Nameless

I received a letter once, from a girl

Adressed: to you from me,

How cute,

as if

Something affectionately meaningful passes

Between namelessness and, looking back,

I knew better

I wonder if she couldn’t bring herself to put my name

Down, in black and white, on paper - to create something

Forever: a monument to the relationship of those titles

By which we are known,

Respectively, one to another; perhaps I should have called

It a spade, the cute me and you, a foreboding

Of what did inevitably come

Because

Don’t be sentimental.

Now is not the time.  It was impossible that such backward

Self-denial not dissolve, not give way to the dissolution

Of what it seemed we had;
Run, me from you.

I figure now she knew then and wasn’t able to bring herself

To write no letter at all,

She figured, a letter to no one from no one

Must be better than nothing, Mustn’t it?!

The old loved and lost, than to have never...

It’s for the best, yes

Now, I can stand it. I’ve recovered; I’ve come through it,

But, of course, then

When I realized what had passed without words,

Without the approval of a name,

Mine; when I learned the meaning of what was not

Written in that letter, what she did eventually, necessarily, mean by you,

Yes, I wasn’t so cool, then; I, too, was short on words,

I had no names to call, and I could feel my air tighten, my chest

With an invisible belt cinch,

Wondering at the meaning of letting go of nothing if

It was to be true, and it was, that what I thought

I had

I never

Had

At all