Notes to Self

 I, You, Us, Them, Zero

Life are hard, he said.
Sammy, of the Kafka eyes,
he said that a lot.
He studied metallurgy and
Karl Popper.  Keeping in touch, but not often enough,
I'd mentioned the differences in bread
in his culture and mine -
his new wife wrote back, "You don't know me but
I regret to tell you
Sammy is dead."
He was only 33.
All these years later,
D and P  .... ML and FK  .... and  S, too -  all
gone.
Why am I still here?

And after all the lights go out (the Final Blackout), what then?
Do we get to come back? 
Or just meet up and
reconnect, despite the gap of years,
resume as if we weren't all
different ages now.  Would they even recognize us?
I could spot Sammy, in even the thickest cloud, but
his memory bank's closed, unupdated on the
changed world we'd inhabited. 
Do the dead even care?  We still talk to them
(and sometimes, they to us), but

I want to hear the other part of the conversation,
the part I don't get to know, that they can report about,
about what it's really like, about 
what comes After, when
all the lights go out.


Failure to Communicate

words, adroitlessly threaded
     my piece untangles,
all connection lost.


Drybled 

Inkless pen :: wordrust


So
Cezanne says Do apples, do
Oranges! Draw first, color later.
Fill your pen with Cobalt Blue, paint words
undiluted, ink the muted apples
purple, don't be such a
copycat.  For every passed try,
that's 20 missed flights
to later regret.  Go even
the odds, find colors that speak, 
go clean the clogged pen. Free-flowing
only comes
when  you work at it. 
When you can't be the pen,
be the ink.