Innocent Memory by Aaron Dusenberry
An illusory memory flickers over closed eyelids,
Twin cellar-doors shut tight against twisted agony.
Fluttering butterfly wings cascade delicately through empty hallways,
Where memoirs skitter in the distance like crouching hermits.
But what hides there, deep in hidden recesses?
Innocence flicks in and out of my periphery like a lost specter,
A nagging doubt lost in time and steeped in pain and suffering.
Is it a boy, ensconced in Technicolor Transformer sheets,
The vellum of a novel clutched like a communion wafer in a felon’s grasping hands?
A temporal vision of the past, lurid and bittersweet in its virtue,
A time when valorous deeds are tempered by an apparent villain,
Where the vain are punished, the cruel imprisoned, where hatred holds no sway.
But such innocence is not meant to last; it is but a second in the timeline of life,
A cruel flicker which chases the memory away as wind would a dusty cloud,
Leaving behind angst and loss, Adulthood a cruel mockery of the past.
And yet my mind still grasps, at gossamer memories.
No matter how quickly they spill away into the ether of time.
Twin cellar-doors shut tight against twisted agony.
Fluttering butterfly wings cascade delicately through empty hallways,
Where memoirs skitter in the distance like crouching hermits.
But what hides there, deep in hidden recesses?
Innocence flicks in and out of my periphery like a lost specter,
A nagging doubt lost in time and steeped in pain and suffering.
Is it a boy, ensconced in Technicolor Transformer sheets,
The vellum of a novel clutched like a communion wafer in a felon’s grasping hands?
A temporal vision of the past, lurid and bittersweet in its virtue,
A time when valorous deeds are tempered by an apparent villain,
Where the vain are punished, the cruel imprisoned, where hatred holds no sway.
But such innocence is not meant to last; it is but a second in the timeline of life,
A cruel flicker which chases the memory away as wind would a dusty cloud,
Leaving behind angst and loss, Adulthood a cruel mockery of the past.
And yet my mind still grasps, at gossamer memories.
No matter how quickly they spill away into the ether of time.