I still dedicate this song to my first best friend from college. When first I met him, he burned with the most romantic passion I'd ever seen, and he drew me in. All my small notions of love and magic in the world I found in him, except that he wasn't confined by my inhibitions. So he let love play the biggest part in his life, and he was all the richer for it.

Slowly little things wore him down. The affair of his life turned sour, and his idealism went with it. He slowly rotted his body away with cigarettes and the touches of strangers. I watched his skin yellow and his gaze fall away. I looked into his eyes one day and couldn't find him anymore.

In the meantime I'd gone off into my own cocoons, convincing myself I was in love with fragile little boys, and betraying my own trust by lying to myself when I wasn't. I avoided the hardest questions of my life by pretending I was a jaded old scientist with far too much useful work to do to concern myself with matters of the heart. We drifted.

I've found poetry again. He has found love again, and when I see him I am no longer blinded by the flat weariness that falls from his fingers. But scars remain, and there is a sadness in me still when I think back on how we began.

I carry pictures of the boy he used to be with me everywhere. I use them as the model of where I want my passion to lead me, wishing I could talk to him again. I study the images in my head of the last conversation we will have in a bar someday, when I watch the last pieces of him disintegrate, and when my loneliness leads me too to hide behind bottles in dark cafes, waiting for ghosts of my old friend to take me home.

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