RemoteMemory

Memory is lying in the dark next to me –
She keeps her distance, but I can hear her breathing.
And soon she starts to sing softly,
The words to a song she shouldn’t know --
Notes to make the dark a little blacker, a little sweeter
like coffee addiction.
Like soccer jerseys and anise and stairwells.
Like being on top of the world,
or at the Center of the Universe.
She whistles, and I hear the tide coming in
And Angel’s soft slither in pursuit of
something
with scratching claws...
She hums, and I taste Sunday mornings in Durham.
She knows the songs, but she wasn’t there.
I know I was the only one there.

But now in my mind it’s all polluted.
Mixed and transplanted, so nothing’s where I put it.
All the memories have been trampled into swampland –
And they’re building a Starbucks
there, to sink into the mire.

And even in my dreams, all the clouds,
They look the same to me,
Like airplanes,
Whose propellers make the drone coming
From the new construction
Somewhere in the prefrontal cortex.

She sings the songs I know by heart
While she drills holes in my brain.
And while I sleep, the new things
Flood up through the empty spaces.

She’s re-programming me every night
With all-new sequences and four-digit transponder codes.
Soon there will be no bridges to anything familiar
Outside that swamp, not anywhere:
not in London; not in Eucha.

Memory is re-programming me,
Just like a remote control.

But I don’t know what I’m controlling.
God. Don’t let me forget control.