If you had a machine to record the images from your dreams, what do you think it would be like? The machine, the experience of replay, or both? Because we can do that now.

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 wanted to go someplace you don’t speak the language? Where no one has heard of the place you come from and no one cares? Where the customs seem bizarre but no one thinks to explain them? Where it seems anything you imagine can come true but still some things surprise you?

Have you ever wanted to throw a dart at a map and just go there with someone you have never met?

If you could have anything from the sky, what would it be? The question is metaphorical or literal, however you like it best.

If they ever do figure out once and for all what makes us exist and experience that existence uniquely, and if we read that explanation and nod and shrug and it makes total sense and we can even grasp it intuitively, it’s still going to be mind-blowing when that mysterious sensation of it chases everything else out of mind for a tiny moment, a sensation impossible to hold on to.

If you were on one of those floating cubes, what would you be doing, how would you be balanced?

Have you ever woken up with a dream you wanted to remember, but lost it an hour later?

I can’t even imagine what today’s installment would have been if things had gone differently. My Twitter friends page is a wall of hope and optimism.

Once they have been falling for years, slower and slower, even the leaves and feathers, even the scraps of wrapping paper light enough for the breeze to have lifted, rest firmly enough to stand on. Rising from the middle of our sacred field, an android has gathered and arranged them into staircases, a maze wild as a briar patch, as colourful as November. At rest, he leans on his broom and his shovel.

You are a couple steps ahead of me, singing. Somehow you always are. By some trick of the dome of the sky, I can hear your voice behind me.

I have looked for the end of the world. I was cautioned against this. Many others, having seen it proven mathematically that we are all enclosed in glass, have looked for the boundary and failed. Some say that the android has touched it. Even if that is true, it is of no help now, slumped, as if in sleep, until there is enough material in the sky again to warrant sweeping it into a new staircase.

At a sharp fork in the staircases, you come almost completely around and begin a descent. These are the only times you face me. I want to ask you something, but you touch a finger to my lips, and now I am not sure what my question was, or even if I really had one. I wonder if your eyes always look like this, I rarely see them.

There are people, also, trapped in their falls. It is said this is the only way to become immortal. The fall never ends. You are right to avoid questions. There are no questions that ask, only songs.

Have you ever had a plan fall apart completely, only to discover something so much better you had missed in all your narrow planning?

This is the sixth and final element in a series of six installments beginning here: http://secretvespers.com/2008/07/21/pieces-part-1/. Each one uses a harlequin pattern and adds a couplet to the story. The hidden text of each one begins with “the romance of”.

Is it possible to deliver justice from the bay doors of a bomber? Have you ever had a dream that was at the same time gruesome and calm?