sometimes people you don't know can hurt you and not even know 
they are hurting you never having met you 
and not knowing you, not even sensing perhaps 
the missed chance, so not missing it, or glancing back, to imagine you. 
if we get hurt like that by someone we only thought 
we might know, are we not simply hurting ourselves? 
but in the time of no reply, we are hurt 
by these things we felt approaching, as we approached, the things we missed 
we felt we needed. 
and knowing this is a recurring non-event, a motif, almost, i can 
kind of let it go in the same stream 
i've fished in before, with my slow hands, with my head in the trees.
it didn't happen around the nucleus of a poem recently, that i felt down deep, 
and the other retreated in the darkness and otherness of the other bank. 
so the poem drifts back down, in the silt in the stream 
inside me, with the stone rapids bending the currents and blurring the sky above.