It's not a poem unless someone calls it a poem, and I'm not calling it that.

With Thanks to Bill Holm

Words lined up in particular form

bring the mirror to your face,

except

it isn't your reflection as much as it is

the face you thought you'd already forgotten.

I've been taken up by my hapless collar and

pulled through the rake of divorce;

tendons separating from bone.

Bone and marrow finely defined.

Later, I leapt

foolish footing from a cliff's edge I hadn't

noticed, or pretended not to see. I didn't think, only

felt the fall and blessed its decent. The

ragged bits of me weightless in the movement;

fantom limbs.

I forgot

the sensible thing, the priority of self

preservation and gave it up

for a guy with blue eyes, his hapless collar tented at the

back. His raked form lovely to my missing eyes.

All these years

for the sake of the heat of the hand in the middle of the night.

The one that has been there for years. Will be.

The heat that could melt a stone.

(I bid you good writing)