My best friend,'Ben', really a pen.

My best friend, Ben, writes:

‘There’s the lunar orb rising, iceberg blue. Its rays spreading like tendrils of hair over balding heads. The arid dunes are washed in this light. The bitter gale, mourning the death of day, provides periodic howlings; lamentations fit for this desiccant, but magic, space. The locals call her ‘Banshee Ghyldahaal’. A bucolic fume-pot spews molten-hot magma in gleeful agitation upon the ancient sands. The sagacious Corinthian cactus speculates over the transformation of granules of crystalline sediment into cold, hard callous glass. Dark, and with beading perspiration, the nascent matrixes of glass glisten beneath the moon’s enchantment. Frankly, it’s breathtaking, the sand baking like this. Tiny Daizan scorpion warriors gyrate like puppets manipulated by the fingers of pale light that idly hang from the heavens.

Meanwhile, the aromatic notes of lavender, spruce and walnut are scintillating the taste-buds and olfaction devices as Arabian entrepreneurs, disguised as laymen spectators, down glass after glass of Chauvroui Reserve, 1872. From their tanned goat-hide tents, they ‘baa baaa’ like mountain sheep while they procure a delicate applause. Only the fingertips make contact with one another as if higher decibels would intoxicate the aura generated by the voluptuous belly-wavers at their front-and-center. There is submordial syncopation between the contracted fem-bots and the poisonous sand-vermin. Their stingers quiver in response to the cacophony of the ruby and sapphire-studded platinum bangles around the slender wrists of the damsels. “Baa Baaa,” again chortle the shriveled men with chestnut-and-amber-colored eyes that are dilated wide enough to capture the precipitating photons of light dripping down the stunning face of the moon. 

The eye, high in the sky, sees everything. It is adjusting and actively oscillating in orbit as even the most minute of detail regarding the proceedings are recorded and relayed to the armored hummer just beyond the farthest dune. Oblivious to the charlatans being so delightfully entertained, calculations are being made and plans are being scrutinized. The time has come: a cruel Caucasian pointing-finger, dressed in an excessively-extravagant, West-point class ring made of 24 karat pharaoh’s gold , depresses the evil, glowing red button located smack-center in the console and unleashes death-incarnate on the satellite-targeted rich, filthy rich, mountain-men.

Fortunately, there’s a 2 for 1 package deal on reincarnation in this most enchanting night. The oil tycoons, within purgatory, will have a choice of either coming back as charcoal or as diamond. If they choose the former, they will be ignited as fuel at some octogenarian’s 84th birthday barbecue party. They will then return as pious men. If they choose to come back as diamond, they will first undergo intense, I mean excruciatingly intense, pressure within the belly of a voracious mountain. They then will be discovered and carved into smaller pieces by their own kind and imbedded within the nose ring of some petulant King’s spoiled primogeniture until he or she passes beyond the great divide that separates the living from the inanimate. They will then return as some batty freelance writer that would no doubt subject even the most elementary of objects, to delightful personification.’