Memory

Memory
’tis but the voice of death
urging you toward him
in gentle whispers.
He speaks so softly
and in pastel hues
lest we recognise
his words for what they are.

Picture Books

He was haunted nightly
by the chocolate covered death masks
of comic strip gunslingers
and yellow page pirates,
though in the daylight
he thought fondly
on and off
of the adventures they shared,
but that was many ephemeral moons ago
when he was a child
and they were alive
in newsprint imaginings,
now their picture book ghosts
and a thousand denouements forgot
give only pause to restful sleep.

Window

I look on the past
through fragments of lost moments
time’s broken window

Clarity

this mind allows no clarity
troubles hide beyond the light
I see the world in abstract hues
a harvest moon obscured by night
uncertainty moves as a cloud
across skies that were once clear
and truths that shone once like the stars
burn away as do the years,
thus unsophisticated rhymes
become as journal to the lost,
the memories and once beliefs
these years of waning moons have cost.

Resigned

my melancholy
is not sadness
nor is it regret
’tis above all
the resignation
for days that we have let
fall away, as sand slips
through the hourglass
to the shoreline
of discarded dreams
for which the days
are passed.

Commotion

as the forest burned
I wept tears for a lost love
but Lloyd Cole sang on

Flickers

These candle-lit vignettes
which form my memories
flicker and flare
in dancing footlight flame
casting shadows upon
the truths
which time,
as wont of its vague nature,
adulterates and adapts
to fit the play for today.

Sketched Memory

I reminisce in watercolours running
as if fresh upon a new page stained
in a sketchbook I had once discarded
on a parkbench left out in the rain

those memories I painted with such nuance
now with each raindrop lose some line or form
like the years passed by as scattered pages
from forgotten sketchbooks roughly torn.

Here (Abbazia di San Miniato al Monte)

peace, here be blessed peace.
Etruscan sun above
crowded piazzas
a thousand years away.

church bells!
is it Sunday?
even the suffering god
is here but frescoed serenity.

time shows not it’s anger here,
if not for the worn steps
of countless pilgrims
time would be a stranger.

The Art of Memory

memory is but
a mean artist
its impressions
unable to colour
your beauty
nor the brush strokes
of fantasy could
texture completely
that smile you saved
for me.