Dear X,

In spite of wanting to call you, I won’t. We don’t hear or understand each other Over the buzz of time’s snub nosed hacksaw Grinding, grinding away at our bones,

Or at least now, we don’t want to. Even though it was your hand that cast This die, was I there at your elbow – specular, Only different voiced – urging you on?

You have now become an idea, a symbol, A chunk of my past trussed up in memory’s Linen – a mummy in a display case by the door That I point to the visitors, usually accidental

Drifters into my ever-shifting alley. I am
The grim curator narrating his quick spiel, Confident of his approximate reconstruction Of a cloudy past. You don’t interrupt. You don’t

Say that there is a fib, this here is hagiography. You stay there behind your glass of silence. Besides my days are nights in your time zone. So in spite of wanting to call you, I don’t.

Sincerely, Y

PS: Just return early tonight from your working day, I will be sitting up in my sleep for our talk On the dead and the undead.

Watching a rainy morning mirrored In the wash of the lake, trundling on A path littered with driftwood, I find I am cajoling my gypsy soul with this Half understood and half felt Transcendental nonsense chant:

"All journeys come to rest and all rests Merge into eternity. That mad laughter, That flash of an mascara-ed eyelash, That green glittering forest skirt And those weak hungers of your body For all that is hidden underneath Will change with time. Only the wind Strumming the water shall remain. So loaf, rest and learn to listen To this music."

Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones, And curst be he yt moves my bones. ~ Inscription on Shakespeare’s tomb

On this bright Sunday morning, I find Myself back in the ditch Feeling for your bones, with these blind Unsteady hands.

There you are, (one can only conjecture and hope When traversing the past), the last bone Of my hunched spine, and there he is, a rib Loosened from the rest

Floating in my chest, handing me the train Tickets to discover and map you, An unruly savage with whom I traded cigarettes And books for throaty ballads.

Time is the fine dust settling over my naked Limbs shoveling ineffectually at death Which came as landslides that shut down all routes To the glittering and polished

Cities of the past. Knowing all this, to what Purpose then do these cursed hands Sift through the stones, again, disturbing your Possessed bones?

For Kutti & Kuppa