Is the world something more

than just a place to leave the dead?

Is the rain something more

than just a drive through it?

Is the reading of these words more

than flashes of light?

Is loneliness something other

than the company of strangers?

Is suicide a sign of something else

than a subway train

speeding through a tunnel

under the street level Yom Kippur

reconciliation?

I lie back, out of the shower,

with my heavy Indian blanket

over my body

after the regular forty kilometers

of bicycle exercise,

with a slight low back pain,

probably resulting from hauling

too heavy suitcases

traveling down here

The bedroom with its heavy speakers

fills existence

with Bernard Parmegiani's Enfer

from Divine Comédie

on a double CD

shared with François Bayle's Purgatoire

Anna remains silent on the fifth day

I am flying low

across these late years,

these misty epilogues

where danger looms

and venomous thoughts spring off

like grasshoppers,

long since died down whispers

out of diverging fates

still signalling like the Voyager twins

out of unreachables and forevers