OUR MAD SAVIOR ...

©Philomena Famulok

twice is coincidence. three times is enemy action.

killing gets easier with practice, in mechanics and technique. having killed never does.

you know — just as i’ve known, since our eyes met — that we have unfinished business.

it’s been so long since i last started a new conversation.

we knew one another as one knows a childhood dream.

our glorious crystal future shines so bright i gotta wear shades, as the prophets say.

i’d walk a swath of rot through your verdancy, no matter how light i tried to step.

it grieves me to think you’d make a boring poker player. but then i imagine you’d cheat, and that’s a comfort.

let me tell you what you have told me, speaking plain: you could have killed me, but didn’t.

tell me something true, or tell me nothing at all.

there’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there?

do i have you still? do i address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass?

if we’re to be at war, we might as well entertain each other.

that’s what we treasure. that’s us, always: the volcano and the wave.

hunger, ___ — to sate a hunger or to stoke it, to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth — is this a thing you, singly, know?

have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out? sometimes i think that’s what i have instead of friends.

this is a place i love, and hate myself for loving.

i was the only person on that tiny rock, and i made the world go dark.

i wanted to be seen. that need dug into the heart of me.

i was light, hollowed, hungry.

have you been lonely?

you place each stone expecting it may do many things. a confession is also a dare is also a compulsion.

i have observed friendship as one observes high holy days.

harvest is not a word for swiftness; the future harvests us, stomps us into wine, and we grow stronger and more potent together.

what i return to, the me-ness that i know as pure, inescapable self… is hunger.

i love cities. to be alone in a crowd, apart and belonging, to have distance between what i see and what i am.

shit. i’m sorry. i can’t keep up the joke. and it’s wrong to call you enemy.

i am more sensitive to your footsteps, i think, than anyone alive.

this letter is a knife at my neck, if cutting’s what you want.

i see you as a wave, as a bird, as a wolf. i try not to think of you the same way twice.

i have built a you within me, or you have. i wonder what of me there is in you.

you’ve whetted me like a stone.

i remember bright light, and then — hunger. hunger that was turning me inside out, hunger in the most primal way imaginable, hunger that obliterated every other thing.

i was only my own body, only my own senses, only a girl whose parents were running to her because she had a bad dream.

this feels like teetering on the brink of something that will unmake me. but i trust you.

there was, i am sure, a time i did not know you. or did i dream that me, as i’ve so often dreamed of you?

i want to be a body for you.

i sought loneliness when i was young. but when i think of you, i want to be alone together.

i want to be a context for you, and you for me.

i love you, and i love you, and i want to find out what that means together.

this is me, the truth of me: broken open, in the palm of your hand, dying.

you must feel it — the difference? we’re on the brink of something.

i would rather break the world than lose you.

i’ll be all the poets. i’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written it will be to you.

how could you die like this? how could you die at all?

AS  TIME  &  LIFE  PASSES  BY,     an  exploration  of  alice’s  mindset  regarding  adulthood.

                                age is a concepts that’s a little foreign to alice, aside from her understanding of what her mother and father were   ( absolute! complete! old enough to understand the world as it is with a certain grace and wisdom that only is deigned fit for grown ups )   –––    the adults she ended up handling in her more logical years as a teenager and young adult were absolutely abhorrent, with very rare exceptions. the only proper example for adulthood she was given were her parents, long before she ever faced the notion that parents are not all-knowing omnipotent god-like creatures. she was therefore cheated of that lesson, though of course made up for it in some ways. she understood the fact that not all adults are right and good and knowledgable. she knew a good deal stupid, and a good deal evil. but it left her in a sour position, where the type she wanted to grow to be was unclear. or rather, she knew she wanted to be good, and smart, but she didn’t quite know how … 

                                as alice is forced on her more nomadic lifestyle following the murder of doctor bumby, there is a sort of relief in physical isolation, at least for a while. the independence granted her is somewhat refreshing, as she’d been manipulated by others her entire life, and lied to, at that. there were two distinct fallouts from that formative experience, however, that negatively impacted her even as she gained a sense of freedom  ––  to begin, she was extremely hesitant to trust. even a merchant felt like a liar, let alone a well-intentioned passerby. it was, unfortunately, herself and herself alone who could prove trustworthy. asking for help was simply a non-option. secondarily, she seemed to understand less of the world than she had believed. she wasn’t without some smarts  ––  she’d, after all, been taught to read as a child and had been given at least some form of a head-start by her academically-minded father. but having gone without schooling, and having spent her youth in a catatonic state which allowed for little else than staring at the ceiling, she was left wanting, intellectually. ultimately, she found, she was neither good, nor smart. she was still a child.