It is only after many years I am permitting myself to add- -ress you again, through these Abstractions on paper. I had read Freud all morning and was led To reexamine what was once Alive and throbbing between us.

Discounting Freud’s absurd theory Of penis envy, you were looking For a responsible and stable daddy And I, oh the infantile ‘I’, sought The benevolent mommy I had lost Metamorphosing from a smooth faced Child into a hormone lashed youth.

However sometimes a cigar is just A cigar. And what was on my mind (Or should I call it soul, that unknown And perhaps unknowable sea within?) When we made love (another loaded word; Another abstraction to soften a common act) Was not a yearning to be restored to oneness,

But a nu-clear annihilation of the self, This walking wounded self. Did I Succeed? No. Was it good for you? No. How closely entwined is the serpent Of pain to that of languorous pleasure! Freudian insights in hindsight, I know, I know, are bunk, more so when we are

Cursed to keep repeating this shadow puppet play, This masquerade ball of courtship and conquest, This minor glee in the face of deepening loss. Yes we are created to perish, and yet see how We stay alive by playing this crazy amorphous Loud riff again and again, Love!

Tonight, past has become A vertiginous tunnel that Doesn’t return, even An echo of my call.

You must be down There, somewhere, beyond Any resounding, or even worse Beyond any summons

Issued by my grief At such displacement. Perhaps Memory’s cather is really Insufficient to keep remembrance

From fading. The years have washed Away, along with minor details of Those minor lives, more important things: Friendship and promise of friendship.

No wonder, the rain gargling in the gutters Reminds me of the undead, laughing.

Nostalgia comes with the smell of rain, you know – Donald Justice

And in the lush undergrowth Cicadas have become minstrels Narrating, into the night, some epic Of loss, in song. And the memory Of other rains returns, as sporadic Glimpses of photographs on the bedside Bureau in flashes of sheet lightning.

What has become of you, once my best Friend, now a colossal mound of silence, A dead root hanging from the side Of my chest, a steel track unbolted, ties Rotten, broken and randomly upended, Rainy nights when we sat talking over Steamy cups of chai, whitening like fossils?

So today walking in the rain, To those inscrutable gods of fate, I pay with your alienation The price of this long exile.