From Sept 2008 Journal

I feel such a strange, aching loneliness
company does not dispel.
I think it is not the absence of love
but the presence of strangers. 


Through the numbness
the unexpected knife of pain
a joke, a story, a comment
a word that opens that black, suppurating, unhealing wound in me:
we are so different.


I am so different from you
and I feel myself alien
solitary; first and last
member of my species


falling into that void
nothing to reach out to
nothing I can use to draw us
together again as kin.