Without-5

Found an old picture of yours today...

Powerless spectacles

And sun in your red school-dress

Those days you did not know me

Life given too much allowance

In its passage through me

Living through

Too little

The picture is hardly all that old now

There is no one to give me pens today

And I have no letters to write

As hesitations ease

Time welcomes similarity

These days

When she does not know him anymore.

Without-4

Let us pack identical bags and take the back road

Bags gifted for the sake of sameness

Furrowed by difference in time

Let us pack the same bags differently

The back road breathes cross-legged

Let us uncross the legs

All the same...

Without-3

Over

All over

Over and out

The word rang in my ears

She elongated the 'O'

Or was it a zero?

So hard to believe...

She tells me she has moved on

I, over.

The return is not within her power

And she feels no need.

She has none.

There is no 'O' in the word 'pursuit'.

So many years...hours...moments...all ill-spent?

All?

There is no 'O' in the word 'all'.

I believed my God who said

All that is done alone

Can be undone

When you are not alone.

But perhaps she thinks

Otherwise.

There is an 'O' in the word 'otherwise'.

A tripping gap between the words 'all' and 'over'

That's where I am.

She has nurtured the corpse in Eliot's garden.