Dear

If I could reach you, we might share coffee and a biscuit, maybe warm bread in silent
companionship. Share aloneness and make considered observations of the drab and
extraordinary, find both in each, laugh because of nothing. The safe harbour of nothing,
untrammelled by requirement to justify.

Where now?

Once, lifetimes since, our small feet touched warm sand, toes curled, and gripped the glinting
grains, our hands gathered and flung, we stood laughing as the particles dispersed and
scattered, repeated the action, falling with them. There was a hole in the fence where we used
to chat through warm wood, summer mornings, last end of Sundays, eye to eye. We gazed at
the holes in the moon, mottled in monochrome, and travelled their canyons, encountered the
suddenness of another day. Dug small holes in mulched flower beds, where we discovered
congealed bread crumbs which you said were mouse stomachs, then quickly covered them
up.

It is summer and I wear blue jeans and a red striped T shirt, feet in plimsoles, marching time
on concrete, arms full of sun, immature impatience not yet quelled, the ball bounces back off
the yellow brick.

Time has holes, holes in between the acts, some covered with the lichen of denial, others still
to be confronted. I will not reach you in the same way again, and bread will not be broken
neither strong coffee sipped nor savoured, the garden fence is a faded memory, the mice, a
figment.

Thank you for laying out the manner of farewell, your dry sense of humour is an asset and
makes me smile, a detachment need not mean there is lack of empathy nor dearth of
sentiment, what another might construe as cold, I understand to be otherwise. But I shall miss
our connection, still holding my end of the string, tying it all up.

You had a rougher deal than most, but much to show for it, future lives, well lived, it worked
out, idiosyncrasies of time and place, the haphazard and the routine. Gauntly now, against the
window, watching, avoiding the unnecessary, pointless phrases, we share an implicit
provenance standing away from the crowd, both seeing, acknowledging the mark. Platelets
shift, as all things must, there is sickness in the breeze, a regurgitating fire as hurricanes twist
and swell. If I could reach you, now…………

This day of winter sun, grey streaks on the cusp of rain, realigning into light, afternoon
elongates, little by little, as the seconds begin to take away, already gone, I think, into that
place, where you will quieten into the always deep, release, the final pleasure out……well
out, of

Dear

We fall in supplicant succession

man in the distance, the spring collector of tithes,

green eyed and strangely silent, picking and pocketing. I turn, observe the manner of his gait
and purpose, retract my gaze, the notes of circumstance halting me in the tracks……..

You are well, out.

In my mind’s eye, the narratives of past and present slip apart as we spin into……out there

where all reference points are cut
we all fall down

even all of us

if I could reach you, the anecdotes time left,

the days

were

dear