There are still in my head some images of you:
the glow of your brow beneath the yellow light, thinking,
your body openly relaxed to a class of curious eyes,
your vigorous elbow moving in front of the white-board
as you wrote.

Also, your eyes blinking generously at what
annoyed you, the innuendoes,
acid in the voice, gestures of contempt.

I can’t say why or how
but politics was there
in our interaction right from the start, like
damp paper, on which when one tries to write
a letter, the characters blur.

In a constant stand-off, in a peculiar atmosphere,
proud and suspicious, there are no ideas. Demons
colonise the room. Yes, your hubris turned up the fire
of my scorn. Yes, I find you spiteful, duplicitous, and
in all your self-possession, gloriously scattered —
interesting how much clarity distance can yield
— and slavish devotion was never in my nature, having
left it long ago in my grandma’s house, but

as I go on processing truths about you,
it is my own splitting image I see in my mind

however fierce I try to blink it away.