Mike G.

High Low Middle All. The cat has a habit of swiping. The Bald has a mullet of diapers, and a sense of nothingness to toy with (in the joint?) Uncoiling a roll of crows, some bray about the perforations. Others send a cable to the brain saying "staysfreshlongerstop. If I were a rhino you'd be a cashew." The sugars muss the air inside the mirror ball. It's early dawn and even division champs feel fractional. One cure has us eclipsing the sun with a popsicle [see fig 1] as if any cherry eyeshade could save our skeletons from Srebrenica or from pick-up sticks. Vultures playing vibes on safety devices. The oscilloscope in us is careening down a beam. Under duress, prepositions melt. Mourn or adjust your loss and then they're there again, whistle adangle, pressed sweats and thrillkiller stopwatch thumbs, barking out the playbook into misty mongrelizing dawns like this. I'd put in for a Nocturne here but real darkness is difficult to come by. I'm the man from Alsace, and whenever I bend over, I swear I've seen the light.

Rob S.

Dear Me, your inner news reader rolls up his tinteds as he's passing the Museum. It's gummy with Annunciations and there's public art in People's Park —The Statue of Memory Loss, a multiply decapitated equestrian, and some old half-bloated Oldenburg— and that's across the Pike from your usual touchless wax job at Golden Nozzle, and Compos Mentis Burger's fabled Few-for-One. The Army-Navy there hangs a Clothed For Lunch sign at siesta time. Dear Me when you are in the know, how can I reach you? Are there pay phones? Is acculturation like a collapsed lung? The manual doesn't mention if I own my own film rights and I scarred up the glovebox searching. If only Live to Tell, Madonna's B-minor Fantasy, wasn't playing in the lobby of the Probably. Some Canuckophile cashier changed a fifty into useless loonies. That means nothing from the Sprite machine when I take the ex-professors to their story hour. There are what I overheard a cousin calling "worser hungers." Point of View can become pretty painful: at least while sitting.

Douglas S.

Visionary seeks seer for nights scraping ectoplasm off the beltway. Must have a dozen dimes and a devilish crush on sincerity. Intimate knowledge of the laugh muscles — the risorius (of course) and he mentalis muscle, which wrinkles the skin on the chin— reminds us that without tongue in cheek there'd be no speech. Fantasies include Piloting Walt Whitman's straight razor, Feeding Sweet Tarts to the collective memory and Unresponsive Talkshow Dogs. Please send along a homemade acronym for U.F.O. and a bulleted abstract of your abrestness. Photos welcome, but not of you — of yours, rather. Got a Do/Am thing going, with self-portraits a creamy quandary. Someone dead said "perversions purify our dimestore dailiness" — please write thirty words. I like a little hype in my automaton, will you edit my acceptance speech?

Rob F.

Pasolini's Mamma Roma was screened for a flotilla of botox-softened needle noses last night at Easthampton's Guild Hall. Someone from the Ladies' Village Improvement Society sucked a scary lolly as the nips and tucks and husbands found their seats in a Stalingrad of politesse. The introducer, airlifted in from Film Comment magazine, appeared to ape a stutterer, heimliching a few filmschool filberts off the lectern and pronouncing nineteen nineties ironies with a gala lift of lips.

Mamma Roma means the history of human suffering is laid in the landscape. Beautiful Ettore's body, whoreson and consumptive, is the ballet of Jimmy Dean in weeds. Lest we forget let's us remember that the Romans invented suburbia, and it's meant overlit midday exile since. Out the windows of Visitations workers are aware of walls. Can you recall just standing there, racked out in fulgent joy somehow feeling FIGURE/GROUND? You are the history of art. Ciao, Ettore!

Canyon S.

To hug Shamu. The nosecone of a Boeing cold in God's Cincinatti quonset. Roll call among Dalai Lama lookalikes. The trillionth pair underpants' wearer searches the map for the pandas. Those conceived during cease fires; and during heavy shelling. The fall descends like an infomercial for Edvard Münch, shimmying the thoughtful of us up a skinny tree where we're prepped to meet and greet a cannibal.

I love thought, but thought loves Dot, dashing Dot of the Morse Agency for Inhalations, dressed in Tartan Sherpa Shirt and abalone inlay Jewish star, her State Department crampons aglitter. All hail whoosywhatsy! Thought may be able to beat up belief. But belief owns the pay-per-view rights, the lines and wires, and the satellite that last sabbath starting sickly tilting. Who gives a bucket of being here? I do. A bunch of gearheads approach a folded paper menu. Dot, I'm giving you this opening. What do you think?

John & Jim O. & T.

The word 'photograph' is a Greek three cheese pizza with all of its shortenings vegetable, castoff and cute--'frisco's and 'philly's' bossed on those metropoles of willed detail and monocular nonplus. For the sake of safebox brevity let's call them posts. Or beams or bouts. Still, walls and P.O. drawers and envelopes and talent and memory are filled with photographs. And the very air, as any distant Reuter with dig. back and sat. phone can put back. Many have men's hair. All contain gray. It is human nature to encapsulate. In the old one about a half a crumb, "you've got two crumbs." Discretion is the better part of on and on. To think a thing is to wean it from the milk of the world and fix it in gelatin forever. Portray A, the original exile. Go ahead. In any old moment in history, figures batter backgrounds. There is only one way to know your limits: start talking. Though "don't strain after poetry, it penetrates unaided through the joins" Robert Bresson said to Friendly Formerly. 1. The skiffs speed towards the battleship. 2. The people of Odessa wave 3. All is not lost, though all evidence eventually is.

Seth R.

Your cat fetches gaskets. You built a darkroom on a sun deck. Your father is buried near Eunice Cahoon. You stole ivy from the Modern wall. You wear an Egyptian ring, it sparkles before you speak. You've sued and been sued. You acted in a feature film (where you photographed Picasso). You spent an afternoon in a Sikh-owned hardware store choosing paint chips, and emerged onto First Avenue dizzyingly moved by color everywhere. And then rolled out the living room in "Grassy Knoll". You love nature and cultivation. You love art, too, deeply and absolutely, like arithmetic loves fingers, or jello coagulation. You've got iffy nerves and steady hands. Let this be a list for you. It's way less than the least I can do.

Rod S.

The-ists depict trees! It's hot as Christmas overwintering in fricatives and here's how Sparky came to hold that stick to the sky and crown it Miss Measured Man. Wind never howled, storm never struck. Gringoes went about bowdlerizing Lascaux. Sparky got a job "changing light bulbs at the Days Inn in Gradual." You could do it with a walkman on and it was sexy with improprieties. Anyhow the walls of sameness started closing in. Like any default animal lover he figured there were gloried jobs at Sea World, maybe spreading rancid muscle butter on the porpoises, and meant to head for Tampa. But between meant to and did do there are many scary offramp loners. Ill-gotten belief seeds the medians. The-ists abandon barcaloungers in run-off gullies already diapery with their silverpoint sketches. Keeping your head about you is like a postcard saying "think of me."

Peter D.

Thank you for telling me in such a nice way. You've an evenness woven through the godgiven odd, a nap moths must collude to chew on. A child's acreage heard you call it in a fog, and for once the details aren't riled. Son of Bride of Rerelease, the Sequel, again, but this time, it's personal. In a fog, a cardboard box, isn't in a fog, a fire. Evenness bespeaks Interstates and dice. The Wall Crimes tribunal searches for a place to purchase purchase. An ice sculpture of a typist thanks you for telling me in such a nice way. Slippery when connected, the river calls from its hands-free, halfway home from a gig. Glug, love. Gilt quanta of needy air served on a pursesnatched platter turn a bandwidth into a banquet. And when we're over toasting 'here's hum in your ears' eyes on radio silence quake someways together, and must pull over.

Brian S.

Good morning. I slept on the remote, Ramada. My eyes opened to a steak-sized lay of light on the veneer, as if this hotel room had bought a few worthless shares in an old master --how about a Rembrandt? --and misplaced the certificates. I got a corner room and it's clean if not shop vac'd or fantastick'd. It's more like the spiders got bored with torque, and dust and dander shuffled off to Brest-Litovsk, pledging non-aggression. Have you noticed how the hands will wake up last? Was it William Carlos Williams who admitted "extremity's a mystery to me?" Hell, I'm horny for a glint. I have got to somehow struggle up, give the Charybdis of CNN the slip, get downtown and eulogize a Ludens. I may be up now, half an ad man in a Red Roof Inn, Continental Breakfaster indebted to his pillow mint, solid sender who flirts with the felines in receivables, roll-on, safety razor, overheard in prayer in turbulence, jams a little light jazz on the imitation strat, half full of bright side (some would say half-sick) --it's all coming back. Culture abhors a vacant room and there's no place, really, for a mess. Oops. Here comes Headline News. Here dad forgot to put the safety on. Some emeritus insists the congress should. Congruities are tiring.

Jeff W.

When I find a niche I scratch it. His wife and he to Halloween as bad Evangelists, with a mezzanine of irony and revolving restaurant of bottled baptized ire, symbolized by the Crispix bibles and the fifth of Maker's laying hands on and pissing into perpetuity. Darwin was a wookie. Of course you and I are eewoks, reproducing like cuddly marketable rats and battling the dark side alongside Oprah, Art, and a flamethrower full of charm. It's darkest in the niches. A lime with that? A median strip planted with palazzo poppies? Grand Dragons of Democracy selling us our white sheets cheap. And under cover of them, we scour Stalin's moustache after babka scraps. The only chain store name containing the letters DEATH is Arthur Treacher's Fish and Chips. The number of registered clowns fluctuates with birthrates. Only hunger stays the same. Eewoks give up cuddling long enough to suck the marrow from a bunch of zeroes, then lie back, greasy mouthed, in the weekend places of their agents.

Graham R.

The science fiction cover illustration with its burnished strontium breast plates reflecting red and green giant sunsets; the fleet of cigarillo-shaped oxygen harvesters needling back to xKlak with the catch. In the middle ground a blonde child leads a freakish deer on a leash. Their hair is Louis Quinze. Their reader is asleep on a barrow of Vic20s and Commodore 64s, the gay divorcees of the 70s, OD'd on the golden age of live TV, are acting like the parents of a patch of dappled light. Divorced with your thoughts. And hooked on baby aspirin and conceptualization. This essay is meant to bless your own fist-sized inner O2 harvester. You're a good guy with an armoire of queer deer collars. Calculus and LSD save lives. A special pocket sewn into your letter jacket to save eraser shavings, for failure (as they say on xKlak) is the monkey in the moonlight.