"...they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"

Sis, you said "The bastard butchered it, I look like a boy." Haircuts are expensive here or so I note. The cost of a haircut can feed a family elsewhere on this planet for atleast a week.

I have butchered my hair many times. She liked it, that straggler look, that one as if I had just been freed from Auschwitz and had walked right into her arms on that station platform in a Mid West city, belive me when I say if I could have held her any closer I would have.

A friend said I look like an elephant with my big floppy ears when I cut my hair too short. You say you are a guy and it doesn't matter too much. Anyway I am losing hair or is it the other way around, hair, time and loves losing me? My forehead grows gaunt and I snip a stray hair that stands alone where there were many before standing around it.

Memories alas, don't accede to the same treatment. I have so many memories to lose, to drop this load that I carry on my back as if I am always playing the game of sack racing. I used to carry my sisters around on my back. Indentations remain of all of them and others, kids big and small, whom I gave my love. Maybe I can give you a ride too, around the block sometime.

What else can I say? That these hairs on my head are like roots, that I uprooted from a country from a memory, that I am a tree hanging upside down aching for a sweet ache I couldn't love and one that I can't ever escape from, as I carry it in the tone of my skin and the hollow space of my voice box?

Why talk of all this now? Your hair will grow back soon and soon everything will be erased,

including butchered haircuts.

You said, with two slender fingers inside a book, "This is the strangest conversation I have ever had", where was my reserve and where was yours?

Was it because of the season, when the trees seem to be undressed and cleaned bare to their bones, to make clear their clean asymmetrical lines, that impelled us, two strangers, to stand in a bookstore, lower our masks and swap histories?

Or was it the love of suprises, that once made me walk up a small stream two hours north of here, just to watch it press itself out of a cleft of rock, drop after cool drop? Did those words spoken, have the nature of water: to come down as rain and soon become air, leaving almost no visible trace?

All that remains now is the memory of that moment, startling and spearing suddenly a rising fish. And nothing fills the space where you stood by, next to that shelf of architecture books, weaving filatures out of these transitory days and lives.

2002:09:09 07:30 Atlanta
Jocasse is a Cherokee word that means "Place of the Lost".