Drowning is the Price You Pay

The place memory whitens is the entrance hall

Photo by Alfred Leung on Unsplash

There is a corpse inside each one
a gilded rock we break upon —
a place memory whitens & grows faint
to preserve the rabid assaults
on the child-soul for late dissection.

How many of us landed only to feel outraged?
Are you awake to what’s asleep?
Or am I thrashing around in vain
clumsily looking for words to funnel nuances —
whispers & ephemera to hold the world at bay

like a branch beating a window
looks to come in out of the rain?
Whatever we can’t remember —
those great chunks of blind time
hold the seeds of both healing & future

& always wash up on our shoreline
drag us back to those places
long locked and put away behind
the great sea-wall of life & pain.
Drowning is the price you pay.

Copyright Simon Heathcote

The God of Forgetting