the guy we talked about in our last few letters 
is still the same; he drinks too much and asks 
me to cut his hair and if we enter 
the dark and strangled patches of humanity 
that we often gravitate toward, we 
either become one of those dying or 
get thrown out as being too alive. 
i'm not in a tight place.  he is my friend, 
and like you, sometimes the only friend 
and his symptoms are akin to yours-- 
like in the woods that spring two years ago 
you picked up a dead branch and anger 
stirred it beneath the sky and at the 
world but mostly at yourself and i am 
still back in that time because the 
rabid stream of gibberish, sex-speak, blasphemy 
and backwards profundities that flew 
from that mouth while hurling your body from one 
wall of dirt to the other still escapes 
my avenues of reason, and he (who says 
his hair is still too long) dances that same 
ungrounded dance, only there is no speech 
or audience to try and understand, 
because getting up in the morning 
and brushing his teeth and driving are not 
like your scrapes of wood on skin and your 
scrapes of words on human ears, so i am not 
waiting for him to stop running and 
tell us spectators how last night's performance 
went and if he thinks they understood 
the show they saw and if tomorrow will be simpler. 
i read your letters, days after pulling 
them out of the metal box, i read what you 
say now, and maybe i can hear you tell 
me about today, or if i read really carefully, 
hear what it was you heard yesterday, 
to make you scream so loud in the springtime 
two years ago.  all i hear now is that you might 
drive down in may, and i write you to say that 
i'm still breathing, and sometimes only 
because you're still breathing, too.