Holiday near the place I was sometimes found as a youth

I’m watching myself and –whip-smart– at the first hint of reminiscence,
some instinct shaves biographical curlicues / reduces kerfuffle / sterilises nostalgia
and sets this place back where it belongs in an ordinary material space.


I’m asking myself and recall virtuosic failures to over-sentimentalise.


An instructive cold early-spring morning 20-years ago
with ineffectual sunshine
when my girlfriend called-out my melancholy (“too young to be so… sad”)
in unpolished boots on a gravel driveway.


The “Aha!” moment when
my therapist put a fluorescent-yellow highlighter ring on my family tree
around the root, cause and moment of unruly surplus emotions
six days before I was left alone again
with a persistent decaying whine of need.


Happy family holiday snaps at the end of time until now.

//ends

>> month of poetry 2012