A Letter to a Friend Upon Whose Return from Being Missing has hurt Everyone who Loved Him.

09/07/05

I am sure you saw walking through the fields,
boardering the interstate,
passing the blinking pylons and radio towers,
that they are not corroding in the monsoons
They are made with of a coating,
which protect us against that.
But imagine if they did.
And if the city smelled like wet coins.
We’d want to leave the city.
But we are here, its true.
All of us cloisted and protected and accounted for calling into work on Mondays, calling home when you work late, calling just to say hi.
So I hope,
You've recoverd what it is you were trying find, but

Amazing to think that with all this talking that no one is able to say anything.
This is a notion un-new to the world, of loud mutedness,
All humans yelling at once through pillows, screen doors, up stair cases, out car windows, to cell phones and drive-thru intercoms.
Asking for things and persons to come to them

I hear a report that you sat on the hood of your car one evening,
At a Drive-In, and spoke to no one,
And in the ensuing double feature you must have stared steadfastly past the screen
And into a pixel as large as your head
As immense as the entire west falling moon behind the mountains.
I've done this too on the occasion when I am trying to conjure some reason why we need people, walking down Congress St.
when all the fast-moving blurs of cars and
reflections of my passing self in the shop-front glass are rendered sightless through the tears that roll tumbling beneath my sunglasses in the bright lunch hour.

I have imagined since that what you were staring at was the great rear view just behind you eyes. If you could see it, you’d see the woman who was your friend, the friend before you lent her to the couch and to the meandering alleyways at 4 am with a clove in her hand. The woman who is so small under her covers when they are pulled tight over her head like her taught lip at parties when you lashed out at everyone, she is the woman I call my best friend now and she is the woman I let sleep without the covers because she needs no protection from me, unlike from you, who tears up, cowardly, and scabs over and tears up more and watches pixels as big has his head without saying a word to no one after returning from a monsoon with nothing to say!