If Memory Is a Lie Then So Am I
Proust searched his brain for memories that
made the man, could finally understand
that this changed him just by looking;
so he called himself a sentimental realist!
many a prisoner, in walls cast of shadows,
have escaped their fate etched in stone
and bars at Guantanamo, where they
remade themselves in the language of pain -
the poetry of misery or bliss to relive a life
that past has missed, to rekindle themselves
in the alembic of desire, their inner fire
because of the lie of memory; I am frisson!
oh, yearning moment, oh, swelling into dreams
come of these needful things, where open
skies and open roads and open fields
are little sparks in open places closed inside of me.
when this lightning sings my body moves
with the ghostly touch of numinous grass
and forgotten fragile flowers, the distant buzz of bee
and echoing twitter of birds sound again inside of me.
inside of memory is me, thereto is the lie
where holes are filled by imagination, a story I call
myself where fiction and reality are hopelessly
intertwined, undermining who I thought was me and too, mine.
this albatross of original stimulus, this
verisimilitude of the incongruous, mutable
impressions which fleeting fly dead-away
fall into the deep error of my earnest loom; memory!
the act of remembering changes me, so a fool I have
become, locked in shadows, staring dumb, I shun this outer lock, sing my songs as they
come from now on, making me in my own image
unbecoming,
unfettered,
unfinished,
undone ...
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