Memory Poem by D. Harris

My memory’s foggy.
It’s hiding,
curling up behind a cigarette haze
of forgetfulness
telling me: it’s time to move on;
leave the past far behind,
let the tentacles of thought go ahead
dropp their baggage and shoot forward,
leave the milky fog of the past.

I try to think back,
look into the catacombs of my mind
cast aside the cobwebs,
feel my way through the dark,
palming walls slimy with old life.
But even when I find something,
the tomb of a memory
buried deep in the caves
and surrounded by murky water
that distorts and falsifies,
I can’t see in the dark.

No matter what people say about hindsight,
it’s not true.
Memory’s caves will always stay dark,
the kind of dark that swallows the light around it,
a white whale swallowing men,
and the closest you can come
to reviving those corpses,
to bringing them out of their tombs
and back to health,
is bringing them to the surface.
No, there’s no soul,
not even on the surface,
but the shell’s there
and the shell’s solid;
you can touch and squeeze it,
move it how you want.

When I stand in a vacant lot
that I used to know
back when it was a field,
I say screw memory.
I'd swear that field
was a lot greener
but maybe I’m wrong.