Discussing the issue
does not mean that if
I tell you,
and afterward you still
agree to walk with me
knowingly
from here
to there
that someday
along the road I will turn
to hurt you,
or humiliate you,
or that all promises
will inhere nowhere,
as arcane and unable to
rise as Plutonian surface ice.
Discussing it means only
that walking with me
from here to there
would then patently
be the more
difficult journey.
I ask you sometimes
(but please, not often)
to imagine how it was
for me before, alone,
all those years on foot
through the tenebrific
valleys of the shadows
of health and death, so
dark I could not
even measure the
distance left.
Meredith Meadows 