Ode to the Love Song of J....

Jack disappeared.
Suddenly and gradually, if that's possible, so that I hardly remember, two years later, how.

I didn't cry.
The cosmic dust of a quarter century had settled on my skin, it was harder.
Not to, I mean.

Elucidation was left to chance.
I gambled more on subtleties, came to exploit even.
The effect was exhilerating, at times. Vernacular palpability. No clamoring with language loose and languid; let the wind whip words from my tongue then fling them wrecklessly out into the unknown. Deep.
They could have meant almost anything. Words.
Like (with my thumbs I wiped the condensation from my glass) "No, that's not it at all, that's not what I meant at all", then left them dangling like that. Your effervescent smile clouded with uncertainty.

There would be time, space, an abscess. Then you, calling, needing assurances the way blind people need to feel a profile--what for? You can't ever realize the abstraction and moments later return to groping. The sensuous masquerading of apathy; a serviceable substitute for sentimentality.

I thought it would be me.
When it came to vanishing acts, I was Houdini in a handbasket.

I felt cheated.
Nothing else, because feeling is archaic and feeble.
And when I recovered from the sting of silence, I never succumbed to the longing for connection-- no, to the need for severence.

The void told me everything I needed to know.

In youthful naivete'we careen back to earth with wicked velocity and 'fall with a dying fall'.
Later we learn to sew
heartache into patchwork parachutes,
to drift back mindlessly, dust ourselves off and hope no one noticed
the still imperfect landing after so many false starts.
Amazed only by our ability to jump, to fall, in perpetude.

I devise a system, like deducing temperature from cricket songs:
a month for every day of silence, in the begining.
The only real surprise comes from your exceeding the limits.
But the neccesary adjustments have been made now, aortic rhythms recallibrated to ensure equanimity.
Your magically materializing is nothing to me but a parlor trick demystified.

Expectancy is transparent, trying to hide it, to slip it by unnoticed is like sneaking back to bed in steel-toed boots: a futile effort.
Listen, I could have made this hard-could have played hard, hit hard, anything-for dramatic effect.
That I didn't disturbs me and paints a smarmy smile of victory across your still-handsome face.
What was it, weakness or mercy compelling me to relent? Perhaps both, or a persistent, albeit waning, benevolent belief.

How quickly our old habits return.
Desperate pleading with a strong undercurrent of insidious intent.
And I, I have the right to remain silent, bite my lip and smile only when prompted to.

A small measure of satisfaction comes
not from your groveling (nothing like a man undone) but because I get to say 'No. No, I don't'; I chased all trace of you from my mind, your shadow shooed from the dark corners where it lurked and sometime sprung out from at moments unexpected; your eyes glistening in aquamarine waters, your smile playing on the lips of strangers and blue angels. Gone.
Dematerialization was your choice, I was simply following suite.