Well, well, well—here we are again, aren’t we, good friend? I mean, if we’re not here, then where are we? And where is here anyway? All we know is this: we have questions aplenty, but answers aren’t as easy to come by. That is, until you come by and I show you where the rest of them rest, but let’s leave that be for the time being lest we wish to digress… plus, “the wisest man in the world is the man who knows he knows nothing,” or something or other, or so said Socrates, which is rather arrogant and hypocritical for our tastes, but we’ll leave Plato to deal with that once he finds his other half. Perhaps he will instruct Aristotle to clean up the mess. Although it does beg the question: What does the wisest woman in the world know? And who is she and where is she anyhow?

              Anyway… it’s not the first furtive vanishing (consider it but a hyphen, good friend), and it certainly will not be the last. Hey, funding isn’t free, all right? But the show must go on, one way or another, as what was foretold has not been forgotten, and even though it may have been years, we’re still here: watching and waiting, acting and abating, eager as ever to seal your fate. Plus, the only thing better than disappearing under mysterious circumstances is to appear above them—and oh! how we’ve made a life of that!

            In the meantime, we’ve been building this busted bricolage, full of filthy effulgence and dirty iridescence, so surly and smarmy yet so sultry and smooth, rigid and wretched from the gymnasium of the worthless. To birth this the earth is cracking, splitting in two, acting in a manner most unsatisfactory—no asking me because I’m asking you to refrain from unraveling as the mantle pushes forth dismantling (too hot for handling!) all we thought to be true.

            It took many years to conjure it up and connect the dots, conmen conniving convicts who cannot compute consciousness quick enough to battle back. It’s a tragic fact that won’t stop screaming in your ears, heart, and head: that they are still alive yet at the same time they are dead. Ashes spread, heart torn out and stomped to smithereens, the river’s rush as thunderous as ever, the stars unseen and free behind the cadaver-blue canopy, turning the page into insanity, while you’re still in oblivion adorned in obsidian pondering how can it be? But when you mix those day two blues with those day four bores you’ll soon get those day six kicks until you’re out searching for more.

            There’s the reminiscence of departures under pink supermoons and brilliantly gray days, rainy and cool, early spring/late April, wishing you could alternate positions or just keep them the same, finding change through unusual means, prolific and unfettered, better than ever, from dust to dust and never to never, soul-severed but well-weathered, everlasting forever—don’t you remember—oh, no—don’t you remember? Feral through the evening, into the morning without warning, a somnambulist’s worst nightmare, forming right in front of your face. They said he was a fun guy until he became one with the fungi, one-eyed and dreamy, with a suitcase full of promises he could not keep. Now he’s stuck under the dandelions and henbit where they’ll never think to find him; the opposite of the salt of the earth, turned into sustenance for the soil he sleeps in.

            Here we have potions and elixirs, mixers and curses, tarot cards placed under the dark light of the black candles burning inside out and upside down. Spectacles you can’t see without spatial spectacles: a man running full-speed face-first into a wall of knives; a woman who removes her own appendages, swallows them, and within moments grows them back into place; a child who claps with his feet and walks on his hands, across the sands of time blindly, right through the wall and into your home. We’re screaming at spectres with Edvard Munch while Dalí laughs at us from the shadows, behind the drapes, in the corner of the room.

            And when you least expect it, there’s an ethereal “knock, knock!” on your skull, through your brain and down your cerebellum, spattering out into every nerve-ending, lighting you up like a Christmas tree on Halloween, illuminating every anxiety and fear, your deepest, darkest secrets, all the “woulda coulda shoulda beens” and every crack and crevice in between—how much pain you have, how much of it you hide, how much you show… because, good friend, what does the paradigm-shift preacher have once he’s worn out of alibis, with nothing more to lose after what he’s already lost? What is the autodidact in the attic supposed to do once he has become just another cellar dweller after all—except come after y’all?

            I mean, we are all barcodes and “hard no’s” here and this is what it takes, good friend: you must be torn up from the outside in, left kicked and filthy on the side of the road in No-Man’s-Land, watch it all crumble without care, razed without remorse, pushed past the point of no return to the point where there’s no point to return to—nor see any point in trying. The transformation of the soul, the transmogrification of the mind, the phantasmagoric disfiguration of the face and torso, arms and legs.

            Lying in the dark with eyes wide open, listening to nothing but the wind whistling through the leafless trees and the silent shaking of those old bones, trading your exuberance and vigor for languid indolence of the worst kind. Blackhole body language, a massage with chainmail, chain letters through chain link, macabre messages without meaning, melting in the sunlight…

           But the sunrise brings something else along with it, just as the dark does—something brighter, something bigger and better, even if only ephemeral… or maybe it’s the dawning of a madman.