Categories: Poetry

SELF-PORTRAIT AS A MUSEUM

Most days I am a museum of things I want to forget
– E. E. Scott

                                                [Part 1]

Museum:        a depository of grief displayed aesthetically;
                            I carry the mishaps of things I want to forget
                            like the fragments of a brittle artifact—
                          i.       the days I wish I never lived
                        ii.       the partition of my father and mother
                      iii.       the fear of my mother growing old
                      iv.       the pain that came with the loss of my grandmother

                                                                                    [Interlude]
 
                                                                                  Consider this
                                                                                          poem
                                                                                    a museum
                                                                              of self-portraits:
                                                                    of a young adult forgotten
                                                                    to the retention of survival
                                                                        of a poet scared of the
                                                          greater grief his poem will become
                                                                      of a boy who dreams of
                                                                        the future after dying
                                                                            of aborted dreams
                                                                              & miscarriages
                                                                        & a receding hairline

                                                [Part 2]

Aesthetic:         the joy that refuses to come in the morning
                              —I’ve always searched for it in bird songs

                              the unseen light at the end of the tunnel
                              —hope is an illusion is a phantasm

                              the better bad days that are still ahead

                              the substance of things hoped for

                              the evidence of things not seen

Colin Burch

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Colin Burch

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