Liquid Memory

The night winds down,
The inebriated and buzzed have retired,
Leaving you in the alehouse,
Only you and your beer,
Your pint-sized oracle,
Cupped in your hands,
An amber scrying pool,
Carbonated images on its surface,

As soon as your lips touch the liquid,
Magic happens,
Memories come flooding back,
Like so much ethanol,
Every kiss ever shared,
Every mountain ever climbed,
Every project ever aced,
Each failure for some balance,

The drink plays these photo rolls in your head,
Leaving you with this,
A cloak of reminders,
To keep you warm on the way home.

Vermin

The attic of my brain is infested,
A legion of cerebral rats I fear,
Vile little vermin,
Perhaps my mind was ample carrion,
They gnawed on my memories,
My good times,
The smiles and beaches,
Seizing chunks in gory fashion,

With each nibble,
Images began to distort,
A stony tint overlaid the joy,
Stories took dramatic new turns,
I had to act,
I had to chase them out,
Club in hand,
A flood of rodents into the aether,

To avenge the elation already consumed,
To salvage what little remained,
To remember some joy.

Bury Yesterday

Some are pursued by spirits,
Corpses of a hundred yesterdays,
Ectoplasmic bindings,
Every past hurt or teardrop,
Every bugbear and tribulation,
Lessons that stuck around too long,
This reminiscence does you no good,

So the best recourse,
Is to bury it,
Slay it and put it in the ground,
Stuff it in a pine box,
Exorcise that spectre,
Forget it,
Let that shovel be your survivor,

If you don’t bury the past,
Six feet deep in salted earth,
You’ll always be haunted by ghosts.

Sketches

My mind was once such a sketchpad,
Paltry yet functional,
Full of images from the past,
Smiles and carousels,
Downpours and cataclysms,
Penned by revels and crises long gone,
I remembered them all,
The ink I thought was dry,

But pens sometimes leak,
The ink seeps out,
Or runs off the page,
So many faces and names,
Escaped into the aether,
Like so many convicts,
It’s nothing personal,
But my memory is only sketches,

Too finely etched,
And easily besmirched.

Remembering

Tell me,
Do people change?
Or does your memory betray you?
Are these machinations in your head false?
Ruby-tinted glasses in hindsight?

You recall them with fondness,
Angelic,
Sagacious in the extreme,
Beautiful and everything sweet under the sun,
Almost folkloric in their virtues,

But then witness them in the present,
Drugs and drink and crime,
Ugliness in their actions,
Selfishness to the core,
As if the past was a disguise,

It’s curious to remember people as they were,
Rather than the forms they take presently,
Are they mirages in the mind?
Or do people change?
Tell me.

Memory Lane

Today I realised,
The lane of memory is laden with broken glass,
Sown amongst rose petals and photo snaps,
I see it from astride my metal steed,
Daydreaming down the highway,

Traversing it can breed torment and pierced feet,
Slicing at your pupils and spirit,
Bittersweet images play out every few yards,
The past visualised like stained-glass,
Faces and places like prismatic daggers,

Some memories bite less of course,
Not all glass is jagged,
Some merely graze,
That memory lane can indeed be tender,
But is forgetting preferable?

Closing Time

In this temple of breweries,
Our beermat oasis,
The hours have been sanded away,
The drinks have been spilled,
Beer goggles donned by all,
The bell rings the end of our joviality,
No more amber will flow here,
We’ve made memories tonight its true,
We may not wish for the fervour to cease,
But if we do not leave,
Memories cannot flourish in our grey matter,
The present can’t be remembered.

Garden Of Corpses

This nursery is held often out of sight,
Behind church walls and ragged hedge lines,
Out of mind,
At least that’s the hope,
This garden of corpses,
Decorated by obelisks and headstones,
It’s home to crops like you and I,
Planted here by fate and chance,

The rows are a series of stories carved into granite,
This old soil holds more than morbid botany,
There are memories planted here,
From babes cooing to final embraces,
Joy and rancor and fear preserved,
Every romance and broken heart under the sun,
All eventually find themselves interred here,
Along with worms and flies,

Awaiting a harvest that will never come.

Morgue Tales

Down those hospital stairs,
That chilly room is a sterile graveyard,
Clad in cold iron doors,
In place of stone markers,
Names replaced by codes on little tags,
Souls preserved just past the point of death,

Their stories will never rot though,
Even entropy can’t rewrite time,
This body here was a tyrant among tyrants,
This one has saved orphans abroad,
Over here we have an artist to succeed Picasso,
This one here was a master thief,

The lights behind their eyes are dark,
But these husks are still receptacles of stories,
People reduced to their bodily memories,
Held in iron caskets,
To be burned to ashes,
Or rusted away by time.

Unseen Vault

Our minds hold secrets even from ourselves,
Like a vault with no keys,
An Alcatraz of singed synapses,
Memories and cognitions that require captivity,
Killers we made in our own pasts,
Creatures of harmful alchemy,
Its halls are patrolled by second guesses,
Steering you from its cells,
As compartmentalization is the policy of a hurt soul,
It’s a death row without an end date,
And it is rightly veiled,
Because if these demons were freed,
And the traumas relived,
The world could burn,
As surely as a peony wilts.