Poem with Accidental Memory
That we go back to life one day, the next,
Some other century where we were alive,
When music spelled itself out to us, often
Incomplete, and nothing was more vague
Than the banality of whom to love and lose
In line, the doppelgangers in rimless snow,
Or even now, in summer, at day, by night,
When something oblivious, replete, turns
Back at us in idolatrous quiet, so we see
Who in nullified particulars we really are
At a desk of our own making, filling in for
Someone else’s life sentence, blots drying
On a silk tie having no meaning but today’s,
When the loner puts his insomnia to rest.
Source: Poetry (January 2014)