Don’t forget
Don’t give in
Don’t forgive
Don’t begin
Don’t undo
Don’t redraft
Don’t renew
What has passed
Don’t forget
Don’t give in
Don’t forgive
Don’t begin
Don’t undo
Don’t redraft
Don’t renew
What has passed
A pile of snaps
From years ago
A half-forgotten time
A party frock
The neckline low
A painted face – sublime
So young, so slim,
With carefree stance
How many now would know
The secrets held
Within her glance
The setting for that show
Do I quite dare
Display this face
A portrait from my youth
Or are the few
Would recognise
Too great a risk of truth
I miss that girl
That piece of me
That juggled many hearts
But see her safer
Mystery
And hidden in the past
I ride this bus
And pass the place
Where first I learned of work
Another world
In time and space
New politics and perks
I started young
It must be said
And strove to earn my worth
And struggle on
Two decades late
Still using what I learned
It’s no surprise
It’s changed since then
But somehow seems the same
I guess what goes round
Comes again
In everything but name
Golden shadows of my past continue to haunt me. I pass corners of streets I remember as filthy, rat-ridden, miserable, and a ray of light suddenly illuminates a memory with a clarity that hits my gut. Forceful as a bolt of chili, straight to the heartburn.
In the everyday I am alone. I am mechanical, stiff, lifeless. I miss these ghostly shadows. Fleeting, they are gone, leaving a strange hollowness. This vacuum of feeling, empty, void. No longer relevant. I shake myself and go on with life. Passing occasionally to cross the road and wonder at changes I see. Proof that life goes on.
And the gold-dusty haze of memory settles on the flat screen of my life. I see things in monochrome, shades of brown and orange. As if through a sheet of bathroom-school-pane glass, everything looks mottled, grainy. And somehow more significant to my story than the things I can touch and smell and taste today in harsh and vivid colour.
I look to the future and what do I see?
My year-ful of past gazing fondly at me.
I turn on my toes and do an about face,
To find myself staring back at my first place.
But try as I might, twist and turn all my days,
The future will greet me, my mind is a maze.
I see now how vain was my endless display,
To seek out my present and past with one eye.
Yet trained in star-gazing and picking up jokes,
Not learning the nature of time, nor her yokes,
I still on occasion, though valiant my fight,
To catch my own tail, pirouette in the light.