Forgotten

I hold a baby in my arms;
She’s mine, I’m told, but I don’t know why,
I never bore her,
and she doesn’t belong here.
But here she is,
wearing innocent’s pink,
and yawning in my arms –
ocean’s blue ebbs from
such silk-leafed eyelids…
… until they’re gone.

I rock in my willow chair,
swaying her softly like the breeze;
she doesn’t belong to me. But
she’s in my maternal embrace
(maternal virginity) and
she seems to know her home.
White walls and ceilings
hold us together;
alien hands and foreign faces
tear us apart.

Through this rarefied seashell,
I hear a lost heart being discovered
inside of her;
a new one growing from the
ashes of a broken one, a torn one,
one disconnected or ‘disjoined’
as they say…
- What do they know!
In this house of painted faces,
diseased by their reality…
… or was it mine? I usually forget.
But she…
Her fumble fingers clutching
my forgotten fingers… they
remind me – sometimes.
I can see my dreams floating inside her head
as she sleeps so soundly…
She must be mine.

Then why don’t I remember?
The rustling quiet numbs my ears
’cept from her soothing breaths;
and the world goes back to black
’cept from the resonating light she shares without.
My memory lies to me
like the plastic clock
and the hands beating on the window
- so violent and sterile -
always after the dark gateway dog releases me,
and the Sun-God’s chariot draws over the sky.
She brings out the movement in me,
she brings out what I thought long dispossessed:
the ache for the beach again,
for a summer once cruelly deserted.
But here she is.
I hold her, and she holds the sun,
both infants I must cherish.
Her eyes flutter (like
delicate teal butterflies)
and are stilled by my tears.

She’s staring at me,
she knows me, she knows
what I exasperatingly cannot.
I may know you’re name,
sweet baby,
and you won’t know mine,
my love,
and I will forget you,
I’m sorry,
But I do promise that I’ll go to the home
you make me want to find.

The hands break through!
One breath, one heartbeat is
all it takes
before my arms are empty – empty? –
and I have already forgotten
that I have been robbed
and left with the sting
of an invisible hole,
with the fluid designed to fix me,
but the capacity not to care.