Every word on the surface there to soothe and comfort and assist.
Your sentences constructed so artfully make you appear essential and crucial to all operations. Whatever would we do without you? You have shoehorned yourself beneath your writing desk and appear immovable. One of the fixtures and fittings.
But I have turned over the page. I have taken a look at your ink strokes from the back.
The side where it bleeds through black, black, black. The side where the paper is punched and ripped; where your hate-filled pressure has perforated the bleached wood pulp like claw marks in flesh.
Here one can see the almost cuneiform cut of your lettering. The short sharp slashes of invective that lurk beneath the niceties. The subtle jibes that lie behind the acts of support.
I know how you work. How you compose your dark poetry.
Your sunny hand builds scaffolding, lays foundations, holds itself open to be taken or to offer advice and help.
But your true hand, your wizened crone hand, is black with dirt and tar from where you’ve been digging; from where you’ve been tunnelling under the protective walls of those who you profess to befriend; from where you have been literally undermining them, pulling the ground out from beneath them.
No wonder your ink stinks of brimstone.
I think I would respect you more if you were more honest in your machinations; if you didn’t prettify or disguise your siege engines with lipstick or the blush of friendship. It would be better if you let your nastiness shine forth au naturel; if you signed your letters with your true hand. Your blackened hand.
Because we all recognize your penmanship now. The disguise, the pretence is pointless. The affectations, the blonde moments, the senior moments, the gauche moments... we know they are distraction techniques. Fake similes. Oxymorons.
The central metaphor of your life is rotten.
We can smell it a mile away.
And so now, we confer. We discuss. We compare notes. We compile lists.
We write letters of our own.
Letters which we will send to you.
We hope you recognize the ink.
It is black,
black,
black...
