Dear S--,  

After you left and I came back to R--, you won’t believe it, no – I won’t believe it, no – nobody who’s believed (if for a second) with any sort of fervor, or verve, or even a simple, barbaric head-cracking eagerness – and that, I think covers the whole world, except for the dichotomous Janus-faced tribesmen of Zevulun who only believe in the purity of the late-night misanthropic moaning session (which is why they never returned to Israel – moaning in the desert is dangerous since the hedgehogs are prone to mate with any moaning surface – and unless you’re into that – which Zevulun people were not – but they’ve had plenty of sensuous, tender experiences with gerbils, that’s a fact (and we hardly have any facts related to these renegade grape-sucking tribesmen, all we have is their national anthem which extensively references gerbils and grape-sucking, and there was a solid cover-version of it made by, no less, Chava Alberstein, of whom, to be honest, I don’t know nothing about, I just saw her name on your ipod and it sunk into my sink as in fact, lots of you-related words have, whether on the ipod or the lip, or the cheek (all four of them), or like that time on shabbos when I said somebody’s-I-won’t-specify-whose neurosis is size of the elephant and you said don’t you dare put that in the poem, which after that I decided I must)), and by the holy Whatever, I am certain that Baal Shem Tov was a little off, close but a little off, when he said that a broken heart is the key to all rooms in the Master’s chamber, it ain’t a broken heart – everybody’s heart is a broken heart since the womb out-outbreak, what’s new, but no, dearest S--, it’s all about the misanthropic moaning session, which subsumes broken hearts, and – twisted ankles, rattled nut-sacks, brutally scratched bald-spots – lots of things, and I’ll confess, probably to my own detriment that I consider kvetching to be the refined, urbanized-after-being-shtetelized, more subtle version of moaning, and so sometimes when you kvetch, the doors of the Master’s chambers are wide open, and so is my bedroom door, and my kitchen door (which is a non-door – just a door-post – and its always open – but kol vahomer – all the more so –), and so even if I make fun of you for kvetching, I like you no less for it, to say the least, but don’t take it into yo head, not the upper part of it anyway, the brain-basement is fine though, and also please take it into your lips, yes, please, yes, take my words, and your words, and yo momma’s (ok maybe not hers) like they’re over-ripe cherries, cherry orchard import, totally tangential and totally A.D.D., but what gentleness isn’t tangential, I mean, served straight-up its too sweet for a Brooklyn-peppered, Russian-Jew-style-pickled, woman in the full blossom of her midos-bosom-eye-shadow-sexy-knees-sarcasm, and by holy Whatever that’s way too sweet for me too, and so the only way, the only one way is the gently angular ever-elbowing tangent, that, yes, I mean what more, what more can I ever tell you?  

You looked really nice today.