Now is the time to talk. I don't mean
dipping my bread into your clipped glyphs
and gobbling like a tramp, or stirring shock
and awe into our first long-distance tea.
I mean the simple conference. The back
and forth that all the world has come to miss.

What I have never known, how can I miss?
Without matter, how can I find a mean?
I too have walked my mind and fingers back
to our first meeting, where your hymnous glyphs
woke me from ancient sleep. Instead of tea,
I drank the beauty of the limpid shock.

Later, I only partly meant to shock
you and others; most of that swing-and-miss
came from my gait. A sitting down for tea
would have made you and me a bit less mean.
Instead I racked my mind over my glyphs,
wishing I could reshape them, roll them back

across the border. Yet the taking back
would be just a mirage. My fingers shock
the keys, and they shock back; the stoic glyphs
have long known these erasures. "You will miss
our mark," they say. But cuts mark too (I mean
the million times I backspaced on a T).

You think I'm playing with infinity?
Last year, maybe. Not now. No going back
to that old cant. Sometimes I was a mean
mortality protester. I would shock
the rosy wellness-hawkers with my mis-
creant letters, my ever-stretching glyphs.

Now it's all one. The river thrums my glyphs
into the easelessness. A spill of tea
lifts ink from the old diaries. I miss
missing itself, the feeling, far far back
in the blue past, that words of truth and shock
would become flesh. At least conjure your mien.

Now I see what I missed: your cryptic glyph
speaks its own mean. "To keep your dignity,
hold something back." So I delete the shock.