Fifth Try: Pilate

Roman,

I need you to know that I hate you. I hate that you could have imagined that you kept the gate to my mind. You might call yourself storyteller, but everyone knows you use literature's headstone to prop open your door. You might call yourself teacher, but you just morph beautiful into pain. You never call yourself traitor, but that is what you are, and you know it. How could your rhetoric ever redeem you?

The world trusts your hands with the future and you don't even understand. You don't understand your sacred undertaking. You spit on us with your rules and your lists and your copied empty allegories. You won't be finished until all of the open eyes in world bleed with the pain of your mind strangle toil. We are not your playground. We will not be your tea-fetching slaves.

I think you must believe yourself the savior. You have no other path to personal peace. I think you want to be the lion. You don't realize the true saviors are sitting hunched in subjugation at your feet. They stare up at you from the floor with accidental respect and offer you the most delicious fruit that can be tasted... and you dare to look down to meet them. You hold out your egg and put your smile on your throat to mock god.

Permanent antagonist.

Don't think I'm angry. Remember that if you were merely a king, your name would be Jones. No matter what you read and tell you will always be an outsider to thought. The real world will always be closed to you and open to your victims. If I could save them from you, you would find yourself inside the cage with the rest looking in.

The young will see the light of perfect possibility no matter what you do.

Everything written is worth reading. Every thought is your equal. Every student can be your teacher. Every child will change the world. Every pair of eyes will witness their love. Every villain is powerless to stop our infinite recreation.

When the morning creeps in you'll sleep. Like Vlad before you, I promise. The most perverted fate of lupine hours will scream away the hurt and redeem every mind you've touched in abuse.

Did you really think my metamorphic fantasies could tether me more than you did?

Regards,

Jonas Briedis

Fourth Try: ReInnocence

Friend,

I ask you to witness. The children are walking blindly into the valley of the shadow of Death. They are walking into the fire. They are letting themselves be raced into the black of the popular far away from ever going home. I'm afraid he has walked too far and that he has forgotten the pre-rational watercolor imagination freedom that he used to glow to every passing face. Do you feel the tear-wrench fury of the lost pure beauty in your eyes like I do or are you already so numb that it couldn't ever matter?

Oh the pain to close his eyes and see the grainy aged film of every memory that shouldn't have to be seen. The world that he knew so lost in the rising tide of so regretful. So like the strangling heat to offer a rewind that cannot be pushed to undo a moment, a decision so close but in the wrong direction.

There's a stranger in the backyard dressed up like the neighbors' dog. He's threatening to steal you if you try to ride the swing like you once did. You're too tall anyway... you'd only hit your head on the way up.

Who will save you when the snakes come swimming from the walls when you're lying in bed? Who will tell you if what you're seeing is a dream? The world is our dream.

Your Mental chorus will get louder, friend; it will warn you not to look back over your shoulder. But there's no Medusa there, there isn't enough salt in the kitchen to build a pillar. We'll just have to carry the temple's roof by ourselves.

You and I, us, together, we can protect the poor one from what he hates about himself. Our reInnocence will not be caged in the laws of the old world. Friend I swear to everything that tomorrow will not make you cry. We may all be living his life, his trials, but none of us are marked for despair.

The lights of thought are floating out of the mist that blows into the cold cliff face of the savage state to bring us to the glorious climax of our generational empire. The radiant flames of our thousand hillside camps will rise from the dew-covered fields to reach soaring eyes until they believe in our perfect tomorrow.

A nuclear flash of light has come to scrub every corner of the black water of Gerry and Jimmy's requiem. Fill your pail with the sea so you can cover your face in reflections. We are connected... we kindred lovers, and we can share our regret until it loses its meaning and power over us. Close your eyes, close your eyes, close your eyes, close your eyes, close your eyes, close your eyes, I feel you.

Our child, he will face wishes to undo more than anyone who could pretend to help him. So will you, so will I. But trust me as we fly I will not let you die. You are stronger than time, we are stronger than corruption.

An army of the reInnocent will define this new era. He stands at their head and asks us to join him. Run until you cannot, listen until you know not, speak until you are not. Feel and be felt forever.

Regards,

Jonas Briedis

Third Try: Ante Geometric Aha

Friend,

Humanity went extinct at 2am today

much to our surprise.

The French Impressionists labored on 'til 4, but all anybody's talking about is how the crowds failed to pour in to witness Monet's mind's last construction. The enlightened man watches through his ears as all of thought explodes, but he just wants to be promoted once the milk has expired and the honey has congealed.

"Every man for himself," he says, "it's how the world is run."

But you know he's lying -- don't you? -- He forgot to mention Eve. The night that came to Earth before us will define what our virgin eyes see. That's when he'll corrupt you; that's when you'll be blamed... Who could walk to the Louvre, when they're trapped in the reeds? The blue-blonde children sleep and the industrial slaves, with their age-blinded eyes, forge every adamant link in the blanket of chains. The smoke rises, a mask, as the rain drives into the streets of the cities. You must know what to do, but know you must not cry. Tears get lost in the crowding rain; you can't be there always to hold on to their hands.

Look darling, the old and the new do the dance of battle on the horizon like lightening. They're fighting for our approval and nobody cares how wicked. They ride without horses; pale beasts they are.

But here I am anyway. Gliding across the bridge in the hammer of the deluge that surrounds the bus. The purple orange darklight drifts like laughter to embrace me so softly from the sky. The people melt to silhouettes around me, swirl into each other 'til they're all one.

And I'm smiling.

Promise me the gently in your voice. Forget the glory of the moon and the color of your eyes, but always always always see him that cries. Write without punctuation. Hold congress at disorientation. Drift to sleep as the sun rises just to wake with the glorious twilight. Kiss everyone on their lips. Scream NO to all that would try to prevent you from doing what you feel in your soul. Do everything to put your mind on the Key Bridge to feel what I feel today.

We'll start it all over at midnight.

Regards,

Jonas Briedis

Second Try: For Uncle Vid

Friend,

I imagined, at night, as I walked the lamplit backstreets of my mind, I found myself at home on Christmas day. A day that always in my memory ran faster than I could follow, this night slowed down that I should watch it in its gorgeous passing. Merry Christmas.

It began like every other, adjusting my new black cashmere sweater standing at the door. Waiting for the kings and the Sheppards. Tiptoe into the frigid rush of the open door to greet the line of familiar faces. Try not to let my look two-time the feelings of anxious awkward that rush in my head. A familiar face, one hug, two kisses, an eternally weary flash of teeth. Merry Christmas. Let the feedfest begin. How afraid that any relative might see the writhe of tedium I'm clutching so tightly behind my eyes as they devour. One more hug, two more kisses... Merry Christmas.

I'm supposed to be so close to these passing bodies, I think, but they seem so far away. The sun drops heavily to the ground to bring the crackling dusk. Oh to be anything but so crook-sweatered and so alone in the threshold. The march of the expected repeats itself ever and again. Merry Christmas.

The spectral puppeteer of the unreal place of my mind picks his moment carefully.

Merry Christmas gives way to half-breath shutter-eyed shock. I know you, that next man in line. I lost you in the river, beyond my reach. Those gentle eyes and overreached hair, that careful walk and strong shoulders. All shoots to the depths of me. A shield built from bits of new-year regret falls to the crashing ground that I might throw my arms around you in choking celebration. Hold your incomprehensibly beating heart so close to mine and weep as if for the very first time.

Tedium is gone from my fingers, that I might clutch you instead. How could I ever let you go again? I raise my head from where it rests on your shoulder to kiss you once on either cheek. This time, the tradition of the awkward is forgotten. After so much waiting, I do not pause: I love you.

Everything that was lost has been returned.

Regards,

Jonas Briedis

First Try: Forget the Jokerman.

Friend,

I've decided I'm not a poet. I don't think I'll let anyone call me that ever again. Someone I love told me the other day I was only good enough for his table scraps, and it hurt me like I don't think I can express in verse. So I've decided I'm not a poet. My brothers and sisters, and me, we deserve more than that. Our love is worth more than that. Our cradle's been on fire since he and his friends spoke it, and they've gotten old. I say under the table's just shame. Forget him.

The prophet and the philosopher, they've been dancing on my walls, on my screen, for some time now. I don't know if I'm supposed to be entranced anymore, but I definitely want to scream. They offer light and then they hide it; they laugh at me for my darkness.

Around every corner is another green-eyed clown calling some teenager a copycat. We're being warned of stolen thoughts. As if our minds should be locked like doors. Don't you think that the sage, whoever he was at first, had a hero? You know, their savior is still dead. And he had the keys to the world. Ours is being born, but he's not so arrogant as to imagine nobody has ever hoped before.

Can't you see them? They're out in the desert, their legs thinned to breaking. They twist in the withering wind of the dinnertime hours and they reach out to carve us in their image. They're watching the sunset, yelling about how the day changed everything. They don't expect yesterday, they don't remember tomorrow. We've been watching with them, but I think it's time we stopped and refused to go to bed at bedtime. I don't want to hear anyone my age say they were born too late ever again.

I ask that those that matter join me in flying into the sky while everyone else is asleep, in pushing the world into the misty squinting stretch-chill hours. We won't footnote the crown when we pry it from the pedestal, but we'll love it. We'll love it like they loved us and we loved him. In gold and silver and purple and shine, we'll weave ropes to connect us as we crash into the horizon to bring the dawn.

Consider this my resignation from the Twentieth Century.

Regards,

Jonas Briedis