Wordwise, edges and ledges: we are falling off. We, as in word-wielding also world-wearied, we, an endangered species, parrots with branded larynxes … falling off.

Ask a stranger to cup your balls (male or female you, no matter) as you cough, the stranger playing doctor and nursemaid to your quivering mass of neuroses, your celibate graveyard, as you diagnose yourself a dying breed. So be it. You believe if you say so be it again and again, everything will turn up roses in a garden of manure and Manuka honey. You even go so far as to tell your center—Look, I don’t want any more trouble from you. I’m done listening to your constant moaning and bellyaching … find another sucker to dump on.

What about the words? Ah, the words, our words, many words, have become grossly fattened dodos with albatrosses dangling from their necks. It is a double-bird curse, affliction in the form of gristly feathers amassing in the black of your throat. We are using words as hatchets to bludgeon and bury cause, rhetoric bereft of vision or imagination, blind beggars with candy canes, imbecilically muttering touche to every dropped remark or empty vent. Words that secretly wished to god they were something or somewhere else. Our words have lost their way—highly disturbed and hyper-sensitive orphans adrift in the swimless tides of shifting climates. They have grown dull, palsied, ineffectual, at the mercy of typing void of forethought and hoping to reform through afterwords that never come. Where is the wonder? Can we recall when language itself, its voice and summons, was kin to dreaming? From out of the dark, stories arise. One voice meets two … two meets a burning choir. The dark is the clothing our ghosts wear when animating desire.