The Memories That Nostalgia Creates

“The remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”

- Marcel Proust, La Recherche

I.

If you held this lemon… and thought of a lime,

then you see the same mirage as me.

Pen jabbed and slit a circle in the flesh

to put a bushel in place to hold our weed…

The yellow ember highlights the hills

of my fingers bent. Butane sits on the surface, 

a marijauna hell. Lime shucks its juice, my gums sponge;

the crickets beep and the owls hoodoo… hoodoo.

Do you recall you tried to eat the lime?

For what you smoke from, you become in time, 

or something philosophical like that,

and I laughed, and I laughed.

II.

I lean to rest on the counter laminate

in a distant house of a distant city

away from the memory– my iris’

brown brightening yellow,

and I think, 

is this memory my own creation?

A feeling I’ve hemmed, you’d call it 

nostalgia,

but do I know what I really felt?

Anxious, waiting

for the red and blue lights to illuminate

the park, or waiting 

for my phone to ring, 

my mother calling.

I fabricate nostalgia, as if what I have today

is nothing when compared to the goodness

I had once felt when I was a boy. 

I wonder why I forgo the goodness in my life. 

III.

I drive my past my family, friends, lovers,

and all the things 

that I have built in this city

never peering behind me to wave.

Like the gray clouds mask the sun rays,

my past enshrouds my present.

How do I escape the pattern 

without dimming the magic of the fiction 

I’ve created?

It’s as if I’m a character in a story written by myself. 

IV.

Where the line blends is unknown to me,

but I must find it so I can step from it 

and leap 

into the future.

I have no vision beyond the clouds

until I rise up into them.

I am on the ground,

I am beneath the clouds–

I need to see the sun. 

The burning yellow will engulf me

and free me of the trail I’ve paved

behind me and grazed in front of me.

I need to stand on the ledge

and fly. 

Fin.