the rub

guarded and wounded, 

yes, that is the apparel that my aura wears.

sure, I dress it up with flashes of color

and cuts of garments, 

as if style settles it

for those onlooking eyes.

I can do warm glow

but not from a natural state of being.

yet easily done from projections skills, 

learned over an extended period of life.

I can be engaging 

in a conversational way.

sure to initiate with cliches, 

either as promptings or as comebacks,

as complimentary is not far from at hand.

I can appear as settled,

when nothing is further from the truth.

maybe it could have been,

but we don't have to appear to each other,

as more than just people in passing, 

considered as a crowded state of passage.

but no,

that didn't really happen.

you, just a roadblock of presence,

I would say looking back.

I was not encounter ready.

I was just trying to get the goods of me

from a here to a there,

sort of as a fantasy task of self in carriage.

but there you were, 

worst than a mirror, 

on a bad emotion hair day.

I tried passable on,

as a mindset that is,

and that had no carriage at all.

I tried a bundle of innocence,

but that looked stupid, even to me.

for a very very short time,

I tried quickly passing,

but that didn't generate any movement of success.

oh why did I have to run into a card reader,

while I was wearing a placard 

of my past history's mess?

no preface,

no last chapter,

just writing it as I go along.

a cramped hand of the mind,

a fatigue in the storyline ongoing,

just memory as cosmetics, 

and facials as a broadcast style.

and the words that came out of me,

were a form of slippage,

as if phrases spoken,

retrieved from a fishbowl of remarks.

but you, you saw me grab for them.

you saw the me that made me snag them.

you saw chapters to the rear 

and even chapters not yet written.

I was impacted with utter suddenness, 

as if I see what you see in me,

how I wear my guardedness,

how I am frail with rereads of past events,

how previous does not shield me from the future,

how a fire, this fire, 

started out as a self as refuse.

some people are just inadvertent messengers.

it's not in their conscious storyline,

but it's there anyways.

I could want to claim it in you, as a friendship,

but that is distracting from the miracle at hand.

I accept that people are just people

and they brush up against or graze,

sometimes in special ways.

guarded and wounded were my calling cards.

sometimes human-dimensions can't say it

but be the presence of it in passing,

couriers of consciousness, 

emissaries of earnest passage,

angels of mysterious means,

face to face, 

aura to aura,

being to being.

that rub can be miraculous . . .