Nobody was here but then they are everywhere, only not right now.  Everybody knows who they are not, but nobody knows who they are.  We—everybody and nobody, that is—are always asking who?  We also ask how when and why but never listen to the answer.  We hear it, but ignore it, thinking it belongs to somebody else.

If only I were somebody else; then I wouldn’t be nobody.  They have it better, those somebodies, they can come and go as they please.  Somebody is always present and sometimes so is somebody else.  I’m not somebody else, but am I anybody or nobody?

And then I’m wondering if there’s just me or if there’s also a you.  Are you everybody, anybody–or maybe–nobody too?

I haven’t felt an affinity for the last few NaPoWriMo prompts, but luckily there’s Muri’s Scavenger Hunt to take up the slack. This time I chose to write an American Paragraph, which is a collection of American Sentences, invented by David Bogomolny, an aficionado of the American Sentence.

If you can figure out what it means, let me know.

I recently rediscovered these collages when I started archiving my art. I do actually remember doing them 40 years ago–I had a book from the library that contained photos of famous artists with their work. Of course I neither wrote down the name of the book or the names of the artists, though they all seem to have been male. And I could not find anything on the internet that resembled such a book, so it must be long out of print.

Another mystery. Life is full of them.