Filing My Mistakes Away Poem by Suzanne Hayasaki

Leave me alone for a moment.
I need to collect my thoughts.
Some need to be boxed and atticked.
Some need to be re-examined.
Some need to be set free.
Some must be set alight.

So leave me in this dusty clutter.
Leave a tea tray before the door.
I will nibble on buttered toast.
I will sip tepid tea.
I will sift through my past
One yellowed sheet at a time.

Funny isn't it how our own words
Written long ago in a different script
Can bring us back to who we once were
For a confused reunion with our present selves?

I was never you; you are not who I will be.
And yet we can both clearly see the path
That leads both forward and back
And together recover the threads that have frayed.

Sometimes a day spent alone in our own company
Is a necessary therapy session between ego and soul.
What one has done the other cannot erase
But if we listen there may be forgiveness in the higher silence.

None of us is born wise.
None of us escapes self-hate.
None of us can bear close scrutiny
Without exposing some past shame.

But time puts things in perspective.
We come to see that we could never reach
The standards of perfections we expected
When we thought the world was like our mind.

Decades of battering by reality
Leaves us scarred and cynical
But still within is that pilot light
That draws us like a winged thing.

So when the world turns my thoughts
To sarcasm and pathetic apathy
I rally my hope and ride it like a Valkyrie.
I sentence my pessimism to death to let myself live.

Then, I journey on safe in the knowledge
That I see little
I understand less
And yet I am as wise as I need to be to survive.