Dear Jonathan,

For one moment in New York, I was alert, fogging up the windows of my eyes with misty disbelief. The two of them talked like subterranean schoolgirls being watched. They were standing with dancers' feet on the dirty concrete. Two plants with buds and no roots.

I wanted to run toward their precipice and belly flop, damnation dive into the nevergreen, drink all the poison and dream blue hallelujahs while the table cloth was being laid open and spread for me. Make language, soul, sword, flutter, shrill-caper, smile, save someone, especially us, from dying. Have a great dark secret to carry like a ticking shoe box.

There was never a question about which one would lead me into temptation. But my angel threw a noose around my shadow while I circled the block in first flight. He pulled the string of some talking puppet and by the time the words peppered away into the gilded street lamps made merciful by the dim Manhattan moon, the gifted ones had descended down the subway stairs, down below the surface of things, ushered down forever into the railed womb of the city by my heaven-sent one.

And now exhausted by the leftover forbidden fruit which was whisked beneath the valley of the shadow of my pulsing, I go to my room hardly awake, beached, lying in the desert bed amongst the Georgia O'Keefe driftwood of Chelsea number 912.

It was June before I needed blue.

Write soon,

Mr. Premonition

. . .

copyright 2000, Linford Detweiler