At the periphery of my sleep, breaking waves is an emotion I have become a stranger to.

It looks like simple joy and on touch moves that way too, in simple steps down the street.

It opens the door, enters with -out knocking and stands at my bed waiting for me to awake.

What shape is it, what seamless form? Is it like sweet wine swirling over my senses of smell and taste?

Or is it like a flower, a dogwood tree in bloom, little stars like snow that line the avenues in my wintry dreams?

I don't know, I don't know and I call out, my eyes closed, "Who goes there?". And then it vanishes into

the night, walks into a door into which I can't enter, not tonight, not right away: like a red woman who has left me now with

thoughts of wine, flowers and discontinous sleep.

2002:12:12 23:30 Atlanta

I began to speak and spoke not, and the words stuck in my throat flare now like a poem, this one I write.

I open and close the book again and again. I don't find a few thousand mouths in me, like the thousand mouths of a river in a far away country, I need to write this song I began to and forgot, helpless

I am, unable to find the words to pluck as fruit from a tree or words like unsteady planets wobbling in their orbits or words that simply fall as snow falls softly in a dark night, soundlessly.

My words are hard: as a rock, as me, or the lines that etch my face, useless words. I need words as fluid as flags waving in the wind, as fluid as a laugh,

a silver fish travelling up the river of my blood, of a woman dressed in dreams, that beat their wings around her as they take off like birds into the evening sky, across the blankness of unfilled sheets.

Will you bring me, few such words?

2002:12:12 01:00 Atlanta For S.B.

Watching this landscape turning into red is as if it was set on fire to teach me what passion really is, in the way each glittering leaf falls like a small flame into the cold air.

I think we are all like so many leaves living out this transient cycle of days unaware of the very fact of our leafy-ness, our voices mere whispers of leaves in the nightly breeze, and these words are but etched signatures on these translucent selves that now bleed red and all our meetings as probable as leaves on distant branches brushing each other in storms.

I was let go and I let go, now I spread my arms and fall upside down, my eyes fixed on the sky billowing with clouds that move like elephants crossing the Alps, over the city spires: this is to keep my falling in perspective,this to know that no goodbye can erase the sky from our sight.

And as I slowy glide down to the ground after whirling in huge circles like Sufis dancing in exhulatation, in love that is bursting open like ripe fruit, I rest on a bed of leaves, I pick one, crush it between my fingers and breathe in the smell of the rich sap that once flowed in it.

I close my eyes and begin to wait, this meditation is for that one praticular leaf, maybe she would be the last one to fall, maybe she will fall so slowly as if the distance between me and her is infinity. But I will wait for her to discover the effortlessness of letting go, for her to close the doors, to skip down the stairs two at a time, to walk down the street and to jump off the edge and slowly sail into the red,

Down towards where my body lies awaiting hers.

2002:11:12 18:00 Atlanta For SP.