Ch 2 to the reader

Ch. 2

Yes, reader, you amaze me.

Here I am, trying to harden the heart of your Pharaoh,

Sending funds to both insurgents and counterinsurgents

With an aim to make you the leader of a nation:

I’m forming a plot:

I want you to take your people into the waste-wild area

Beyond the playing field;

I want them to come to another land;

A land already inhabited;

I want them to raze that civilization to the ground 

With extreme prejudice

And repopulate it.

Yet you, O reader, smart as a whip, wage a peacemaking process:

With honeyed words, you re-soften the heart of your Pharaoh;

You smooth-talk the man into passing a general amnesty,

In short, 

You do the opposite of inflaming everyone’s tempers:

You calm things down;

You quell civil conflict;

All sides now recognize their inherent siblinghood.

You become a statesman and lawmaker.

For your Ancient Homeland, you draft a whole new Constitution,

Which solves all the problems.

In sum, it was as if, after reading my Master Plan,

You looked up from the parchment

(or the tablet, or wherever my Intel Agents stamped it)

And gave voice to your disapproval 

Very politely, but straight to my face:

“Why bother to leave this game of our birth,

This game of gold, with its fat red river;

This lovely game of cows and bees;

Behold, is it not a perfectly decent gamble? — 

Why struggle to escape?

Because its leader is mean?

Because the opposing party is hostile and racist?

I say: God forbid! 

Instead of going to all the fuss 

Of performing magic trix and plaguing the populace, 

Let us use intellect,

Our skill in oratory,

Various philosophical arguments,

And standard diplomacy,

To achieve the state of détente.

No one need die in the wasteland wilderness.”

It turns out that I really like your idea — 

Honestly, I hadn’t thought of that.

(Would that I had — 

Then I could take credit.)

Anyway, that’s how you always manage to thrill me,

Gentle reader, you make me smile.

Your ideas always improve my original intentions;

I thank you for revising my decrees and my dictates 

In your mind, as you go, 

While you read,

You improve immeasurably all this stuff that I have written.

I respect your choice of attire, as well.

I like how, even when in the years BC

And early AD, 

Walking around on the sand together and bickering,

You never wear a toga

(Or only rarely) — 

No! You show up in modern garb:

Sporting the tailored suit of a businessman; 

Perhaps a tux of Italian make— 

Hey, I like that grey suit that you wore in the previous tale — 

Or an evening gown, when you are a woman.

One day you said to me:

There are borders real and imaginary.

Skin is a real border: it hurts to trespass.

But map-bound countries’ borders are scams — 

When I step out my back door in Alaska

You must tap me on the shoulder-pad of my pantsuit 

To remind me that I am now standing in Russia;

For such things are not immediately obvious.

This observation of yours truly did help me

To make the world a better place.

It was for this reason alone that I added 

Into the screenplay

The spy whose code-name is Bering Strait.

That’s an inside joke about the body of water 

That is equal parts real and imaginary.

Remember? The very weekend after inventing it,

I caused it to go back by a strong east wind all night, 

And made the sea dry, and the Bering Strait was divided.

Thus I had created this obstacle solely for the purpose of removing it,

Which I did almost immediately.

And the Communists trampled out into the midst of the straight 

Upon the dry ground:

And the waters wall’d them — 

A type of border — on their right and on their left.

Yes, the Commies pursued, and infiltrated America;

Entering at its Northwest tip;

They stormed my house, by way of its French sliding door at the back,

And they began to steal my vodka,

Till I rose up from where I had been sitting at my writers desk, and yelled:

“You cannot purloin what is freely given in friendship.”

And they stopped and smiled, and raised their glasses in a toast

“To camaraderie!”

Then the camera on its crane zooms out 

And pulls way back into the midst of the sea, 

Even to the place where the straight had divided,

Thru which the Commies had ridden their motorized chariots;

And, behold, the frame fixes on us, dear gentle reader, 

You and I, as we stand there watching: 

We are watching me in my story… our story, rather;

For I can never tell which of us is doing more MAKING;

As you keep dreaming a lot of stuff up, between the lines,

While most of the myth that I am so desperately spinning

Keeps tipping over like a top lacking gravitational torque,

Or angular momentum, or whatever causes the wobble — 

Yea, on this morning, you and I stand watching my ego,

A hale roustabout, bellow drinking hymns with the Reds.

O reader, you are afloat in a pillar of fire: 

Thick black smoke clouds billow around you like a pavilion; 

While I stand aside you in my goatherd’s garment, 

Which is simply my wizard’s robe turned inside-out.

We gaze upon the host of happy Communists 

Until the episode is over.

“That was pretty good,” I say, “I almost liked it.”

“It was alright,” you reply. “I just wish that it were shorter.”

“Agreed,” I say.