I don’t remember poems

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