Dear Laura Palmer.

                  Hi, it’s been a while. I meant to write to you a long time ago, but time ran away from me, and it’s taken me centuries to find it. Would you recognize me now? Multi-eyed, bug-headed, broken-backed, body like soft jelly, hunched, cape pulled tight to resemble the white mountains at night. How’s heaven treating you? Your brothers say they miss you; I hear their voices lost in the trees, in the land where lost compasses spin round and round and never find their center. I sit on the stoop, head bent, ears tuned like a deep space listening array in miniature. They say things like,

                  “I wish I could have known. . .”

                  “I miss you,”

                  “She was alone…”

                  Kid blows his nose in a tissue,

                  Knows his tears fall on deaf

                  Ears.

                  Silent mourners huddle in the dim, eyes transfixed on a box garlanded pink and white to match the rosy blush so carefully painted on your cool, pale doll’s cheeks. Shapeless blobs of black mingle and shift and speak softly behind open palms. Tears well and fall and stain. Kid comes into focus; he’s got dark red hair and wears black polyester and black denim. He’s come from work. He’s an ugly crier, won’t come more than a few feet forward. He never knew you, but he feels that he understands you now, says he’s sorry for never saying so much as “hello.” A wizened old crone comes up to tug on his sleeve and wipe her tears away, says, “She had such caring friends. If only she knew.” The kid swallows, blood cooled thick black in his veins. The woman asks if they were close. He lies, can only bring himself to lie as tears fall hideously down his piggish countenance.

                  Laura Palmer, queen of the moon, wanders through shoegaze dreamland among broken rock and clay figures. She is preceded by seas of nameless and faceless souls that have got no place left to go. They cry dry tears, heads bent to pale white sand, unable to look back at her majesty. Worms feast though wet springtime soil into damp, cool boxes where we lie, sleeping, sleeping forever and ever; like bulbs we will someday sprout, reach for the sky and the sun and be met only with blank clouds left to choke us back into the dirt.

I’ll see you someday, Laura Palmer. No, not so soon, I’ve come to my senses. No promise, vow, hope, or kind words will bring you back, Laura Palmer.

Are you alive in my heart? I fill it with pretty fishes and clear crystal water from the land of lost dreams.

—King Lear