Back Slide

Maybe at that point when you return
From the far-flung and the intensely different
And intense
Dreaming backwards, of towels on wet floors
In New York City bathrooms
Cramped and dark
Yet somehow demanding a jocund nostalgia

Or thoughts from away on home
Meditations on missing people, on missing you
On appropriate presents, or smiling again
Buying raspberry beer named for Hendrix
And drinking it for you, to think of you
The strangest of symbols tying you back
To who and what is missed

In that side dimension that imagines emotions fastened,
So bonded as to be unbreakable
These things which we love to create and shape
To help understand love
To paint over the uglier parts of reality and humanity
And insist then that love and beauty
Can really be all that they can be;
Of primary importance
And all that matters.
With my hands open, and my eyes
Shut fast.