Epistle. To: Wollstonecraft

My horoscope said -  you must outwit the riddle. Not solve the riddle. But outwit it. And that's catchy but where does it leave you?  Are you still at it? Did you still play both sides? Maybe in the heart of things you might redo my chart? As for things now I'm escaping a bad night outside. It's raining and blowing against the windows in downpours and knots of wind pound against the house like something large and simplified trying to crash through the walls. I'm hiding on the inside in a dimmed room with a single lamp burning like some old torch lit up in the halls of darkness. It's late and I have a familiar feeling. Where you can't fall asleep for trying so you try and bother someone else and try and talk to them. Where you stay marginally awake at a loss until early morning and as you're about to fall asleep in the early morning you stop and you say to yourself wait a minute don't I usually wake up in the early morning? Thunder rolls across the skylights shaking dust off the blinds. Lightening flashes ride the clouds in herds of electricity. Everything lets go with a storm. Don't you think? The way the world sometimes appears to look back at you. Sometimes it's all so great and you feel so alive that you must fail, correct errors, repeat the process to ensure your feet are still lovingly planted above ground. Sometimes you look into the night sky and what you find staring back is ridicule. Like a vast silence telling in credits but no dialogue - hey yo you be small. Do you think the world has a brain? I mean a collective one. I guess it's like breathing. A bunch of thoughts gathered up and let loose like a manner of sorts plotting on how to get even. Each day I try and extend my reach. I try to walk further. The punch list that's never complete! But when I look out the window I'm faced with geometries of memory and what those sensations are and how they run deeper than just filling in the hours. You were important. Perhaps you still are. All that spook work you did must have made you some enemies worth nothing. Remember how that president's wife would never let the president even take a nap without looking at the chart? Central America? Banking deregulation? The hot line to Russia? Nothing happened higher up like that without first consulting the charts that you built on the stars. And so, are you hiding tonight? We're not the same. We never were. I was a fool and you never were. Maybe I'm just scared and would like someone else to take up the job and be afraid for me. (!) I just finished reading a post by some guy who's taking a year off to bicycle around, in order to have a "radically local life." I just saw Jane Eyre with the nurse. Tell me your tale of woe Rochester asked her. Woe she replied? Sir she said, I have no tale of woe. Ah Miss Eyre, Rochester said, behind a smokescreen of cigar rising in his face and a tumbler glass of shadowy alcohol brought to his lips, we all have a tale of woe. I try but suddenly the whole thing goes off into the past and I feel stupid looking at it like I've been left behind. Should I just leave the deal alone? How's that possible though? The way we're made inside. If it's written in the stars?  And this is more complex than I ever gave it credit for being. I guess I'm not sure what I should do - so when you tell me I have extra DNA to scatter about what does that mean? The hospital mechanics want to put me back together - but even if they get on with their best laid plans of mice and men - I will never be the same. Who would I be - I mean who can I be - if I don't have my old body to live within? It's an attraction for sure. The whole body thing. I remember I always felt safe when we talked about things walking around together after school. I remember setting a book on your thigh and I remember you picking up that book and hitting me with it broadside across my head. I remember how it was your face would change and shift by how long or short the daylight was falling on your face. At times it was soft and craving. Other times it was cut wicked and angular and seemed to have it all and what that said was don't ask for more. Ah. But is this just me? Or the wind and the rain. Or the moon that isn't there.