Memories

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.