My name is Pardrigal Tuma and I've written poems since I was 11 and I look back at some of the

poems that I wrote. I've lost most of the ones when I was that young but I've got loads since I was in my

20s and 30s and 40s. I look back at some of them and think oh my God I'm embarrassed

to think that I wrote like that or that I thought that. I see the limitations of myself.

Maybe even if it's a good poem or if I think it's doing something technical, I also see what time was doing.

And I find myself in conversations with those old

poems myself now as someone older presumably that will happen in the future as well

when I'm 60 65 I look back on the poems I'm writing now and have a conversation about knowledge and time.

To my 24-year-old self by Elisa Gonzalez.

Sometimes you feel more intimacy with the woman who lives in the apartment opposite, 20 years older probably, though she looks barely 10 devoted to a fading age, than with anyone stroked or kissed or otherwise handled. You sit naked on the white sofa, lights on, looking into her home, lights on.

She paints her toenails, watches a black and white film, Hitchcock maybe, there's a woman with a platinum chignon. She applies a green mask, a cream, a mystery

ointment. When you meet an older woman who resembles her, you do the obvious thing.

That woman says after, don't ever leave me, but when you report to your friends you change her words to

don't ever forget me typical of us the lie and the lie.

Why couldn't you tell the truth? That's what I've come to ask, not to her, to your friends.

I can't remember why it embarrassed you. Was it that she was old enough not to bear her throat?

Or was it shame at yourself for misunderstanding how well you were understood.

It always comes back to knowledge with us, doesn't it?

Maybe it doesn't matter.

You'll think of this woman so often throughout the years that by some lights you'll have kept your vow. Oh, So the action in this poem is of a 24 year old who's feeling isolated and who feels intimately connected with someone in an apartment opposite.

Presumably there's a straight in between them as well.

This 24-year-old is perhaps trying to bridge gaps of isolation with sex, but knows also that sex doesn't

...