This afternoon along with sudden rain, I will have a poem and a friend.

This afternoon along with wet earth, I will have a voyage in the gutters of memory, rushing like detritus into a sea of forgetting that faraway country of faces which perhaps still keeps time with the wheel of change.

This afternoon along with grinning thunder, I will have a seat by a flickering lamp, that almost goes out with every crash and whose yellow flame frames a pair of eyes which peer (if not lovingly gaze) at this water logged landscape: my soul.

This afternoon along with flailing branches I will have fields of freshly fallen snow, wrong thing wrong season, over which a madrigal circles like a red tail hawk. Its talons carry the shape and touch of those cold hands, which still caress my windy sleep.

This afternoon along with this thick rain and this freshly written poem, I will have

An old friend.

2003:07:10 15:30 Atlanta