Dear (unnamed/unquantified),

 

I will never be quite sure how I got to here, 

to this isolated plateau,

this strange relationship 

of fiction and non-fiction,

born of seeing 

you, one 21st-century Renaissance painting

carved in the burning brushstrokes of an unfettered hand.

You, in a thinning, passive crowd,

a noticeable patch of mercurial smoke 

against the beige trench coats of businessmen.

A single directionless instant in the Madison Square Garden Amtrak station, 

I, standing impatiently in front of the last dying K-Mart in a hug of a houndstooth coat,

you, cherished girl, walking by, places to go, 

all backpack patches and waves of dark hair and two strange seconds of eye contact before vanishing into a riptide swarm of morning commuters

that swallowed your irreplaceability whole.

 

I think there must be something wrong with me.

 

Most people have their twenty-second premonitions,

dream full lives with the broadly-laughing stranger in the Starbucks or the boy 

two seats across in the lecture hall,

and then, bemused, unworried, release those vivid hypotheticals 

to their windswept progress, 

but here I am, 

writing these futile poems 

to a muse I know nothing of.

 

I am a cowardly romantic at best.

In the safe glow of this laptop screen I confess my secrets to your imagined, waiting ear,

but never to those who should know them the most.

I would tell them

but they, unlike you, might take my words from the crucible of my tongue and distort them before the hardening of their iron bones,

you wait for them to cool

before taking them in your hands 

to explore with curious fingertips.

 

You know me farther than I might know myself,

the panic in my veins when high school stands aside to reveal the red-sunrise arms of college, 

the unseen and unconquerable  cracks in my bathroom mirror's reflection, 

my doubt,

my hollow potential.

Even conscious you could never know my fingers still clutch this black keyboard and scatter.  

This thin line, this hope or madness; they overlap, often, so perhaps I shall exhale the residue of both.

Could you be enchanted by my flaws?  I shake when I stand in confrontation, like the circuited motors drawing my muscles are loosened in their sockets.  I stumble across my own apologies

like there are buckles in the sidewalk-cement beneath my vocal chords.  

Would this endear me to you?  I am such a wandering daydreamer these walls cannot contain yet I move without moving through the galactic space behind my eyes and realize twenty-three minutes have been evaporated.  

Would I frustrate you, I, perfectionist bleeding imperfection, I, martyr without a cause, I, self-destructing?

Collapsing, I wonder.

 

In these darkening days 

blurred by grey, by this rumbling hollow river valley brewing in my ribcage 

spotted with crumpled flowers I planted in youth only to neglect,

that all-consuming nothingness,

dust

choking dust

dirt in my lungs 

where lives

l’appel du vide

and its simpering promise of peace, peace, peace,

the only worthwhile audience is the imagined,

the unresenting.

 

Here’s to you,

to the unpredicted collision of our spherical universes,

and to overactive imaginations.

I toast you with a styrofoam cup of steam-washed cocoa,

while the rain makes its pattering escape on cat’s paws

against the window,

I, pretending,

and yet smiling still.

 

 

Sincerely,

 

the devotee