To Each His Own Poem by Matt Mullins

What hurts most is not your forgetting
that unforgettable tune,
but the searching, the impossibility,
of actualized need ruining itself
upon the sleeve of your stained
and most sainted shirt before
you’ve even learned the truth
of the first word:

Desire. Let’s blame it all on this life
where broken shards of the past
fresco themselves into a future
as ephemeral as lightning leaving
us only the flash-lit instant
of present and the patchwork
of our memories, absolutely perfect
in their fading.

There is nothing more our own
than the human shock of it: Mortality
the irony of consciousness, the deepest
well filled only by those things
we crave but do not have
and can never hope to keep.
It’s only natural that we put an ear
to the mouth of the well’s black silence
after we’ve dropped in the wishing stone.

Pointless. Thoughtless. Who knows
where the truth of living lies?
Somewhere between the rippled
undulations of longing?
Who ordered these days lost inside days,
this echoed jumbling talk of hours?
And what is there to claim in the end
but so many minds taken surprise
by the quick-fuse of time.

I shall not presume to understand that
which seeks us out only to unfold us
toward a focused spasm of our own dissolution:
this need to pull pale and deep-soaked
creatures into the writhing light.

It comes from something holy, we must know.
A red dividing of desire that mandates us,
that brings the mantra: “I’ll get mine.”
“I’ll get mine.”