this is a page from a book of my youth that migrated back to me via the free book bin and when i opened it wondering if it would still hold my imagination it fell apart in my hands.

this is the book that i gave to a friend i made a shadowy super 8 film of once doing yoga, who thanked me 35 years later when he wrote an essay on a book that changed his life. 
i think it changed my life too, but it was all said perhaps in this first page, which happened to fall out first, into my hands that are now maybe 40 years later. funny to think of late hands, but i note that even under the water my hands look like old hands now. funny too, i know it's an old cliche, but my mind feels younger now, more the age of my soul, and far from that premature age of my anguished youth. 

when the friend called to thank me i was not in the light, and anyway his words sounded hollow, like he had written them into his essay, and i did not want to be written in, i felt distinctly crossed, though he meant to praise me. i felt that the book was my book then, and surely what he read was another book, especially all these years on, when we were so far apart. i felt he had not know me and never would.
what was behind my anger, because really it was anger, building to rage, was what he said about the war on terror. he believed in it, that it was really to preserve democracy, not just the opposite, freedom to kill anyone in the way, to steal resources and further establish a system of terror over the planet. 

i had one friend at the same time that black lives matter came to rise, and trump. he scoffed at black lives, and lauded the trump. he was a barrista at starbucks in l.a. and hated the mexicans, and the blacks, and who knows who else. i still like the guy's art, but as for his mind, i could not abide. we had to definitively part.

so all of that from a leaf of a book that has grown brittle and tan with acid and disintegrates in my hands.