I want to live in the places of our mind. I want a free ride on the things that we aspire to. Haven’t I felt empathy for the unfortunate, predicted the events of the planet, conceived of great inventions and works of art that I would accomplish, if only I had the time? I’ve seen us, too, in my mind. We are in perpetual amazement with each other, honest without the slightest loss of mystery, somehow at the top of our arcs, with all the time to dazzle the world, and all the time to idle like a picnic with each other.

What is this awful place where we actually live, this city named for a better one, one that is a legend, and is mostly a myth? Are we, collectively, so dull that we cannot even name a river? Maybe you and I could never be together, we would try to escape but not quite manage, we would go to the end of the world, and still we’d be there, mechanical in our language, and like the actuaries or adjusters of romance, systematically disproving the best that we’d imagined, systematically hedging against the worst.

When I was a child, I hoped that later, ten or twenty years later, I would not know the difference between the things I had experienced, the things I had dreamed, and the things I had imagined.

Have you ever met an old ex-pat in a foreign country, a refugee of lost love and a prospector of new chases?

I am trying new forms. I am thinking of dropping computer type for handwriting. I am going to work on this for the next few episodes, and see where it goes.

But no one counts the hours or the years. There are no seasons, the days are unchanging. Nothing dies out, nothing freezes over—not the mosquitos, not the refuse in the river beds. Everywhere we look we find the litter of surplus, the riot of vegetation, the overgrowth of humanity spilling out, as if God’s thermometer has snapped apart over the streets and its mercury dots are the motorcycles.

Five men sit under a sheet metal screen, quiet as a constellation. They are waiting. They are blank with waiting, waiting for anything to happen. The hours pass uncounted, their trivia falling into the gutters with the rest of it, with the wastes of humanity.

This peace is mystic, ancient and crushing. They say never to add music to what silence has said best, but this is a peace I want to shatter with a chord. And you—with you I want to rouse the street, not to prayer but to life. I want us to inspire the roofs to lift and the vines to tumble, the city to erupt like the volcanos that surround it, leaving gardens in the craters and love letters in the igneous pillars.

Tonight, love, I want us to gather up and organize. For tomorrow before dawn, we storm the mosques, we fill them and spill out of their grounds, and like a choir of thousands, we sing through their megaphones. Tomorrow we will make an instrument of them, the greatest ever built, the throat of Jakarta, a resonance that will rise into the sky and fall onto our heads, a celestial finger that, touching our foreheads, will lift us to our feet for sunrise.

This episode was drawn by Francesca Frati, and the words are snatched from two different parts of Pet Poems. Pet Poems, by the way, is now available on Amazon. If you like it, I hope you will give me a good review!

Pet Poems on Amazon

Have you ever discovered that you were not as real to someone as that person was to you?

So I printed my old stories and cut them into pieces. I shuffled the small ones and folded those large enough into airplanes, doves and cranes. I assembled tetrahedrons and dodecahedrons with the fragments and rolled them together as dice. I wrote the parts facing up, and in the logic of seventy waking hours they formed like a hallucination, like the patterns hidden in those books you look at out of focus. On second reading, none of it made sense. None of my ideas do.

What I want is a collision. I want what comes out of the large hadron collider. I want what this city has, a skyline with the remnants of centuries rammed together, an original text with red editing between the lines. I want imperfections waiting to be scratched out, reflections and shadows falling onto the neighbours. I want a street of people who are incoherent in their passing, who are so far apart from each other that you can pluck at those distances like on the strings of a cello. I want so much competing music that there are accidental melodies in the clashing. I want them to last only so long, then veer away again to noise. I want you—the whispers I hear just barely above the crashing of your colours, smells and movement—a conversation left unsaid but glimpsed at in the veering apart of topics. I want the near miss, what can’t be captured yet, and when the dream is done, the only part that lingers.

Your first letter was a drawing of our alley raised so high it vanished in the clouds. There were zip lines between many of the ledges, flying paper birds, and the architecture of a medieval post-modern collision. My letters to you were straight-forward. I talked about the day, about ideas, plans, and my hopes. You might write for seven unpunctuated pages about what a needle wasn’t, or in technical and archeological detail about how an obscure civilization might have made bricks differently, had they just tried this or that.

I asked you questions you refused to answer. What was your name? You told me to make names up. What was your school? You told me the question was too boring. When I asked you to come out and meet, you agreed but refused to set a time. The next day, and on many others, I was sure I saw you waiting at the end of the alley, but by the time I could run down, you were gone. I was sure I saw you all around the city, your face disappearing behind a corner, a flicker of your coat, your eyes behind a mask in a water taxi I could not approach. Our spaces wove together but did not connect.

I suspect you used my letters to make those paper cranes. I wonder what a tourist would make of that, a visit to my world, and like their visit to the city, a voyeur’s dip into a stream, a vision that is honest but incomplete, or perhaps merely a reflection.

I came back to the alley. It is the same. I came to a canal and on the ledge there was a book. It can only be by you. The ISBN and the publisher are fake. So are the reviews and the names you acknowledge, the diligent editor, the spouse who stood by you all those years. I looked it up. I’m glad I have this now.

It’s the longest night of the year where I live in the northern hemisphere. Do you ever go out to watch meteor showers, stare at the sky until you see a streak? Have you ever cast a wish, then realized you could make it come true?

Have you ever caught yourself staring at someone? Is it a person you later approached? Which was better, the anticipation, or the resolution?

I know a lot of people who live in their own, distant worlds. They bring back some wonderful things. Are you friends with anyone like that?