mmcmlxii

A Dying Language

I nicked myself shaving
this morning as the person
I saw in the mirror, who was
not me but my imagination,
perhaps a vision from the other
end of the planet, the opposite
end, or perhaps complete imag
ination, evaporated — leaving my
face markedly odd in the mirror, fractals
of it, cracked in dozens of pieces, or so it
seemed, by the dancing rivulets of crim
son rushing down my cheeks and ears
and over my lips and chin, down onto my
white-haired chest.  These scarlet lines made
me forget the tragedy of the evaporation of my
mirrored companion.  I have an active imagina
tion, as my friends, my doctors tell me.  I still
recognized the beautify of the tiny puffs of mois
ture that disappeared into something like a tiny war
of droplets of acid which played out until my glisten

ing red facial springtime thaw forced me into dozens
of pieces which became even more beautiful than the
fancy evaporation and disappearance of my face’s com

panion face.  The luck of the razor and the anguished hand. 

That hand that had yet to cup the, if I were to imagine
it to be real somewhere, somehow, face that had appeared 

so perfectly in the mirror this morning, which has already
landed (for real!?) in London or Singapore or Korea by
now, far from the crusade of the phantom battalion forced
by the mixture of the sour vapor and crimson cracks that
tore poor Humpty so severely that all the kings horses and
all the kings men could never put him back together again, all
the pieces of the puzzle mystically sticking incongruently, their
open mouths each gaped with portruding odd-shaped tongues at

tempting to lock themselves up together, perhaps forever. Every

thing about this odd head seemed real until it was covered in 

the mist of the piping hot water and rose like a big translucent 

balloon with a head in it, only to dissipate without even a pop 

over the reaches of the mirror, into a warm melt of nothingness 

which floated by the school of poetry to the south, and onward,

to other end of the contintent, through all of the gibberish of 

English residue to a place no war had even been seen. What a 

fantastical world this place where language was so foreign.  The
English residue of of jibberish kept whispering, as if taunting
those who live there except when traveling to show up deep

inside long-away mirrors.  But these taunts no longer affected 

the beautiful inhabitants, were only a sussuration sweeping the

countryside, affecting no one but perhaps the occasional tourist. 

The fantastical land had given over to an amorality, with crippling 

sharks that circled angrily in every pond that was nearly deep enough; 

with sultans to the south having never traveled far enough north to even 

see this aged empire, and just above the border to the north of it, heads

swirled within mirrors.  Indeed, half-way across the planet were caverns 

and caverns filled with gold of which none of the inhabitants of the land 

of  sussuration had ever seen.  Instead, they wandered their fields of 

rice daydreaming of the green currency, the kind that grows the 

greenest. The longer the afternoon, the greener these recurred. 

Until, without one of the inhabitants of the empire lifting its head, 

the country grew full of the people who lived in the north with the 

hundreds of caves full of gold, and from even further north than that. 

They appeared as if from nowhere with handwritten bills suggesting the 

gold existed and could be traded for anything, including every parcel of

the land of their empire, the one between the sultans and the golden 

caverns.  Soon that land belonged to the northerners, but for no reason 

than there were piles of papers drawn suggestive of gold, which gave
great pleasure to the inhabitants and quenched their thirst that had
developed as they stood with the constant sussurating breeze due to 

the gibberish of the English residue.  The northerners had devised a 

plan to trade every parcel of land for a piece of their paper suggestive
of gold in the caves near where the northerners had formerly lived, 

the land was now hollow and hard to walk upon.  It was around 

then that the king of the empire of sussuration began to breathe 

his last gasps. This was a kind who had seen no war, who had
lived longer than any king, and whose names had such length

that no one could know who was who, except those who had 

always lived in the land of sussuration.  Each inhabitant began 

to call the king by his long name, and before anyone could 

finish saying the name, his royal namesake was gone. The 

inhabitants soon discovered that their land had been taken 

from them in bits and pieces until they had none left to them

selves, by the northerners and their pieces of paper suggestive

of gold, all with their express consent, as written, and why not? 

They were busy.  They were happy.  They were automatons.  The 

men gambled away their weekends in ways that would shock

a teller of banks.  The wives, who yet almost believed in property, 

took on the aura of the current and future wives of other empires 

who soon found their demise among gadgets and electronic cir

cuits, while the husbands spent long weekends gambling.  What
else was there to do? they wondered.  The dreams of the fathers
and the dreams of the mothers became the green dreams of
beaten skepticism and so on, and so on, and so on, ad infin-
itum, while the children played in the fields of rice or in the
ponds full of sharks, never knowing any better.  The kingdom
was demoted from a land of open arms attached to wide smil

ing and welcoming faces to one of arms up-raised in fear with 

uncontrollable trembling mouths, through which they would 

speak in succor or in solace, a dead language, the words of 

which would rise above the tourists ears. The tourists came
every season to the same destination, and had papers
filled with the suggestion of gold, mixed with the greenest

currency, which would be delivered to the new rulers of the 

land, unbeknownst to the rest of its inhabitants, whose lips 

smacked of alcoholic coffee beverages and ganja leaves.  

They would each arrive at the same destinations as last 

season, and the season before that, never knowing 

the difference.