A Cage To Hold My Dreams
The Real Us
In years to come, I shall fictionalise the event of your dying.
I shall forget the long afternoon with snow on the window-ledge,
and everyone beyond it treating it as a normal Tuesday.
I shall forget the weight of your head on my shoulder, and
the unspoken goodbye in your last, lingering look at me.
I shall forget the miles we walked and the hours we talked
during that precious post-script to our life together.
I shall fill the years that we never had with glowing tributes,
in words more suited to a previous age.
When I describe you to people whom you never met, I shall
present a portrait as removed from reality as a painting by
Picasso, because I want to keep the real you--the laughing,
serious, impossible, delightful, you--selfishly locked in my head.
I shall not share with anyone the contents of our love-chest.
They shall feed, if at all, on half-truths and exaggerations
which will bounce like softballs off the surface of your soul,
leaving not the slightest clue as to what you truly were.
In years to come, when my mind is a busy pathway along
which all sorts of crazy ideas and self-destructive urges scurry
back and forth, I shall pretend that the loss of you was
a tragedy I took capably in my stride.
I shall shrug my shoulders and say 'nothing lasts forever' and 'into
each life some rain must fall'. I shall let them see the lines on my face
but not the ones carved more deeply into my heart.
Behind the fictions which encircle my memories like a protective
ring of barbed wire, obscured by trees and prickly bushes,
there is the real us, and I promise you we shall not discovered.
I shall forget the long afternoon with snow on the window-ledge,
and everyone beyond it treating it as a normal Tuesday.
I shall forget the weight of your head on my shoulder, and
the unspoken goodbye in your last, lingering look at me.
I shall forget the miles we walked and the hours we talked
during that precious post-script to our life together.
I shall fill the years that we never had with glowing tributes,
in words more suited to a previous age.
When I describe you to people whom you never met, I shall
present a portrait as removed from reality as a painting by
Picasso, because I want to keep the real you--the laughing,
serious, impossible, delightful, you--selfishly locked in my head.
I shall not share with anyone the contents of our love-chest.
They shall feed, if at all, on half-truths and exaggerations
which will bounce like softballs off the surface of your soul,
leaving not the slightest clue as to what you truly were.
In years to come, when my mind is a busy pathway along
which all sorts of crazy ideas and self-destructive urges scurry
back and forth, I shall pretend that the loss of you was
a tragedy I took capably in my stride.
I shall shrug my shoulders and say 'nothing lasts forever' and 'into
each life some rain must fall'. I shall let them see the lines on my face
but not the ones carved more deeply into my heart.
Behind the fictions which encircle my memories like a protective
ring of barbed wire, obscured by trees and prickly bushes,
there is the real us, and I promise you we shall not discovered.
