And it turns out I lied to you, that was not the last letter.
See, I do this thing when I give readings, where
I try to let the book drive.
I always say that the writing knows more than us.
And I wholeheartedly believe that.
I follow the pen, I follow the energy, I'm just listening.
And I'm making sure this is actually the last letter.
"Dear Diego, in my dreams we finally find
a way to get together and drive to the ocean.
We bring everything we need.
We discuss the constellations of streetlights, and neon signs.
The boats and books that create these circuitous archives
of association.
I teach you to roll a joint and you break the bible down,
while the waves explain the infinite universe.
I show you the ways I've learned to reverse death
or you teach me how to talk to the living.
We write poetry together in these meetings,
they happen at the lip of the continent.
Every night at the edge of my dreams,
between this body and what lies beyond this place,
we dance while oscillating gravity.
We make many moons.
I play you all these songs I keep writing but can't record.
You forgive me for my dark days of sinning,
and I forgive you for thinking it could be that simple.
We talk about healing with you speaking of a wound and a lamb,
and I try to explain the many wounds of colonization.
The ocean punctures our every sentence with infinity.
The inky, black, midnight melds ocean to heaven.
We swig heavy handed from the void,
I tell you about the many deaths I've died
and my many afterlives.
You tell me about the limits of man, the myth of maturity.
We talk so long, our words start to spill out like sand,
and the sun never comes up again.
We keep drinking from the void.
I tell you how I'm scared of dying,
how deep down I keep forgetting about my body.
How I can only see myself in words.
You tell me about your lack of body, the empty freedoms
of purgatory.
We become synonyms for one another.
We talk so long lightning strikes twice,
and we become glass on the last of the coastline.
The moon looks upon us, polishing our dreams
into something resembling a mirror, only more luminous.
We talk until the ocean takes the mountains,
until the fire and the flood pass and everything
grows quiet again.
We speak in silence back and forth forming
a Mobius strip of information.
Dharma, back and forth.
Dharma, forever exclaiming, expounding,
and examining the self of no-self,
the mirror archive of eternity, the space between us,
the time before you set foot on that first boat out of Spain,
the time before we both become buried
by the sand of our words, all while adorning
the ineffable, this elastic eternity of sound and fury
signifying nothing.
A warm and empty nothing.
And eventually, we talk back and forth so long
the ocean begins to sink.
We speak new tongues of water and wave.
We keep talking through the mess of masculinities
and colonization.
We keep learning.
Eventually, we develop into a language of clouds.
Now we learn rain.
We learn the many realities of water.
We drift lonely as a cloud combining molecules
until there is a consciousness alive in the atmosphere,
an awareness of learning and relearning this commitment
to sincerity we've always had.
It continues to warm the language we're making.
We talk so long.
We invent the word eon.
And you add an 's' and I laugh an eternity.
We never stop talking long enough to figure anything out.
We let the language grow and morph into what is needed.
We dream long enough to sleep in the deepest of sleeps,
the sleeps of dreams.
And it's there that we finally find each other, Diego.
It's there that we can rest in the heart of the process,
in the seed of the ongoing, forever learning, untangling,
rereading, adorning the infinite in the language
of our own making.
And I have this dream where eventually--"
[APPLAUSE]