since he's left my prose has become more mature which I suppose is a good thing. if he comes back I don't want to start writing about razors' edges and hot dry winds and tents and canteens and soldiers of war. to hell with metaphors. still he'd like to know where they all went: the armies and the wild dogs and the cement builders and the spiders who would come and sit and say nothing because there was nothing left to say and nothing left to do but avoid the blasted earth outside and dig holes a little deeper and a little deeper and a little deeper until somehow an infinite tunnel came and took the place of an entire population and him with it. I do not know how he found his way back from whatever limbo he had to escape to but he'd like to know where everybody went.

it's not like there is much need for regiments and bayonets and the ever-vigilant watchman who would tell us when to get down. today there is just a wary man. not his creation at all: it was the soldiers sprung from his imagination as there was no room just for men or rather there was no use for them we needed extraordinary men so he thought them up and they came. there was something exciting and glamorous in it or at least it was that way in the beginning. by the end it was something on the order of throwing desks and boxes and trash cans in the way as you try to run out of a long corridor with no doors and no visible end as the lynch mob closes in. or fumbling for the key to the gate while the shouting gets closer and closer.

he did get out but they took over the corridor and not only the corridor but the building the block and the city. we all know how that went. it's been a long story of buildings shifting so slowly as to elude the eye until everything seemed to have returned to where it started. almost everything. I'm not sure what to tell him. the soldiers are gone like dusty photographs and the bricklayers and the bricks themselves resumed into the earth which is where I've been told I live and belong. I'll be the first to admit that tents in deserts with soldiers with rifles watching the horizon still seem friendlier to me too you know as long as the coyotes and jackrabbits can get in and everyone else stay out it's amenable and you can lie on the ground and look into the sky and wait for the message from several million years away saying we're coming to get you hold on.