Remembering is only a new form
of suffering.
—Baudelaire
Surely, there were words
which prickled
my skin—
or certain actions
undertaken
which bleakened my sleep
and slurred
my waking.
But freed from the sway
of the diary page
and placed, without prejudice,
on a more
celestial timetable,
I watched
every ordeal recede
to a speckle
of light on
one wave
of perpetual ocean.
And once I grew tired
of watching the pageant,
I was free to leave the shore—
my memory, a palace
filled to the brim,
filled to the turrets
with the bliss
of its blankness
and uncertain
of anything—save for
the fact that
what happened
to me
had never been
all that there was
to reality.
