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 