for W.R.
I keep finding you as a friend of friends,
or in the spuriously precise terms of LinkedIn,
a 2nd degree connection. You’ve added
various certifications and jobs at companies
which weren’t even around in the days
we worked around a so-called platonic attraction.
The ways we fit together broke down under the strain.
Much of this wasn’t true.
What’s true was: a lemon-scented shampoo smell in a lobby;
the then-stylish bob from which you’ve moved,
on a fit, sun-damaged woman in a tennis dress;
the sound of a certain cultured accent;
a taste for Shiraz I still have,
and tell myself has nothing to do with you.
This frictionless conservation of momentum
this communication event horizon –
I could send this message to you right now
and there’d be only one reason
you wouldn’t answer.
I deleted another version of this which I published on my blog, so comments may refer to that other one. A few years later, I just like this one better.
poetrytech 
I often think it is better to leave a poem as it is and, instead of revising it, write a whole new poem that relies on intertextuality with the first. That might lead you to a lot of obsessive work and self-referencing, but on the other hand it might also lead you to a themed corpus full of ingenuity.
M
I think you’ve just hit on why I have so much obsessive, self- referential work!
Oh just go for it and be danged! 😀
🙂
wow nice….the second stanza is a great rememberance…full of texture…intereting running into these people online that we once were connected too and now not…
I really like this – the end is appropriately blunt after the winding memories. So sad.
…thanks for putting into words what so many of us feel…to be reconnected with that someone whose attention was not requited…
very cool 🙂
threads =)