Memories

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Conch/Bug shadow

Memories give us amnesia
about what we could know:
spooks telling truths
in cunningly coy
closed, secret sessions.

They wrap us in myths,
conjuring dreamy, alluring
vapid mirages
                         which may guide us-
                         beguiling as
                         stars in the distance
while receding further, further
as we approach.

Memories shatter moments
of fragile truth, (unwillingly)
drawing us
irresistibly, to their
tinseled cocoons.

They corrode love’s
fresh childish rapture with
sugar and rust
syrup and dust.

Memories lock us in
windowless rooms
as we stare longingly at
faded, curling photographs
of the way
we once wished
we once dreamed
we might have been,
but may never know-
for haunted oldness coats
new moments like thick, black grease.

Now forget all this
and peel open your heart.

I wasn’t too happy when I wrote this. I had been rejected by a long term lover. But it has a certain bitter truth to it about clinging to the past.

8 thoughts on “Memories”

  2. Thank you Yemanja. I checked your site again and it’s beautiful. I noticed you listed me. Thank you. I am also listing your beautiful and alluring sensual journal!

  4. Memories holding us in the “might have been”. A very true and powerful image. It isn’t just the reality we remember but all our plans, dreams and schemes that never came to fruition. Very nice.

  5. Powerful and moving imagery, right enough, although I’m not sure I agree with your view of the past. For me, the past is like my library or my collection of music, full of rich treasures, some dustier and less often used than others, but all important pieces of the jigsaw of my life, although they don’t stop me looking out for new and interesting additions. I’ve enjoyed browsing your site very much and hope you won’t mind if I add you to my list.

  6. Ken, thanks for the comment. Having been deeply rejected, I was very unhappy when I wrote that poem, so the past only reminded me of what I had lost. Obsession with the past is what I was decrying in that poem.

    Ned- sorry I never responded to your comment. Memory, like history, is created through its recording. It’s subjective. A shattered dream, for example, can be remembered as the agony of failure, or it could be remembered as the pinnacle of a woderful period of growth. There is choice involed, discernment.

  7. Rejection, betrayal, abandonment, are strong emotional memories our bodies hold on to as deep scars. They are quite subjective though, and mere interpretations. Reliving such a painful past can be crippling, debilitating. Unnecessarily so. In this cartesian, bipolar society of ours we are much too attached to finding culprits and victims, blaming and condemning. But these are evanescent feelings based on judgment; they are unreal. So, let go of the illusion, leave the past with its victimization process behind, and live today to its fullest. Only the present is truth.

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