Instead a Letter

This poem is from June of 1995, the summer after I graduated from college.  It's strange that letters are now such a rarity.  I used to love to write letters, long letters that rambled and pontificated on and on but were a piece of me in a way that electronic communication can't be.  I miss letters.  Seeing a person through their handwriting, knowing that they wrote it and that it had a tangible connection to the person is something we miss now.  PJ Harvey has a great song about this called aptly 'The Letter'; there is a line in there about "the curve of your 'g'" that sums it all up perfectly.  So it may be a little bit ironic to post a poem about the immediacy of the handwritten word on a blog but I guess this is my way of using the new medium (okay blogging isn't actually new anymore) to expound on the virtues of the old.


instead a letter                                                   6/29/95

of a poem
there is little
belittled
in telling a friend
what could be
instead of solitude

a grabbag of anecdotes
to share
to dramatize
a life painted in postage 
is lost forever to trust

words desanctified of holy loneliness
jokes aiming in common
at what is not enough to laugh
to oneself but to you
who can't quite read it - 
my off-rhythm cadence 
and left out letters

but finding some small hint of you or me in it
something reminding
keeps the blood warm between us.