Love Divides

people into different categories,
friends, neighbours, and enemies
among many others, all of whom
are defined by the state of grace
of the humans, and how friendly
the spaces between them are.

We all live between grace and disgrace.

The toughest love comes to us and from us
when we allow each other a liberty of thought
where we don't want to know in much detail
what others might think-as long as they express it well
and they have a sense of restraint before acting on it.

Some People Are Like Their Front Doors

-they are very good at keeping folks out
when it suits them.

And it suits them more, and more often,
than they are prepared to admit. 

Ho Humbug

When friendships stretch us
and we still find the flow
then we really will know
who we are, and might be.
 

Better By Letter?

When I was young rejection was disguised
as acceptance and I was naturally confused,
and as it all panned out I was always more reduced
by both than I expected to be.
That was engineered naivety.

But when hopes that failed in person,
for my obvious lack of wealth and choice,
I still believed in writing; the personal letter.
I prized the written words that I received
which I would reread-repeatedly.

The older I got the more I typed
rather than hand-wrote the letters I sent.
What was lost in character and frankness
was improved in the edit and ease of reading.
And still...  ...they had to be posted
and waited for that once a day.

Then emails shifted me further along
and conditioned me to be less precious,
since people only half read what I wrote
and then probably deleted it, undigested.

Meeting people remained relatively easy,
but the longer I go on the harder it gets
to make new friends out of those I meet.

Finding reliable internet correspondents
is like looking for a thread in a haystack.
I still hope to be found. Is this randomized
isolation a fit motivation for self publishing?  

So That Is Why The News Is So Confused

It makes one almost wish the old dictatorships
were as benign as our media told us they were
when our governments wanted them as allies.