Littered around my room are books. Books lounging, gathering dust small ones below bigger ones,a tottering column when I nudge them a little;

Supplying an apt metaphor for those days we had tread on shared laughter and yellow light thrown by the lamp on your window sill. Those were the small things, the minor details, happiness too perhaps, that lived before the assault of Big Ambitions, borrowed and adopted. It lead to the closing of the doors and snapping of the wires. I know now I was placing smaller books first, perhaps I didn't see the larger ones.

Also this I know,one needn't be a board certified physican to heal, it's love that heals and yours healed me. Thanks.

Now only the remananents are left behind: a poster of a monastery at dawn, another dawn just a few days ago when I woke up feeling suddenly cold, you had already woken up and were bustling around, now it's a premature winter in the middle of a humid summer.

The night is lonely and I ache to hear your voice. The airlines have sent me a good fare deal, just another way that things take me to you, I looked at it twice to make sure that it was not a trick because it came a week too late.

I travel tonight in my thoughts and since you won't wait at the end of gate A, in your red cardigan anymore I know there is no arriving for me now.

I trace lines on my skin, inscribed in a braille like script is your name, followed by "I was here". I saw such names all above me in a camp bunkhouse on the rafters once, "Joey was here, 1995". "Peace people, Amanda 15".

And when I complete the tracing, I remeber those moles on your skin arrayed like constellations and me counting them one by one, as if somewhere I knew such a day would come when I will forfiet all the rights to count or measure anything that is yours.

The books have finally tipped and are all over the floor, words have dried up in my throat and this is all over too.

2002:08:07 01:00 Atlanta

I walked the streets it would have been ok to do that at times that are less lethal but I chose the most dangerous time to walk around, to laugh at myself, an hour after midnight.

A car crept up to me from behind like a cat or her, always like her. My shadow grew in length, it became huge, like a black black gaint. My eyes darted around like the hunted, there could be guns in that car there could be that death, parts of me have been seeking, a clean bullet through the skull but instead I started to run, as I turned my head and watched behind myself from time to time.

Meanwhile my mind was busy composing farewell letters, farewell you, farwell friends, farewell brothers, farewell sky, farwell electric bulbs at the windows, farewell clear eyes of babies,farewell dogs shitting in the grass.

My legs turned into a side street to escape. Escape, they have become good at escaping, escape from loneliness, escape from soundlessness, escape from the desires of the skin to sense, the lips to kiss, the arms to hold and the face to feel the warmth of her palms.

The car turned, I saw it turn and lights bore down the street, was that the moment of clarity I had been seeking? Thoughts, a hundred thoughts took off like gulls from cliffs, awesome thundering and screeching and I couldn't now, possibily seperate one from the other.

I ran across a chruch yard, Jesus of Nazareth beyond those stained windows, bleeding from his palms and feet, I joined him in the bleeding with the drip drip of blood of my heart. The car overtook me, and I found myself alive, but didn't I wanted to be dead in the first place? Why this dilly dallying? Is it to write poems? What is the use? Who is going to read them anyway? Whom can I read them to anyway?

The shops had signs outside, closed, closed, I stopped before one to catch my breath, I peered inside and saw upturned chairs on tables, the show had ended for the day, for the decade and perhaps for this life, you can never tell these things, when they begin and when they end and why? Who cares?

Cars go up and down the street like tanks, traffic lights blink, on off on off on off I am going crazy looking at this on off at all these things going on off, open close. I want to scream stay open, stay open, don't sleep, wake up wake up Don't fuck behind those doors, those open windows behind those curtains, come come will someone join me in listening to the woosh of water flowing in pipelines beneath the roads over the interminable silence of the night?

None answers, none even listens, none wants to talk to me. I come home, covered with sweat and press play on the answering machine. Old messages begin to play and her voice begins to turn like a cockscrew into my veins as tears that I held back all day start to flow all over me like cheap wine.

2002:08:05 02:00 Atlanta

I survived, the plan is to survive from day to day till I begin to live once more.

At the begining of every August, when it's still hot and the leaves are still green, I sit and watch a rite of passage. Young people, not that I am too old, mill about with eager faces, older people in tow, older people we call mom or dad. Thus with this another clock
I measure the passing of time.

It's seven A.ME(after ME) now, and that ME has changed in shape, has lost hair, gained lines on the face, tasted sorrow, despair, truimph, love and such things one has to learn in a unique crucible of time.

I write better now, but I don't see as well,for along with accuring thicker glasses I realise I have accured hesitation and a measure of cynicism. I have tricked myself into accepting more and rebelling less.

So on overhearing conversations at tables, of which classes to take, of moms discussing anxiously food and such talk and shaking of hands of strangers that comes with transitions, I invoke these older selves that were yet to see and thus were eager to yet to leap thus could leap beyond and yet to know the dos and the donts. Thus with this invocation I travel to all that I was and all that I can still become.

2002:07:29 17:30 Atlanta

Freshmen Orientation Day at Georgia Tech.