, for God's sake we have mapped liberty, mind, heaven, hell, love, hate, women's buttocks and men's breasts, the four poles, the seven seas, the five needs and the one human desire; come now, stir, let us map THE IMPOSSIBLE, let us stake a claim to it, this once, we ragged possessors of absence, fridges full of only cheese and beer, empty bellies and blistered anonymity.

Necessity now permits us to steal life in all its bathos and hubris. We corrupt counts with gilt-coined eyes are in bed with obsession and we will donate our spare, spent and unending lives towards nothing, such as the cartography of THE IMPOSSIBLE, or the surveying of the space of one who goes back to sleep after the alarm clock has rung.

But I must first apologise for every single one of my caustic and camphorous crimes, all fifty-one of them (in prison one has time only for mathematics). Having recently discovered that FOREVER was either postponed, forgotten or abandoned, I have been lost, like that pink-arsed baboon on his escaped polar icecap, drifting up to the crest of the Great Wave off Kanagawa. I'm sad that you're here and I'm not and we grew older without realising it but I accept it. I'm happy that I once heard your laugh, whoever you are. It sounded simple and what some would call innocent, though I've always been sceptical of the motives of that word.

Don't speak to me now. Don't add me on TheirSpace or Facebore, or send a text from out of the distant blackness of the blue. Bedecked in tresses of tinsel and swaying hands, we blunder along the stations of this life in what can only be called progress, however absurd such a notion seems.

We ourselves are maps of strange and sinister districts of towns yet to be constructed. We suffer misery willingly as the accomplishment of our priggish cynicism. We witnesses, silent, motionless and only ever reacting in the negative, we suffer the fates of strangers. The one thing I can be sure of is that this is all I have to say.

Yours in wine,

Anon.