dear HIS MAJESTY,

i cannot possibly thank you enough. for each time I do, a part of me is eroded by guilt. i am not an obsequious man, often quite the opposite. i will not thank you with words. for each time they are uttered, or even suspended within my mind like some drunken fool on a swingset, or as a robin on a powerline — i feel they are too pathetic. too pathetic, too banal, too shallow. even such a description is grey, tired, is february.

you found me through the mirror, when I was not looking for you. when I was looking past myself, not even at the backdrop, but covering the eyes of light itself. the moon that night was valiant, inviolable. i truly believed it had dressed up for me. the streets outside were desolate, windswept by the luxurious perfumes of the distant country — that i missed like my youth (yes I am young, but when one begins to question their age, the time has already passed). I watched a fox sleep on concrete, an owl perch on a brick cigar. there was unfortunate punctuation between the silence. exhausts modified so the stars can hear them rumble, and turn away in shame. my neighbour may have killed his wife, the radio wept her name.

but then, for one moment, the world flatlined. yes, even the clamour of the withering leaves had ceased; as if they’d received bad news.

the president is dead. the world order attended his funeral.

the void snuck a phone into prison. he dialed for his father, who did not pick up or even hear the device ring.

absent minded children found the bunkers. they did not know how to open them, so they destroyed them.

if you pack a pig with enough explosives, then let it pop, we’d be able to have woodstock again.

oh, how I detest memories. what makes them so important? I do not need to know who I was, or who I wasn’t, or who I was trying to be, or who I could be, or who I knew I wouldn’t turn out to be, or know that I knew that this moment was always blazing towards me like a comet that passes every 20 years but never makes the damn headlines, because it’s only been 20 damn years.

well it’s been 465 years. you never lost track. you do not detest your memories. why?

yours sincerely,

anti citizen one