1.
From memory comes imagination
imagination ➡️ poetry
From poetry, memory
2.
We pull the words back and forth.
It's all memory transformed.
In the space between how it seems to me
and how it seems to you,
Poetry lies.
That's where not-you and not-I are.
We briefly dance where not-we dance.
A dance of shadows, beneath the shade
of a sad willow tree,
swallowing and swallowed by
the dappled light.
Not-you asks what not-I dreams.
But I'm a coward -- flitting back across
the cold stream whose touch causes
paralysis, amnesia, and rots the frozen fingers
with nostalgia -- running with hummingbird wings
on my feet, messenger between the goddesses,
spilling water & sugar, coming home with an empty bucket,
home to leeches groping beneath me, curses
raining down on my head, sleeplessness,
and the smell of chicken shit.
I'm a coward who should've replied 'not-you' or 'you'.
Instead I ran from the simple answer: not-you you.
I remember loving you endlessly
in that no-place, utopia, you-topia,
the place of you,
Not-you, not-I.
So it will happen, supposedly,
or at least happens there
In the in-between
you remember now,
having read my memory, imagined,
and made your own memory.
Willed into existence, but not really.
If only it were the same.
If only it were so
and not just a memory.
At first I thought not-you and not-I
were like shadows or opposites
or potentialities or fluids or ineffable.
But it was much simpler in the end.
I am not you.