While my lovely artists have given me a generous buffer of images, I find myself lacking an equally generous buffer of stories, and since I have been cruelly struck down by that most heinous of things, the common cold, I leave you with this poem, written to a friend and never delivered, many years ago. Ironically, the poem was written in direct response to a photograph, which would thematically fit with this project; but I decided it would be in poor taste to include it. I hope you enjoy.
I don’t know you
anymore,
can’t remember the sound of your uninhibited laughter.
You wear your hair like a Hula girl
and pearls fall around your neck
like hungry teeth.
I want to ask you who that stranger
in the picture is, but I know you
even through the make-up and new clothes,
the flesh hanging in alien patterns
across your so familiar bones.
We talked two days, three hours,
four minutes, and a life-time ago.
I thought I knew you
then
and maybe I did. but I don’t
know you
anymore.