Words from Inside My Head

he left on tiptoe feet
came with noise of laughing
friend-voices, bursts of orange-red-yellow
sunlight, slap-cracking screen doors
left once, returned and left and
came back again,
muffled in velvet Paisley
like soft confusion,
he went.
try to tell him, just try,
it’s not the leaving that hurts,
it’s the continual return,
coming back and being had,
of sand once white now strewn with
entwined arms and legs and pop-top rings,
an unfigurable puzzle, his mind.
on tiptoe feet he goes,
i sit resigned and wait
for his
inevitable
return.

I wrote this in 1966, Read about those first poems
in Poems written Long ago