Have You Met My Memory
Contributed by
tjraff01
on
Saturday, 22nd November 2003 @ 10:02:26 PM in AEST
Topic:
goodbyepoetry
|
Don’t you have time to speak?
We used to sit and talk,
I’ve watched you weep for a character in a movie,
Yet you didn’t even blush when you told me
Not to seek your moistened cheek again;
But I have not come seeking,
Only found by nightly chance—
Stumbled, and so was hung
In this wound of nocturnal circumstance;
I am going this way...”How are you?”
I’m always ‘fine’ or ‘great,’
My eyes are always blue…
They used to turn to you,
Don’t you remember how, on the still crest of silence,
You’d meet them with a brush of blushing kindness
That may have truly been, as it had always seemed
And felt to me—too polite to, in the silence, be
For ‘more than friends’
Or ‘lovers yet to be.’
But now you glide right past me through the night
So firm, too strong even to act polite
Or let your failing sight bend low to see:
Stale memories haunt these dark filmy seas,
Writhing waters splash and thunder
And a thousand sundered waves
Roil over my divided consciousness—
Bumping, scraping, nudging each other along
To the wounded shores of my mind,
Reverberating with the cyclic moanings
Torn from throats born in sick hunger
And enflamed with desperation.
And time will stretch the silence…
Give me room to agonize, then,
Like a shadow seeing his sun rise
Speed on with forgotten places and the faces
I held dear,
One the most—too much, it seems,
I held it dear—I held a wisp of sunshine in my palm
That fled with warm illusions for the day.
But now you blow right by
And sting fresh gashes
On my raw and burning cheeks;
Those soft eyelashes that once batted
Your grace and tender touches
Down toward my aching face
Are now cold edges that slice at my inner skin,
Such thin wet paper, being torn to shreds—
Thin wet paper—torn to shreds in silence…
Shriveled, thin dried skin against the world,
And at a touch I bleed,
Now at your touch, I bleed—
At your soft touch…
I bleed.
These hands must shake that pass you now,
For I am just a creature who is weaker than his hunger;
If thirsting lips could move, I’d crack and bleed my answer for you, girl.
All the same, I cannot hate,
But nimbly turn this empty weight
Over and over again in blistering confusion,
And seek my comfort in the thought
Of pain as an emotion—somehow, noble,
Deep and noiseless
Like those breathless screams
At dream-feigned phantoms
Hovering around an empty bed…
But the illusion fades as it is fed
And so do we,
Although we may not dare remember
All the vision may have said.
A starving heart will suck fresh venom from cold wounds
To purge his hollow belly
With some lusty dark emotion,
And digest it to the whine of vertigo…
But I will taste no more;
Shattered, I will not cry or shriek infected fears
Or blink, betrayed by unborn tears—just so,
I would not bruise your tender ears,
But hold my stride as my last breath
And act as if we had not shared some secret space,
As if I had not passed you in this place—
That your smile was but a dream,
And I awake
As the night breathes a moist wind
Upon my waiting face.
Copyright ©
tjraff01
... [
2003-11-22 22:02:26]
(Date/Time posted on
site)
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