on amnesia

hot flashes pass through you like blinks of screaming light
consuming, haunting;
words, sirens, history, urgency
neon rainbow ambiance;

yours,
that past;

now indifference sips your inner crevices
until you can only claim numbness;

scraps of records, scraping your knees and mind,
scratch perpetually and aim for chalk screeching

can you see naked angst without solution?
face forward and bleach hope, sir,
then perpetuate idealism,
frictionless business, copious engagements,
flyers headlining "to forget" "to wait";

you say and think someday,
but it's always someday;

a tower falling,
and the waning red plants, bleeding and hurt,
shatter adjacently;

in a picture portfolio,
puzzle pieces lay forever incomplete;

dust and books
dust and doll houses
dust and gardens
dust and blank spaces;

how far we've flown;
are we like Icarus, still plunging?

the old CDs play, carving on a particular point
a jolt of pain or sensation, electrifying,
laced in plastic fabrication;

damning dark statues,
copper, Rodin,
stranger, Dalí;

obsidian ivory colors, smooth,
but cold gray crystals are more pleasing still;

and sand, spread like peanut butter on a scrapbook,
hid little miserable castles, black incongruities.

That day we couldn't draw our
coordinates on the Cartesian map;

can you still find the singular place
where romanticism
touched no thick piano chords sewn to your throat
and enraptured no aura of lantern fireflies cast in your eyes;

loneliness alone shoveled dirt over inches and feet
and finger tips, l'amour, foliage;

the physical became non-existent,
and dust, dancing directionlessly,
mercilessly,
spun thoughtless circles and circles in the ever-changing test tube of time.

While magazines splat flat on the tables,
we constructed that imaginary brick path to the stars

but see how the path is a Berlin wall?
-- oh, mayday! --

glass rhythm jazz must have laughed out loud at our philosophy,
because so what if we had some formulated idea,
theory or etching of painted behavior,

only unproven observational matter,
dictated antimatter, wretched particles,
death song so saccharine sweet,
lyrically maiming, insulting;

how real is the world, subconscious,
as two are meant to be twined as one,

one seed, yes,

and though irregular speech and
foreignness may pierce gold light on an ocean,
sheltering its surface with scintillating warmth
for the briefest of moments,
there are evermore blinking snapshots,
man-made sadnesses and excessive
waste, objective memento, density,
that remain fathomless, subterranean.

Yours,
a strong tree or three

yours,
improvisation
dimensional squares
branching streams
ambivalence

yours
silence
mine

I’m on the other side of the broken bridge,
and boat-steering isn't an expertise