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 

• Sonnet CXXX: My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun by William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare
• Sonnet CXXX by William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare
• Winter by William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare
• When to the sessions of sweet silent thought (Sonnet 30) by William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare
• When that I was and a little tiny boy by William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare
• When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes (Sonnet 29) by William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare
• Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare
• Under the Greenwood Tree by William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare
• Three Songs by William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare
• The Quality of Mercy by William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare
• The Phoenix and the Turtle by William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare
• Spring in New Hampshire by William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare
• Sonnets CXVI: Let me not to the marriage of true minds by William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare
• Sonnet LXXI by William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare
• Sonnet LXX by William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare
• Sonnet LXVII by William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare
• Sonnet LXVI by William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare
• Sonnet LXV by William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare
• Sonnet LXIX by William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare
• Sonnet LXIV: When I Have Seen by Time’s Fell Hand Defac’d by William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare

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