Imagination runs its wildest when it’s close to home, you tell him that.
Tell him that he’s only brilliant in the afternoon, when the sun only casts dullness upon his soul, and obligation forces compensation.
Tell him that he’s only funny when he’s afraid; when comfort pulls his limbs apart, when a joke is so mundane that he can’t resist wallowing in.
Tell him that he’s not eloquent. Tell him he’s brutal. Tell him that I watch him distort every little nuance of meaning into binary code, into garbles of morphemes and it only amplifies the wonder of him.
Tell him that my prose is the answer to the crux of the matter. Tell him that I can’t carry his dead poetry between the worlds anymore.
Tell him that the ink is running dry and that the words are going wild and that there is absolutely no sense in my failed attempt at expression.
He will understand it. He will. Because there’s nothing in this blasted, massive excuse of a universe he hates more than missing on a prospect of a thought. He will understand because he will read this in the afternoon, when there’s nothing he could do but be brilliant.