Letters to Ayiti

Last time I wrote, I folded the text, and sent it as a letter to an undetermined location. Without an envelop.

The last time I wrote I was in a desert populated by mercenary cactus seekers. They stole all of the cacti and left all of their water bound tightly in your calabash gourds.

Last time I wrote, I was on a packed car, in a rattling vehicle on my way to china in the body of a nineteen year old who was trying to show me what it was like to dance as an scientific experiment: "We must know why we move, to hypothesize the end.'

I've never been to China and she only went to China to go have a peek at the billions of curios in such a curious place. She spoke the language--but she never greeted anyone.

I held on to her words because they gave me meaning.

They gave meaning to the place right below my ankle that continuously hurts when I remember all of the lives that I have forgotten. And I stared quietly at the movement that shook her tiny toes and left her eyes static, glued to the thing that she could not understand.

She never found the cacti.

And I stopped writing because I relished the emptiness.

It is a longing that cannot be expressed, a destitution that cannot be defined, an ache that must be situated as agony because it has no cure and no mortality and I have found that it is only justified when I am most small in the back of a closet, inside of the negative imagination, reinforced by mindless isolation of multiplying paper. I am a reject replica of a misspent journey, bound by the terms of my tenure and nurtured by the rabid impotence of that which is anchored in the middle of the sea.

The landscape of my insomnia has room only for the perfumed and nameless cottoned trees that give fruit in the beautiful night to the sounds of the Ave Maria and the wailing of the many-named mother.