“I don’t know of any writer who doesn’t look back at their earlier books and think: can we just shred them? You know, can we go door to door and collect them and shred them?”
—David Sedaris, to Bill Maher, on Real Time, HBO, 2023 March 24th
past
Arise thankful
a new day doesn’t mean
forgetting yesterday
but simply letting it go
not to dwell in memories
but to cherish each one
as it pops up and surprises us
and then release it with a smile
the birds are singing of now
our hearts beat of the present
the past is a muted background
enhancing our carpe-diem lives
dawn paints the scene of today
and invites us to live beautifully
to be the artists of our own souls
Ten thousand fathoms deep
“You peer into my life to find a lingering past, but I tell you it was sunk ten thousand fathoms deep and weighted down with my dead self. You look into my breast to find that old, old open wound, but I tell you I seared it with my hot tears and only the cicatrix is there.”
—Muriel Strode (1875–1964), My Little Book of Prayer, 1904
Flux capacity
Nature and wildlife
are gradually vanishing
like in the photograph
from Back to the Future —
our future is vanishing too
but we have no hundred
and thirty horsepower
gas-fired time machine
to go back and fix it.
Real eyes
Now that I’m over the hill
I can see it’s just made of
skeletons of dead monsters
that were never really there.
But that past is no less high
and no less there, and I am
no less on the other side of it.
Common denominator
“We are all, in the course of a lifetime, a half dozen different people, bound together by memories of the same childhood.”
—Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
Saudade
…and torture myself with happy thoughts…
Give & take
I was so in the present moment the past was no longer part
Come here
Don’t spend too much of your life avoiding the sharp edges of shattered dreams.
Agone
Love stabs at loss with pangs of past happiness.
Leaving behind
In winter, forgive the fallen leaves of your past.