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 puff of mois-
ture that disappeared into something like a tiny war
of droplets of acid played out until my glistening
red facial springtime thaw forcing me into dozens
of pieces became even more beautiful than the
fancy evaporation and disappearance of my face’s
companion face. The luck of the razor and the anguished
hand. That hand that had yet to cup the, if were to imagine
it to be real somewhere, somehow, face that 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 it back together again. All
the pieces of the puzzle mystically sticking incongruently, their
open mouths out of which gaped each odd-shaped tongue attempt-
ing to lock them together forever. Everything about this odd head
so very real until it was covered in the mist of the piping hot
water, rose like a big translucent balloon with a head in it, and
dissipated without even a pop over the reaches of the mirror,
into a warm melt of nothingness which floated by the school
of poetry in the south of this land at the other end of the cont-
intent, through all of the gibberish of English residue. To a
place where no war had even been seen. What a fantastical
world this place where the language was so foreign and the
English residue of of jibberish kept whispering, as if taunting
those who live there every day, except when they traveled
to show up in long-away mirrors. Only the taunts no longer
affected these beautiful inhabitants, was only a sussuration
that swept 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 the empire
of heads that showed up in mirrors half-way across the planet,
there were caverns and caverns filled with gold. none of the
inhabitants of the land of sussuration had seen any of this gold,
but wandered their fields of rice daydreaming of the green of
currency that grows the greenest. The longer the afternoon,
the greener their alcoholic dreams of recurrence. 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 even further north than that. They app-
eared from nowhere with handwritten bills suggesting the gold
existed ad could be traded for anything, including ever parcel of
the land of the empire between the sultans and the golden caverns.
Soon the land belonged to the northerners, but for no reason than
there were piles of papers drawn suggestive of the gold, which
at first pleased the inhabitants and quenched the thirst that had
developed by the breeze of the constant sussuration of the gib-
berish of the English residue. The northerners had devised a plan
to trade every parcel of land for a piece of their paper suggestive
of the gold in the caves near where they had formerly lived, the
land now hollow and hard to walk upon. It was around then
that the king of the empire of sussuration began to breath his
last breaths. This was a kind who had seen no war, who had
lived longer than any other king, and whose name was longer
than anyone could know except those who lived in the land
of sussuration. Each inhabitant began to call the king by his
name, and before anyone could finish that 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 themselves, by the northerners and their
pieces of paper which suggested gold, all without their ex-
press consent or knowledge, and why not? They were busy.
They were happy. They were automatons. They men gamb-
led away their weekends in ways Las Vegas would ridicule.
Their wives, still almost believed property, took on the aura
of the current and future Stepford Wives of other empires who
soon found their demise among gadgets and electronic circuits
while their husbands spent long weekends gambling. What
else was their to do, they thought. 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 king-
dom was demoted to a land of open arms attached to wide
smiling and welcoming faces to arms up-raised in fear, which
made their mouths tremble uncontrollably, through which
they would speak, in succor or in solace, the dead language
that rose above the tourists ears, who would come season
after season to the same destination, and whose papers
filled with the suggestion of gold, mixed with the currency
that grew the greenest would go directly to the new rulers
of the land, unbeknownst to the tourists, 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.
