Langston Hughes wanted to hold a knife to the world, split it open, and with a physician’s eye, examine what maladies bedevilled it from the core. A man wrote that poem on a piece paper and left it on his dining table before catching a bus to work, after a breakfast of bread and beans. Have you read this poem? The table said aloud. No, I haven’t, could you pass it to me? Asked the chair of the table. The chair read the poem and sighed. I tire of being in the house all day, on four legs and unmoving. I want to see the world, I want to go clippety-clop down the street looking for a passageway to the world’s core, and righting what wrong ails it. That is a mighty fine idea, replied the table, who wasn’t at all interested in this proposed pilgrimage of healing, but was remembering the tree – a bark-wrapped behemoth of resin & carbon that towered in the holy darkness of a Slovenian forest. So did the table and the chair canter down the street, wooden horses spurred by healing and memory. The men at the newspaper stand turned their faces from the sleaze of celebrity gossip and the ruggedness of armed conflicts to point at them. The women removed their scarves and waved and shouted after the fleet-footed furniture. The children clapped and sang: who is in the street today? It is the table and the chair come out to play.

A saxophonist and a trumpeter fell in love and were soon married. Their musician friends graced the wedding with various instruments. Some of them pressed accordions like a confectioner kneads dough. Others slid trombones and pirouetted. A man wearing a shirt with Miles Davis’s face blew into a large French horn. His inflated cheeks shone on the instrument’s gleaming body. No one held back. Everyone was playing something, everyone ate something; the man with the French horn managed to get tomato stew on Miles Davis’s mouth. No one went home hungry. The trumpeter and the saxophonist went home and got into bed. The saxophonist’s saxophone told the trumpeter’s trumpet: you are beautiful and I am lucky to love you. The trumpet, revelling in the moonlight spilling in from between the curtains, said to the saxophone: you cannot love me, I have called forth armies to slaughter, I have been stained with the blood of cities and the red of women. I precede the conquest. I rally plunderers for the spreading of the salt. You cannot possibly love me. The saxophone thought for a while, cast a look at the trumpet’s moon-washed body, and said: you are beautiful and I am a fool to love you.