Proust searched his brain for memories that made the man,
could finally understand that this changed him just by looking --
so he called himself a sentimental realist!
many a prisoner, in walls cast of shadows,
have escaped their fate etched in stone and bars at Guantanamo,
where they remade themselves in the language of pain -
the poetry of misery or bliss to relive a life that past has missed,
to rekindle themselves in the alembic of desire,
their inner fire because of the lie of memory;
I am frisson!
oh, yearning moment, oh, swelling into dreams
come of these needful things, where open skies
and open roads and open fields are little sparks
in open places closed inside of me --
when this lightening sings my body moves
with the ghostly touch of numinous grass and
forgotten fragile flowers, the distant buzz of bee
and echoing twitter of birds sound again inside of me --
inside of memory is me, thereto is the lie where
holes are filled by imagination, a story I call myself where fiction
and reality are hopelessly intertwined, undermining
who I thought was me and too, mine --
this albatross of original stimulus, this verisimilitude of the incongruous,
mutable impressions which fleeting fly dead-away
fall into the deep error of my earnest loom; memory!
the act of remembering changes me, so a fool I have become,
locked in shadows, staring dumb, I shun this outer lock,
sing my songs as they come from now on, making
me in my own image unbecoming,
unfettered,
unfinished,
undone ...
