Letters to Old Friends . . .
Thumbing through these old messages,
once sent with such care,
now moldering in their dank secrecy.
Words that meant the world way back when,
now only serve to bring with them the vulgar stench of regret.
How I wish that I could still reach across the mental void to you.
Continually tormenting myself with such painful written reminisces,
I just can't seem to let go of these archived folders filled with memories,
like forgotten children stuck in residual games of file-tag,
slamming into me and imprinting their dead letters on my skin.
I can't even recall when it was that we stopped talking and hanging out every day,
greedily hanging onto each other's' words like candied delights to be savored,
what makes us fade away from constant communication with the ghostly-yellow permanence of faded-paper finality?
I used to spend so much time just waiting for your singular presence,
preserved in loose-leaf elegance and folded away,
with all of the anticipation of an over-eager child, pacing and twitching,
now our every interaction is filled with the alacrity of deliberate erasure.
Yet I can't fully banish the resounding echo of your thoughts from my aching heart or twisted mind,
and would joyfully welcome back the familiar warmth of your inked-up pages with open arms,
if only you could see me through the shredded remains of our past remorse and my current chagrin.
There's nothing worse than unfinished things that are never properly laid to rest,
like paper cuts on flesh seething within the salt-water flood of my brain,
So I'm casting out my language of light, like bobbing lures of bottles in an ocean of white noise,
Just to give me one more fight to hang on to, to spur you into some kind of inertia-laden prosaic motion.
I'm starting to think that I'll forever search the dark trees and city lights for literary signs of you,
blindly groping the rough brick of decrepit buildings for the hand-made calligraphy of your ugliest verbal graffiti,
sweating through my poetic desires as an excited pyromaniac burns through all of their matches,
just to illuminate all of the sights and try to place the oral history of your most recent passage.
