He disappeared, nearly naked,
Dressed only in a long white garment.
A white cloth
covered in numbers and geometric shapes.
He slipped into the nothingness,
into some place I will never know.
(If I were to follow him,
the me that can know would have left
and I would be left as naked as he was
unable to understand whatever I was
seeing.)
He broke with the language of our world,
and left behind only scattered fragments
–
A poetic line
A shopping list
An idea for a story
An argument not fully formed.
He left in a succession of slow breaths
Which carried the old melodies we once sang
together,
our voices strong and cracking.
He took with him
A thousand stories we will never hear,
food we will never taste,
so many things I wish I learned,
but I didn't.
His face now appears on maps,
The kind I sometimes look at
but mostly I try to avoid them.
His face is quickly losing its shape
even though the map lines tend to
converge.
The story ends
and I cannot contain my wailing.
I am left without numbers,
with only a drone of ongoing pink noise
and a few mechanical glitches
now and then
a kind of broken rhythm,
irregular pulsing.
