I DON’T REMEMBER POEMS
I don’t remember poems
I – of former full-script-of-lines-remembered
– type person
Standing to play my part as Lentulus
I don’t remember poems
I – of former full-on stamping-forward youth
Ready to take the world on
I don’t memorise poems –
“Who wrote that I often ask?”
Why – it was KR – me myself and I
Written –
it must have fallen unnoticed
Into the back of my folder
I don’t speak poems from memory
I have to shy away
All shy within – slipping out of sight
Into the corner – as young men or women
Recite and rant their full contribution
With no page in front of them
What memory have I?
Enough to invent more words
Get ‘em down on paper or screen
Speak ‘em out and forget them
But you can glean
Making them what they seem
Or what – you think they mean
They tell me there is a diminishing with age
However memory is some old wine
So you’re wrong – it grows in value
What value – a memory brings
A softly spoken man – (I’ve met one or two)
Softly spoken – they speak perpetual poetry
Having never written a poem
But am I too soft in valuing other things more
When freely distributing my text at the drop
of an asking voice?
Help me or help me explore…
The hypothesis that:
Friendship is greater than words
Even though writing them we cannot ignore
I don’t store –
up – poems in the recesses of the mind
I get them on the white shore –
safe from the stormy blast
Paper – that ancient reciprocal of lyric or text
Still lends it’s hand as a bank-vault-archive
Pinning these thoughts down
But don’t ask me to extemporaneously repeat them
I won’t make the effort to write them on the heart
So in all of this subject matter
In danger of being a major made out of a minor
I have given my explanation as to
why I stand with this page
Let’s just say ‘on page’ is what I want to do
Unimpressed? –
me too
