Dear ghost,

Please rethink your occupation of this room. Its mine and I can’t focus on human affairs with you wisping about in clandestine puffs or snaring yourself inside reticulations of the rug. I can’t keep a mug of coffee hot or veritably warm in this room. I sit down to go to work . . . ponder . . . mull . . . contemplate . . . hanker for a swig of aromatic tannins comfortably shy of scalding, and my tongue gets flashfrozen. My taste buds hole up into their ducts. My gums go practically frostbitten. Look, we all need shelter, I’m a believer, I can understand this. We do share a cosmic space: you tending within the drafty, myself opting for the toasty. Is my apartment so poorly ventilated that you consider it decent specter real estate? Or is it just that your lot has cast you here and there’s nothing your wispy self can do about it? Look, I’ve got deadlines. Pen and paper deadlines. Its more than mere sporting jottings you hover over me employed with. And do you read over my shoulder? Because my shoulders, usually the right, always one more than the other, goes cold, even numb at times while working. Please stop that impolite looming, if you would. Look let’s try and work something out. I’m not unreasonable, but for a substanceless whisking entity you really bump into furnishings and make spurts of noise. Please remember that your transitions generate currents, and if you go around dragging your vacuum-wake without paying attention to what you’re doing and who you’re distracting, then you certainly can’t make a tenable roommate . . . or we can’t get along symbiotically in a common space or however it goes or whatever. Get back to me please. Again, let’s work something out.

Wallace Ashbery, Current Renter

P.S. I don’t mean to be blunt in referring to yourself as “ghost,” but, remember, I don’t have access to your name or former name or have any way of identifying you more personably. Please, please make contact. I’ll serve cold coffee and . . . and uhhh . . . city square pigeons fatted on café bagel/doughnut croutons and vending machine spitouts. . . or, if your ghostly palate prefer, café bagel/doughnut croutons that I would contract a homeless person to collect, cause I’m not going to that nasty trouble even if that is the fare of your otherworldly subsistence. Please deposit a menu or something; orchestrate the hairs in the shower into shapes of what you’d like. I don’t know what I’m talking about. Please, please, please . . . . . .