Guardian...Well, Gossiping Sylphs

Call them Sylphs like the Alchemist and the Poet do, or Familiars--The spirits of defunct social presences that hang around us, haunting us, imbuing us, partaking of our lives, resonating in our thoughts, and living through us--in a sense guarding us, but mostly, cautionarily reminding us, of what has been, and of what, in consummately evanescent fashion, is the Way of the World.  

I'm most conscious of my "Equipage in Air" when I'm least conscious--deep, deep in sleep, an hour or so before I wake--which is the time ordinarily that I have least to say about anything, and, without my interrupting them or ordering them around, my Sylphs are free to amuse themselves. They gossip idly about everything that occurs to them in that curious, sempiternal Beau Monde of theirs, whereof they seem to be both the tutelary divinities and arbiters elegantiae; things that they find interesting and funny, outré and preposterous.  This morning's Hour of the Wolf favorite topic for scandal-mongering among the fairy folk, that I overheard, was the world-freezing, party-planning agendas of Republican billionaires' third, fourth and fifth marriages to heartless, grasping bimbos. What struck my own little crowd of aerial Elsa Maxwells as hilarious beyond belief was that when one of the transporters of refreshments (who are, in the special world of Republican Billionaires, something like what FedEx is to us ordinary mortals) proposed to microwave coffee delayed 10 minutes by a glitsch in the delivery system, instead of ordering it fresh, this particular (It may have been Rupert Murdoch's) Republican Billionaire's Heartless Bimbo's Special Agent, speaking for the Bimbo, said "Call the Police!"  Gales of silvery, sylphide laughter ensued.  You can see why I don't stay awake for it. 

But as I turned away in my slumber, seeking deeper quiet, a dapper sort of johnnie with a monocle grabbed  me by the elbow and said, or seemed to say, "Arab Princes...."