Dear Arthur,

I spend a lot of time with your words nowadays. I smile at your letters and wait to find a new missive from Ethiopia or another cruel telegram detailing the sale of waistcoats and stockings. I have nowhere to put the chest of trinkets I have collected. It has to sit in my mind, curling around the edges, and stained with cigarette smoke. The muse is a building. The architecture is perfect. It holds itself in great esteem. It cruelly builds staircases that lead to locked doors. It opens windows and sends out birds, fierce storms and legions of fleas. In its decorative features, in its beaten copper and stained glass (prone to shattering) it reflects back the depths of sorrow and the features of disease. It is friends with conceit, and allies with despair. It paints its nails with arsenic and combs out its long hair. The orangutan sits on its highest steeple, asking about the very nature of people. It swings from vines, and sends poison darts into the thickest veins that must be mined for inspiration. The gilded walls are nothing but trinkets, a fool’s goal wrapped in hallucinations of success.

The muse is a building, dear Arthur. It constructs itself from the patterns that repeat throughout the bonds of reality and the bombs of desolation. There are themes, motifs and riffs. Within the walls of the muse, time does not exist. The muse wears the same patterns that he holds in the background of his existence. A bee here, a flower there, and above those pursed lips, and below that iced stare another face falls into place and sets itself, not on the stairs of the mansion on the hill, not behind the casement windows, nor sitting with the potted plants on the window sill, nor riding on winds, both welcome and ill; but on the sea, the endless sea, where I see you and you see me. That voice has a mouth contained within itself, it speaks its own mind: it walks on water and is fed by the foam. Flaming wheels are sent towards it, spiked with feathers and lost love letters, trinkets and torches and fruit from the tree of knowledge, rolling unquenched by water, forever aflame. The flaming wheel is no little lantern, weakly hoping to survive a trip across the river, bobbing up and down towards the far bank. The wheel might set the whole ocean alight and roll onto land carving a path in fire, a glowing ember path for the fools to follow, if they don’t mind getting their feet burnt.

I know you do not agree, this idea of mine that you were the building and contained all the lairs of the muse, freed by the bottle, freed by the spoon, freed by the fairy that dances underneath an absinthe moon. Is the muse not a building after all? Is the muse instead the light that shines at the end of that building’s very long hall? I am in it for the long haul. I am in it for the love of the light and the gift of second sight, and those paint brushes that I hold but do not sing for me. I paint in words. I drown under your endless sea, where dolphins don’t dance, nor porpoises play, and fishermen throw no flowers at the end of the day. At the end of the day I drown and am grateful for it for under the waves, I see man is neither monkey nor clay.

The aeroplanes and trains crash into my brain, missing the rocks, but smashing the padlocks off the church doors, where no one goes to pray, but instead go to gossip or to fuck, or play hide the under the cassock with Friar Tuck. This is not my world and nor is it yours. I break down windows, and you smash the glass floors. Neither of us are impressed with the bell that tolls. We know it is coming for us, we know roughly what our future holds, and it trembles our hands and shakes our knees. We stand before The End at the edge of the forbidden endless seas. They can keep their bells and their bullfighting ways, they can keep all that fancy talk about ‘ at the end of the day’. They can shove their walkers around the edges of pools, that wear bowler hats and fall bloodied and broken in brutality’s schools. They can keep their sonnets and shove their flowers.

Are you not interested in what lays beyond Venus’s perfumed boudoir, deep within her hidden bowers? She looks so perfect on the surface with a veil of gauze and lace covering her body just enough to tease and distract from the scent of decay and disease that wafts from her carved curves to the nostrils of the titillated. That ulcer on the anus that spurts sickly yellow discharge and how, not ashamed, she offers this sickness to a sickened world and the world sighs and charges forward, ignoring the disease and focusing on her soft fake horse-hair curls? Underneath her hair is straight and blonde and cut crudely with a pair of kitchen shears. Are we not interested in how the boat rocks, but how we can get it to roll and tumble and change direction with but a slug of wine and an opiate confection?

The alchemy of water and fire is the fuel that feeds the wheel that turns and the flights of fancy which crash upon the rocks of the page, opening up the tin can of thoughts that might become words worth weaving. Wheels of fire roll not down roads, but instead into oil-slicked waves. Thoughts crash disastrously into waves and rocks. It might be an owl in the sky, bringing news from the dead, or it might be an angel doing much the same. Don’t listen to the pale souls who tell you it is all a dream. The muse brings dreams into reality and pushes reality into the dreamworld, kicking and screaming. Artifacts fall from the brain of the artist and drift off into outer space, waiting to fall like so many dandelion seeds, into the mind of the next vehicle of the lonely muse. It is probably best not to look at them too closely. It is not time for those thoughts to blossom. These are the dark ages. Nothing much grows here anymore.

In the brain of the muse sits three artists. One paints his face and sings about anything other than freedom. He does not care any more. One pursues alchemy and hunts for clues in the places the muse walked; he knows he should paint but he does not. He burns his art on the bonfires of his vanity. He is a lost sheep. The third is faceless and sexless and their talent bucks like a bronco and twists like candy purchased on a pier where the horses used to go round and round. The muse holds them as if they are branches he wishes to cross pollinate. It is best to leave the muse alone to try and contain the multitudes of elements that he encompasses within his soul. It is not so much a juggling act as a fine equation. He is not so much a muse at these times, but more a suspension of particles in a base solution, which if you shake it just the right way, gold falls out of the fine test tube and lays gathering lint on the carpet. The muse has a strange alchemy, a curious solution. The muse stands under a banana tree gathering dates while the world looks on, gawp-mouthed and throwing lead balloons at him in the hope he will bounce some weightless gold back at them, but he has no need of these people. He has no need of instigation or investigation. The muse? I fear, he has no need of me either.

Words write themselves across the sky. The muse exists in the halls of quantum space. He spies out at a world full of stories waiting for him to pluck them from their homes on the road and the trail and the houses of the poor and the souls of the holy. I am enmired in the mundane. I am rolling in the shit with the pigs. The muse tuts. There are stories waiting but I refuse to listen. The pigs are having fun and I am not. The muse stands on the boardwalk and waits for me to pay attention, dear Arthur. I am glad you managed to survive quite well without a constant round of news and propaganda. I live in different times. Dear Arthur, please take care, the muse is you now, you terror, you fighter, you other, you lover, you discarder of flowers and writer of discomforts,

Your admirer.