This far along the road
the cul-de-sac’s clearly signed
so there’s time now
for turning around, to track back
through the furrows memories have made
meeting many apparitions,
dusty from the years
Not the keepsake ones
who drop by dreams and still fill
fantasies with a febrile pulse.
All those others though, lost and lapsed
with their pale, amorphous
‘remember me’ faces
I’ll puzzle a while
till the pieces should fall into a name
a time, an encounter
There! All the way back there.
From that perilous perch of puberty
he steps. A hopeless valentine
with his broken record, his cracked aria.
Eager, hangdog, dressed in pathos,
like an unsold toy
And now there’s no choice…
I am doomed to remember a boy
with a wrecked voice
For Punam’s Poetics prompt “Beginnings are endings” our poem finishes with one of her given opening lines from literature, as here with John Irving’s : “A Prayer for Owen Meany”. Title is the end line of Leonard’ Cohen’s ‘Chelsea Hotel’.
PoetryPix 
Beautiful use of the line!!! Well done. I especially like the idea of the cul-de-sac, having lived on such a street when I was growing up. As was pointed out to me….there’s only one way in and one way out in a cul de sac!
thank you Lillian – I had to dangle it quite a while before the imagination
Oh, wow! Laura, I so love what you have done here! That line seems to be meant for your amazing verse. ❤️
thank you, and for hosting, Punam with such an enticing selection though this was always the line that beckoned from the outset
How wonderful! You are very welcome.
A poignant poem sprung from an evocative opening line, Laura, and I love that you took the title from Leonard’ Cohen’s ‘Chelsea Hotel’. I also love the ‘’furrows memories have made’ and the idea of filling ‘fantasies with a febrile pulse’.
thank you Kim – it took me a while to find a title once I’d written the poem and then I remembered that wry last line of Chelsea Hotel!
My pleasure, Laura.