March 13, 2026robertfredekenter

from an epistolary novella – A Collaboration: Vikki C. (texts and sound) & Robert Frede Kenter (images)

a collage of trees, brambles, screens and text by robert frede kenter entitled mouth-as-your-hand (c) 2026

Vikki C. author statement on process

These three poetic prose pieces form part of a forthcoming speculative fiction epistolary novella collaboration by Vikki C. and Robert Frede Kenter. Essentially, the three pieces, written by Vikki C., are part of the series of letters exchanged between the two main characters during a dystopian post-world reality. Here, the process of letter-writing embraces a larger mandate of resistance, in form and spirit – one that involves the characters writing at the margins of societal destruction, in hopes of building an intimate future outside the systems of oppression. In this sense, the book’s unique experimental form deconstructs meaning and considers the power of language as protest, as sustenance, and ultimately, a channel to query what is at stake for human sentience and connectivity in the wake of global demise and heightened propaganda.

Recounting delicate threads of existentialism and self-discovery the letters serve as a poetic allegory for the fragile relationships that bind Earth and the human experience. They explore the complex weave of desire and dependency jilted by isolation, social-political crisis, climate change, war, and the torment of fragmented memories. The narrative journeys through landscapes of chaos and subliminal beauty alike, reimagining the complex dynamics of agency and displacement we might experience in the not-so-distant future. To this end, the creator’s process is embodied in the sheer act and desire of the characters (and authors) to continue to exchange in a system where culture and civil liberties are being severely diminished. To seek an otherness across cartesian mappings of perception versus truth, dream versus realism. And through dire vectors of change, to rebuild the world anew from language…and with it, humanity and love.

Oneiric War

Spoken word version:

Dear__,

Again, they bring you back in warm manifestations,
weakened blue blood,
trapped by attractions of your own making.

The dream sequence irrevocable
– even in the coded silence
all one’s bounty diminishes.
I am numb to temptation – just as I am
no longer a thing to be hungered.

What of a crystallized future
or threads of vows, dew-soaked
with human desire and other imperfect constructs?

Witnessing it in reverie or upon
awakening, is not proof
of a greater predator than oneself.

You speak of a beautiful design
– both life and death –
hung bare and glistening before you.

But Fibonacci was simply a man’s distraction
from the ultimate spiral into destruction.

Remember the greater gift…
“Chapter one, he brings me the universe in a bell jar.
All hot round jewels turning in slow breath.”
A mantra – what do they preach out in the leftfields?
A telescope probing too far back into the wreckage we crawled out of?
Read it to me sometime, after “dark”.

When lunar light catches the fine gossamer threads out here – where one is privy to equally exquisite renderings woven over a broken statue of Eros – its neck and body separated by civil war. And there, behold, the spider web like a tightrope bridging the irreversible gap – its gleaming threads a taunting victory.

The public garden is now reclaimed. You must visit, if you dare, when I am not hostage to their epidural of “ambient music”. Now I am able to map each emotion to notes on a chromatic scale. It hurts, but less than losing all sense.

We can walk (without touching). Admire the roses which now only last a paltry season. Never spared the merciless threads – nooses tightening around their dainty throats beyond winter.

A Romantic Interlude

Spoken word version:

Dear__,

Holding your letter up to brief light, I learned a little late: there is a scent to all this which is not love, but its imitation. A half-remembered truth, each season, rosewood not far from water. Pacific Counsel ‐ a counter melody coming in waves. Dense pines at the foot of the mountains that hide all acts of pleasure. Sting of salt and pine distilled in a coastal refuge too far to hear the music. Aphrodisiac released into thinning air – so dense the instruments break. The terns falling out of a cloud above my thoughts.

The same cloud the child’s red kite disappeared into. My girl, maybe. A turquoise dress running into a rainstruck field. The field once yellow – horses dappling the hours. Their grazing aligned to my spirit. To see it all on reel, a decade scuffed by the patriarchy. The oyster that was not your world, demeated, scraped from its onyx shell. Pearls recklessly scattered across generations…

Still, I remember etudes as a way of self study. An alternate body not under duress. Wet ferns beneath us. Symbiosis before the frost. The piano was Mother’s – waterlogged in a glassy river. A panacea lulling our troubles downstream from 1978. Yellow aspen leaves floating as corpses that couldn’t quite leave us behind.

I remember the wind wrapping my hair around my mouth, as your hand would. A silencer.

You unbuttoning a dress with the same hand that loaded fresh bullets. Three rounds bought us time. Approximations of death delayed. The way acoustics haunt a ruin. You hear its saga in another state of delirium. Another pleasure zone. Foam at the ocean’s mouth, seething in a fit of justice. Arousal of wetlands turned algae. You remember the sensation of entering the first time. How she holds you in some ancient euphoria. Waiting for the seed of a future love child you’d never meet. A figurine on another desolate shore. Also looking for their origin.

We are all composers at twilight. Some other room to the west – late geraniums and cologne. Windows full of the Atlantic, the archipelagoes scattered notes of lost musical scores. Disharmonies, countermelodies, all the pathways of a man’s touch.

I loved your hands most when lifting the lid – dust caught in an aperture to a fragrant future. Balladic breath over the conservatory misting a dragonfly’s metallic body. The hinge, rose-gold, reflecting what may come of a black dress spilled as a Freudian slip on mahogany floorboards. The body taken by its own pulse. Replenished under a crystal sky. Contrails of your manhood streaking this vast bowl of blue. I’d collect it all for future consumption.

Had I known.

On Fading Poetics and “Addiction’s Hunger”

On Fading Poetics and Addiction’s Hunger Download

Spoken word version:

bios

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