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 

• On A Picture Of A Black Centaur By Edmund Dulac by William Butler Yeats by William Butler Yeats
• Old Tom Again by William Butler Yeats by William Butler Yeats
• Old Memory by William Butler Yeats by William Butler Yeats
• Oil And Blood by William Butler Yeats by William Butler Yeats
• O Do Not Love Too Long by William Butler Yeats by William Butler Yeats
• Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen by William Butler Yeats by William Butler Yeats
• News For The Delphic Oracle by William Butler Yeats by William Butler Yeats
• Never Give All The Heart by William Butler Yeats by William Butler Yeats
• Mohini Chatterjee by William Butler Yeats by William Butler Yeats
• Model For The Laureate by William Butler Yeats by William Butler Yeats
• Michael Robartes And The Dancer by William Butler Yeats by William Butler Yeats
• Men Improve With The Years by William Butler Yeats by William Butler Yeats
• Memory by William Butler Yeats by William Butler Yeats
• Meeting by William Butler Yeats by William Butler Yeats
• Meditations In Time Of Civil War by William Butler Yeats by William Butler Yeats
• Byzantium by William Butler Yeats by William Butler Yeats
• Blood And The Moon by William Butler Yeats by William Butler Yeats
• Before The World Was Made by William Butler Yeats by William Butler Yeats
• Beautiful Lofty Things by William Butler Yeats by William Butler Yeats
• Baile And Aillinn by William Butler Yeats by William Butler Yeats

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Duckduckgo – the real alternative and a search engine that actually works. Without much censorship or partisan politics.

Yahoo– yes, it’s still around, amazingly, miraculously, incredibly, but now it seems to be powered by Bing.

 

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