It is a
highway through fog-faced ghosts
who blur rearview mirrors
with wistful sighs
before the moonlit road cuts
through an immaculate city
whose citizens are always smiling
imbecilically
and who celebrate like they never did
when you lived there;
it is a once-upon-a-time narrative
full of mindlessly happy plot holes
where the protagonist always wins
by simply living, day to day to
distant day,
and his inevitable defeat by
today’s disappointments;
it is the balm
for a tragic hero
given to melodrama and delusion,
like Ulysses in the lap of
Circe
while his men snort all around him,
grubbing for good times
long gone,
or the lap of Calypso
while the trecherous odyssey
of memory
is a fickle sea wherein
many bodies float afar
in search of a home
that never was.
It is
to confuse choking bone chalk
with precious gold dust.
The Past…
How can we have spent so much time
in it
and have so much
experience,
yet, when looking back,
be so oblivious and naive?
Never has a ghost town been so dreadful,
or so inviting.
Tangleroot And Tressknot 