Linger long enough
and I'll join you under
the sagging porch roof,
beneath a night that
whispers sleepily
to fill the hours before
daylight wanders in
for the morning shift.
I'll rock myself to sleep
in the old bentwood,
and you'll drift off, too,
before Orion has a chance
to say hello
or goodnight,
but he won't hold it against you.
And I'll be gone when you wake up,
but linger long enough
and I may just come back again
to sit for a spell
beneath the universe,
on top of the world,
in the old bentwood.

I see the cover of the book of you my friend
with its catchy graphics
and beckoning fonts and title,
but how could I truly know the pages
of the stories that speak inside?

If the unique and essential you
were bound into a book,
I might scan the index,
or watch a Talk Show interview.

I could pull a bio off the shelf,
and trace the paths from who you were
to who you might become
sipping tea in my bentwood rocker
and who knows,
you might do the same for me.

My curiosity is keen my friend,
because our chapters are interwoven.
The air we breathe and our chosen paths
have sewn our lives together.
The common ground we walk
is crisscrossed by our footprints.

If I blink for just an instant
I notice that new pages have been
appended to your book.
Even the cover has changed
and so it is with mine.

So I own without regret or sorrow that
I can never know the book of you (or me)
whose infinite shelves of once-told stories
await some distant final chapter.

*September, 2013