A plate of tomatoes

A plate of tomatoes

I write poems to an audience of one,
the only one I ever really wrote for.
I have to write before I forget,
because that’s coming for us all.

How’s that thought for you?

Certain items are lodged stickily inside me.
Keys, fading photos, seven thousand words
burning slowly in little corners,
sometimes painfully surfacing:

A plate of tomatoes.
Walls of oceans.
An uncomfortable sofa.
Mining for gold in the dark.

Campfire smoke.
A crushing epiphany.
Pine and sweet grass.
The brick wall in the backyard.

Ink on paper and on skin.
Poetic confessions.
Coffee in the rain.
October, trees stripped bare.

Silvered hair.
Reading a letter.
Something I can never have.
The uncertain future.

Remember, my sweet:
Pleasure and pain are sometimes the same,
and that uncertain future is actually quite certain.

One way or another, memories vanish.
They are torn from you, exhausted neurons destroyed,
or they’ll simply fade away as if they were never even there.

I don’t know which is worse.

But you have your precious things, too,
and because I am lucky, sometimes they line up with mine.
So perhaps we can hold on to the plate of tomatoes, after all.