I Can't Manifest a Thing, Can I?

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.


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