.

not today, it won't

one certainty about this day is that it will not be his voice
on the phone, when it rings

nor will it be his warm-breath nonsensicalities whispered
onto the back of my neck in an open-air market

he will not be the one to willingly swim through my
glazed-eye expressions as if to punctuate twilight regions
of wordless thought with an inconsequential and
completely unrelated "hmmmm"

and it will not be his hands that reflexively pry a black-handled
knife from my fingers to resume the infinitive chopping of
transparent cucumber slices without breaking its chain of beats

he, an alternate self, jigsaw fragment of some
well-determined aggregate and flow of external terms,
elusive wave of indeterminability moving along a line
that in some sense has already happened, and, this
ungraspable thing held close to tender conviction
by my blind grip, its white-knuckled l/edge of
perception spilling into the individuality of
this particular day, this season intermixed
with a street, voice and heat that beats
specific longitudes and latitudes into
assemblages, becomings that slice
like a knife through everything else
as if to rearrange what is and isn't