Life with a Faulty Memory and A Misfiring Brain

I once connected the dots and drew an arrow traveling straight into my heart but my aim was poor and it missed its mark.

Memory is a Cage for Birds 

I can’t be sure, but I may be living
inside in a globe filled with photographs
that stand in as memories.

When I look up through the glass I think
I must be living in one of my mother's 
terrariums. Maybe I fell in or maybe 

she put me in here on purpose
and my life is all her fault. 
But maybe it's just the bipolar;

maybe it's best explained in the shrink’s notes–
“almost narcissistic but does seem to
form meaningful relationships."
 
But maybe it’s not the bipolar.
Maybe it’s because my memory is sketchy.
Perhaps this is a function of 
the disorganization of my thinking.

Perhaps I once connected the dots
and drew an arrow traveling straight
into my heart but my aim was poor 
and it missed its mark. 

~~~~~~

At times like these I puzzle through the pieces,
trying to get my bearings, 
but the plug pulls free from its socket.

I press my hands against 
the solid surfaces in this place
as I have been urged to do. 

I am here, I am still here.
I say this out loud. 
I say this with echoes.

Then I remember my father.
Maybe it's all his fault. 
Maybe he pushed me over 
the slippery lip of the jar. 


Maybe I should build a ladder from his bones, 
from my mother’s bones, 
it would be easy to do. 

I would not be bothered by such labor,
but I cannot keep them in my head,
only the soft spots where they are dead. 

~~~~~~

I think I might be an amnesic.
I might be lost on a backroad that
intersects with my current location.

Let me explain. 
My brain is a line of railroad cars disappearing 
into the mountainside,
my brain is the size of my hand 
but also as large and hot as the sun.
 
I am sick with fever,
the bones of my skull 
slide apart while I’m sleeping, 
all my memories escape 
like birds from a cage.

~~~~~~

Sometimes I forget to remember that I’m alive. 

~~~~~~

On good days I realize I’ve never 
pushed off from the station,
or crawled through the windows into the interior rooms.
I’ve been crawling all this time on the outside,
my head bent down from the sky,
looking for a way in.

On bad days I collapse. I implode.
As solid as a colander I am 
the very definition of “hole.”

~~~~~~ 

Is this the shape of hell?
If I cut myself loose now 
will I ever remember the difference?

~~~~~~

How did my life turn out 
no bigger than a thumbed-sized box? 

How did my heart go so flat,
like a map of something long lost,
perhaps hiking up the long hill at summer camp.

And yet. 

I am as faulty as moth-eaten sweaters but 
I manage to pump in enough air for me 
and for all my mother’s plants who still live here. 

I press my hands against 
the solid surfaces of this place.
I am still here, I say, but I give way 

like the fragile doors of the advent calendars 
we used to open day after day I am uncoupled
and I fall through.

And through and through and through.

~~~~~~

I am underwater and I wonder if 
I have forgotten how to swim.

I rub my hands against my eyes. 
I look up, 
my breath condenses.

The ceiling begins to rain.