a letter

I want to write
I want to write a letter
I want to write you a letter
I want to write you a letter so
I can tell you how much i miss you.
A phone call could do that.
And if i wait.just a little bit longer
and let it fester, then allmymissing
can become a poem. But that would depend.
on whether i dust the memories everyday
or let time accumulate over it. Either way,
there is no guarantee. Of remembering you.
or finding that poem.
a letter seems practical.and romantic.
though ours is the romance of
dry rivers and empty skies.

But then the letter would stir up expectations.
A poem can be content in its disappointments.
given the rich harvests of our lonelinesses,
the latter seems better suited to us.

What would you like -
Should i pander to your fancies?
We were strangely one in our
whimsicalities, come to think of it.
(Everything else clashed.)
You would find the idea
of recording absences ridiculous.
i wish i could disagree.
What about this conversation then?
That was us too. All of our time
a contemplation of fashionable trivialities
(in distinct idioms of silence,
less definite when we are apart and
time lags into a language of longing
necessitating this interlude.)

Let us go then.
As it turns out, true to our natures,
we are too passé for a letter.
too impatient for a poem.
It will be a note. A story without words.
An asoka leaf. buried in the heaviest book
on the topmost shelf of the public library
that we used to visit.