Old Boy poem – A. Van Jordan poems

If one rainy night you find yourself
leaving a phone booth, and you meet a man
with a lavender umbrella, resist
your desire to follow him, to seek
shelter from the night in his solace.
Later, don’t fall victim to the Hypnotist’s
narcotic of clarity, which proves
a curare for the heart; her salve
is merely a bandage, under which memories
pulse. Resist the taste for something still
alive for your first meal; resist the craving
for the touch of a hand from your past.
We live some memories,
and some memories are planted. There’s
only so much space for the truth
and the fabrications to spread out
in one’s mind. When there’s no more
space, we grow desperate. You’ll ask
if practicing love for years in your mind,
prepares you for the moment,
if practicing to defend one’s life
is the same as living? You’ll
hole up, captive, in a hotel room
for fifteen years and learn to find
a man within you, which will prove
a painful introduction to the trance
into which you were born. Better
to stay under the spell of your guilt,
than to forget; you’ve already released
your pain onto the world; don’t believe
there’s some joy in forgetting.
There’s no joy in the struggle to forget.
And what appears as an endless verdant field,
only spreads across a building’s rooftop;
your peaceful sleep could be a fetal position,
which secures you in a suitcase in this field.
A bell rings, and you fall out of this luggage
like clothes you no longer fit. Now what to do?
You remember when you were the man
who fit those clothes, but you’ve forgotten this
world. Even forgotten scenes from your life,
leave shadows of the memory,
haunting your spirit
until, within a moment’s glance,
strangers passing you on the street,
observe history in your eyes. Experience
lingers through acts of forgetting,
small acts of love or trauma
falling from the same place. Whether
memory comes in the form of a stone
or a grain of sand, they both sink in water.
A tongue—even if it were, say, sworn
to secrecy; or if it were cut from one’s mouth;
yes, even without a mouth to envelop
its truth—the tongue continues to confess.

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Poems in English 

• The Sun Was Slumbering in the West by Thomas Hood by Thomas Hood
• The Song of the Shirt by Thomas Hood by Thomas Hood
• The Haunted House by Thomas Hood by Thomas Hood
• The Dream of Eugene Aram by Thomas Hood by Thomas Hood
• The Death Bed by Thomas Hood by Thomas Hood
• The Bridge of Sighs by Thomas Hood by Thomas Hood
• Silence by Thomas Hood by Thomas Hood
• Ruth by Thomas Hood by Thomas Hood
• Past and Present by Thomas Hood by Thomas Hood
• On Mistress Nicely, a Pattern for Housekeepers by Thomas Hood by Thomas Hood
• November by Thomas Hood by Thomas Hood
• No! by Thomas Hood by Thomas Hood
• I Remember, I Remember by Thomas Hood by Thomas Hood
• Gold! by Thomas Hood by Thomas Hood
• Flowers by Thomas Hood by Thomas Hood
• Faithless Sally Brown by Thomas Hood by Thomas Hood
• Faithless Nelly Gray by Thomas Hood by Thomas Hood
• Death by Thomas Hood by Thomas Hood
• Christmas Holidays by Thomas Hood by Thomas Hood
• Autumn by Thomas Hood by Thomas Hood

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