CRIMINAL

This morning I received a letter from Nick Blake, my incarcerated criminal confidante:

"Dear Gena,

"I've now resumed my former life of last summer in the tight top attic floor of this hotel, whose windowsill hangs out into a street corner dunked in placid West Coast sun, warmed ice floe that swims on thawed lakes, tablet on the cold tongue of the marble-skinned dead.

"Ironically, I’m now the night watchman, fleeing a sly, vengeful ghost, its life torn like a woman's nylons snagged on a nail. He accompanies my every evening walk.

"The rhythm of his heart hangs on my hems, my buttonholes, sings like rough wool against my skin. Sometimes I feel his features superimposed upon mine, his thighs crossing my own. Other times I glimpse his swift shadow in my shaving mirror, where his remains cling like a necklace at my throat, scintillating echo of sequins, their lingering sulky sparkle...dull unruly ash echoes of Hiroshima's erased residents...metropolis debris...ricochets and returns...

"Currently I'm in the process of applying for a state hearing, talking to the cops, as the inclement masses of incinerated metal clang together in my mind, a Wagnerian clamor, an iron prison storm...myself a slick and rubbery new sprout still encased in human husk...

"though thanks to you carrying the key I now possess, it jangles at my thigh even, first spotted in that New York fog amid cool confused clouds that scuttled like excited atoms in the approaching heat storm, the bright sheet of lightning, swift false sunlight amid neon...

"but what more can one say about chemical red Times Square sunrises, drugged midnight dance, powdered heroin, or any of those other East Coast things that I’m so blissfully missing...

Yours, Nick Blake"