Heard your voice tonight, by accident. How long has it been, two, three years? I admit something is still there, but I don't know what it is. Others would say unresolved conflict, as though conflict needs to be resolved in order for resolution to exist. Feelings, many know it to be, and maybe there are correct. But maybe they mistake this for force of habit, a mannerism no longer with a context, signifier without a signified; a dead sign. Who could blame them? The face brings the habit, and with the habit the feelings, or the habit of feeling, when seeing her face, hearing her voice. The past pulls itself back urging you to feel love as you had then, pulling itself closer to you, more habits resurfacing the closer it gets. "This is the face you love, the face you see when you love," it says. Maybe because you've never hurt me that I'm more susceptible to returning to old habits. But I've learned not to live the past in the present. I'm not exhuming a corpse, however beautifully preserved. What if you never died? What if you only waited for me until it was right? But, in the beginning, why did you even wait, if you had the chance? I know this is not the right line of reasoning, though this is a very enticing, tempting one. This one is the easy way out. How do I write a love poem now? Geez.

Hoping to end this summer with a love poem. It's been long since I've written a legitimate one, a poem which, from beginning to end, presents a relation, and at the end the relation is same, though changed. For instance, desire begins utterance, and ends it. What happens in between, and what causes desire to silence itself? A love poem should not only woo, but gaze. It should not only sing, but know when to keep silent. Silence begins when the gaze is attempted, when touch is felt. When our words begin to move us to love. A love poem is preparatory, and the result of reading one should be action, or active restraint, because sometimes love means not doing anything. It should not be something which one wishes to read to another, but something which pushes one to speak truthfully. It should be the path to the heart, and not the heart itself. A love poem must empower us to know that the risk of speaking truthfully is innate in love, and when one actually speaks from the heart, one has already let go of fear and of uncertainty. One has already risked; one is loving.

I still think of you. When I would walk, I secretly hope I come across you waiting for the train, or going where your life is taking you. Then I would hide, resist the urge to talk to you, resist the past. For the consolation of the ex-lover is to know you are alive, to know that you are still alive in me.