"I held her and held her and held her, Convoyed at terrific speed By the stalled, dreaming traffic around us" ~ James Dickey

His lacerated heart aches to believe, and weep into its withered hands, once again, with the strange pain of daily joy, as it sits at the edge of a bed, in another roadside inn, doubting,

what innocence can be found in this landscape of secret assignations, these arenas of desperate lovemaking between him & Radhika, Radhika & others, others & him? And what laughter born of sly

touching under white sheets (corpses, elsewhere, are carried to their pyres under white) can hold back the rainy night waiting to shred open the ampoules of unloved seasons like it does to the tender buds of spring trees?

Blood hurtles through the opened blisters, a diver deep in the wreckage of years, with their lies and their self justifications, with their oil-halo signatures spreading over the body, a floating garden, if only

now barren.