What is the clear voice in the realm of the real.

Our speech is birthed of our privilege, our allotted perspective. View from the third, fourth, fifth, one hundredth floor, encapsulates all beginnings, middles, and ends. Neatly. Perfect bound. Embossed cover with gold foil stamp. Shelved unread in the sarcophagi breeding enduring bacterial growths of yellowing pages baking in the oven of time. Those seeded with the yeast of history slowly rising with time in significance, while those kneaded by trends continually oscillating high and low. All dying, withering. And we, on padded futons, lament the death of good friends while relishing the fragrance of their very rot. And of them, what did know? Their character, spirit, habits? Or did we bathe in their ephemera, failing to read the time, distracted by the tick tock tick tock.

To which replied the jester, or have we failed to hear the tick tock tick tock song, distracted as we were by our knowledge of time?

The court rolled in boisterous laughter. The monstrous powdered wig of a monstrous powdered lady fell to the ground.

The jester bowed low, strapped a rope to the banister, methodically demonstrated the tying of a noose, tightened it around his neck, and leapt from the window. His neck snapped like a cold twig and a moment later his left foot shuttered like a leaf in the wind. He pendulumed rhythmically just inches above the street. The street covered with black gum spots, spit, and oil slicks. The children were handed baseball bats. They swung and swung till he burst like a piñata showering trinkets and dime store candies into their hungry mouths.

What is our inheritance, but a rope by which to hang ourselves if we attempt to deny it? If we gaze upon the street and laud it as reality as reality. We have history and future in our hands. Where then do we hold now? In our photographs, remembered, in our books. If we are second livers, are we less real? Can we untie ourselves from that silver thread? The clarity of our greatest visionaries is as a child’s peering through the crack beneath his parent’s bedroom door.

In the coffee shop overheard:

‘I will never know not-myself,’ he said.

‘Does that frighten you?’

‘I will never know not-not-myself,’ he said.

‘Does that frighten you?’

‘I will never know not-not-not-myself,’ he said.

‘Does that frighten you?’

‘I will never know not-not-not-myself,’ he said.

Did he already know, I thought?