Missed Connections

This is a Missed Connections ad by Anonymous, presumably a 35 year-old woman from Oklahoma City, haunted by her former lover, Carlos. I present "Carlos, I'm giving up the ghost" in the interest of saving this bit of found prose poetry from the Craigslist dung heap of oblivion.

Carlos, I'm giving up the ghost. - w4m - 35 (oklahoma city)

The banana project was not enough to lure you in, and I want to be sad. I want to conclude something more than you giving up on the dream. My best guesses are as follows:

Perhaps you met an untimely doom via a boa constrictor, after he had smothered you in ketchup.

Perhaps you were found out by an exorcist, or a ghost hunter. I'm wondering if they have your voice on tape somewhere, I'd like to hear the gurgle and scratch against the back drop of white noise.

Perhaps you were eaten by a plump man on an elevator, after he had mistaken you for a cookie.

I feel as though it always goes back to the state of cookies, the shape of cookies. Shapes of all things.

It's highly likely you were bored by my previous letters, and allowed Horatio to devour you. His mouth was always a prison, I am not sure how well of an escape plan that would be. The halls are too quiet without you, my teeth hurt from too much sugar. I will start cursing the sky in your name, only to have forgotten the curse songs minutes later. After all, it is a fast food, give me candy, now now now type of world.

My universe is shaped like a broken wine bottle, and defending it seems useless. I find myself getting letters from women who hope I will call them Carlos, or men who desire me to treat them like a dirty muse. I am not sure what that even means, I am not much of a sadist, and dirty? Dirty things like mules, and goats tend to make me seek solace in warm water. I will not throw tomatoes at anyone while they are tied to an oven.

I keep washing my eyes, and hands hoping to rid myself of your memory. I must be a proper masochist, a longing marionette. I have done all of this dangling by myself, written songs about tad poles in remembrance of you. My nostrils caught the smell of bourbon, and it made me wonder how you had met your end. Poe would be proud, I thought. Or he would be disappointed, let us hope your story was not like one of his terrible poems. We all have terrible poems. Sometimes we are the terrible poems.

I have never stolen kisses, or danced to acid jazz. I have died a thousand times to the echo in her voice, every day is a little death.

I dreamed of a wolf on my front porch, though I do not really have a front porch. He sat splinters in his paws, jaw agape. He reminded me of nights I have spent wondering, determined to sleep thirty minutes less. I have run out of clever ideas, I do not know where you have gone or why. I presume you have found another woman to haunt, to send your suave prose to.

I hope wherever you have gone, the ether is lovely this time of year.

I will continue to write letters, until I have run out of ridiculous things to wonder about. This will surely be once I am dead-and-gone. What is death anyway? Just a little weight loss.