I. The poet-explorer Robert Burton reminds me of my youth - walking tall in my smiles and swaggering between the terms "faggot" and "bastard". Captain Burton is the Eye in the Masonic Pyramid, the tip of the cock, the sharp voice of a castrado.

II. Last night, I dreamed Burton never left India. He stayed on, turning within the circuit of the Idea of the Orient, of brothels, and of military pomp. He stayed on, looking for an unreported village to put down his pack and rest his soldier's head. This morning, after I woke up, the captain came home to Victorian England and bought a first-class seat out to the twentieth century. His departure was accompanied by the braying of a hundred camels, and the clouds marched along the horizon like a merchant's caravan heading S.E.

III. And growing up was always like trying to pin down someone's identity my identity which was always impossible and still is so that people who they are and what they are and what they could be was/is always sliding together and slipping across surfaces and things get confused and always will even now pinning down my own identity is hard like trying to open an envelope in the dark with mittens on and even if you manage to get the envelope open you still won't be able to read what's inside not that it matters because only a dumb-fuck or an asshole would even try opening a letter in the dark with mittens on.

IV. Burton is seen thru pop-art windows and barely concelaing blinds that bend open to the touch of advertizing images. He's glued behind a cigarette wrapper, resting in an oasis near a pyramid, while his camel poses for the camera. He is T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) played by Peter O'Toole and imitated by little boys wrapped in white sheets. He is wrapped in colonial dreams, colonial nightmares. He's Kipling with a soul, Joan of Arc (the consummate outsider coming inside) with a dick, Jesus translating the Pentateuch for Pilate, and a Utah Mormon surrounded by his hundred wives posed for the sepia-tinted photo. His meaning flows away, like sand in a windstorm.

V. The idea is to see your everyday surroundings as if you are a visitor from far away, a tourist in your own life, a pioneer on colony earth. A rainy day following an up-all-night can become a scene in a tropical New World drama. You're an explorer, a character in a Conrad novel set in your own home town. The real drama is waiting for you. Morning and the world is coming awake: restless natives, a longing for a far away (in time and space), horniness, mental fatigue in a strange environment- It's not easy being a colonist, is it?

VI. (After a poem by A.C. Swinburne) Night or light is it now, wherein I feel away the hours, toss, turn, and cavil for a second chance. Sleep were sweet for a while But now I'm awake, listening to a train passing in the distance. A living soul that had the strength to quell rises inside me, weak now, tired, without enough sleep. Life, the shadow of wide-winged time, seems filled with openings and small chances and yesterday's smiles. But not for us is the past a dream. It's true. We can taste it now. Now we are what we were and what we only thought we were. Faith, whose ,eyes in the last low ray of evening passed a glance my way and is now hours gone- faith still sleeps while I turn within the circuit of memory. As trees that stand in the storm-wind fast, my memories never let go of the roots they've put down, although the wind shakes and threatens to cleave the branches. Night, she knows, may in no way cling to what is dead behind us but picks the times that still live to prick us awake and push insomnia's buttons. Souls there are that for soul's affright would tremble, shake and convulse away these memories. But I'm too tired to fight. Him I've hailed from afar or near, a friend I've only read of, a wider soul than the world is wide, I compare my life to his... But we that yearn for a true friend's face should put aside our books and our nostalgia, our old maps and drawings, and sleep until the day brings real friends and better hours.