In Absence of Friendship


When I heard you were in town and didn’t call me

my uncollected assumptions mercilessly shattered

noislessly smoothed by my wonder at how always you reach me.

The conduit of your disengagement is not a silence.

It’s a suction completed by my motionless joy in your company.



It requests that I speak to you, pass words through the sting

that implosive dip of memory of the surface of our vulnerabilities

where I told you how we’re powerless to move together.

What I would say to you now if I could is that

the stillness of where we used to meet was already perfected.