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Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Persistence of Memory


 

Memories seem to start early this year.

They didn’t surface in the black murky from the round window of an upturned 8-Ball. They didn’t surface from looking at a bottle that contained enough glisten at the bottom to moisten a dry tongue.
They just came back. They flooded. They were sparked unannounced and they just came.

They flooded like a mudslide that rumbles your stuff and then burstcrackcrushes through windows. For a flash second you sat confused and then you know that some God chuckles to remind you, some mudslide wants to bond with you, bury you and take it all back. Back to the way it was.

It seems like everything is destroyed but just because you are sitting in the muck, plucking memories from the mud, it can’t all be gone.

You are still there plucking. Gratitude of survival takes a moment to come on. Acid takes about an hour, same with X and moon rocks, but Gratitude is funny. It is either there, like when you pop open the oyster and in the fresh fleshy, the pearl smiles back at you. Or it never enters the reality. Or it waits until the Memories start to flood back and in some weird triad of reality you compare how it was to how it is and how it can be.

Sometimes Memories are more than just blank. They are more than absent. They are more that the empty of a void.

It is not the Now that the Alcoholics-in-Recovery dream to live in.

It is maybe what zombies feel.

You walkstumbleforward, arms outstretched to grab at an unknown.  There is no memory of sitting at a table and waiting for grace and passing peas.  You stand with your shotgun and a group of zombies lurch toward you. As those unfortunate zombies, victims of your shotgun blasts fall to the ground, the diminishing remaining zombies continue to lurch forward. No evasive moves to escape. No running away.

An existence of a life with no Memory, no fear.


I suspect zombies live in an ultimate December now, never knowing never caring never ducking from the shotgun pointed at your head. Just keep lurching forward, arms outstretched, without the memory of even fear of death.

Little things bring Memories on the 23rd of December to my brain: a flash poem of Verona, flashes me back to a lone romantic in a leather trench coat, standing in an Italian march chill to caress the bronze breast of Juliet, buffed bright by the millions of hands that caressed her breast before you. Even the 70’s as a helpless romantic, it must have been before the years of fear and plagues and disease.

You caressed her breast for a life of love. In a sensual desire of building Memories of love and lust.

A song in a too cool coffee shop run ragtag by twin sisters takes you unknown back to Shreveport Louisiana and an empty apartment and an emptier heart while Sting croons “Every Breath You Take” and the two sisters bicker over what a favorite customer drinks and the Memory hurts more than what the sisters bicker over. You are not involved in the now. You are sprawled on an unmade bed in an unmade apartment a million miles from anywhere and you ask yourself how did I end up back here? How did I end up so far from everyone I knew? Even in the Memory, I live in a Memory of how it was and how did I make it here.

Memories come to quick these days. They should let me finish the year first. I want a clean cut with the old and a hope for a new. I can’t escape the memories yet. I must not be a full time zombie and I am not ashamed of my life but then I am not gone…yet.

Somehow the Memories that motivate are the Memories of sorrow and loss. Lurching forward, arms and heart outstretched to meet something head-on.

I can have more coffee now and wait for awhile longer to pull up any Memories so when it is time, I am ready.

I wait new Memories

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