A Pepper Grinder Full of Mashed Potatoes

The last time I saw the White Cliffs, the king of france was bald and the glass was where. I relish your letters but loathe their distraction from the real issue at hand. I think that when you put on the cardboard helmet and don your pretenses, I forget who it is you're hiding and why he can't be out in the open. I mean, sure it may be a matter of sufficiently cathecting all these bombarding energies, but let me tell you something, meister, sufficient cathexes are a fairy tale, like Greek olives, terse billy-goats, American imperialism, and sand-bottom reservoirs.

A Wednesday morning is the most flavorful fruit. I suckle it as I reluctantly awaken, allow the juice to trickle through the coarse hairs on my chin. Mites drown in ambrosia. A man comes to collect tickets and I avoid him, slink down below the covers until he leaves. His breath smells like the dining car. The ghost of Sancho Panza takes pleasure in disrupting these perfect moments of mine, and he takes this opportunity to stroke his delight.

"How long since you made that promise to me, Don?"

"How long, indeed, cur."

Fortunately, Elias, the groundskeeper, has left his trowel on the nightstand and I am able to excavate the wicked heart of Panza before he can strangle me.

I had to have a special messenger deliver it, please tip him well, he's my brother's brother, a sad old man with watery eyes, or one, at least. I trust you'll put it on the shelf with the others in the room you're preparing me. I trust you're preparing it. Certainly it won't be long now. I'm certain to get out of bed one of these Wednesdays. Now that I have thrust the Heart of Panza far from me, tying another knot in that silver chord. Sancho follows after it disentangling, never deciphering.

Listen, can you send me a Pepsi? I mix it with arrowroot to quell the tremors, but it's getting harder to find them here.

Then, after a long silence, the drummer beats four, and the guitars erupt:

Don Quixote de la Mancha

Aswan High Damn

"Ohh...," he (I) lets (let) the last few "h's" suffer out and expand until they are several and none: a long drawled sigh indicating his (my) exhaustion.
It was always a slow day. Now, barefoot, I read the veins, now vericose, on those fleshy paddles on which I walk. They tell me imagined stories written there. They tell me fables, but in the garden of memory, now wilted, they offer up only the folklore of blood travelling from toes back to heart. It is a textbook now. It is a pied-ual. The second volume erupts from my forearms, but I refuse to study further. I don't like what I'm learning.
Instead, I return to the letter I write, a cartographic experiment in directing you to my heart. I worry that those same circulatory labyrinths hide not even a minotaur. I am less than beast at bottom. I am only maze.
But then, I run around away from you, building; I lay the bricks in the walls in spirals so that I never have to erect stories. I prefer to remain close to the foundation, one floor high, a distance from which I hope to be able to fall more than once.
"Ohh...," he (I) lets (let) the last few "h's" suffer out and expand through winding passageways until they are several and one: a long scrawled sigh indicating his (my) exhaustion.

I.F.
D.Q.
d.l.M