a letter

A letter

I keep getting messages. there are people upset with me. they write me letters,say, you never respond to my messages. they send more than one letter,so i send one back,
I say soda water, chipmunk.
They send me another letter, they say- that is no response.
So, i send a letter back saying soda,water, chipmunk (s). Eventually will write me off forever.
I would say i love you i love you i love you, forgive me but it is not the kind of thing you can say in a letter. I've been thinking about California, I'll tell them—
you wrote me on the day i was thinking about California and a chipmunk was on the wire and he was electrocuted right in front of me. He fell onto the sidewalk outside the library. no one else noticed.
Or maybe they did and they pretended not to. Can you imagine? forgive me.
I smoked a cigarette in Paris while staring at a dead pigeon. I am cruel and unbelievable.
Nobody wants this in the mail. My ears are so small it must mean something. My parents have normal sized ears, I've seen them. My parents used to have a rotary telephone next to their toilet in the master bedroom. Can you imagine? I used to listen in, can you believe that?
Of course you can,
Sometimes I don't even know if California exists.
Onetime I saw this pigeon dying outside a record store in Paris. I'd just been to see Picasso. I was buying my parents Billie Holiday records for Christmas, Frank and Nancy Sinatra, a crummy gift,
and anyway this pigeon was dying, just sitting there. Strange how a bird is just sitting there and everyone knows its dying just because it’s just sitting there. I couldn't leave and I couldn't save it. I just stood there and stared at it. I looked at other people to see what they would do.
What should we do? I wanted to ask them. I didn't even know how to say "what should we do” in French, can you imagine? If you move to a foreign country you should know how to say what should we do in French. There was a woman with a furred collar.
Paris was either beautiful grey or tragic grey, always,
one or the other and I wish I knew how to say that but i don't.
soda, water, chipmunk (s).