!DOCTYPE html> html> head lang=”en-US”> title>Old Boy by A. Van Jordan/title> /div> h1 class=”pageTitle”>Old Boy/h1> div class=”entry-content clearfix”> h2 itemprop=”author” class=”author”>by A. Van Jordan/h2> div itemprop=”genre” id=”content”> div class=”taxonomy-images”>a href=”/a-van-jordan/poems.html” class=”taxonomy-image-links”>img itemprop=”image” src=”https://www.best-poems.net/files/imagecache/poet/category_pictures/A.%20Van%20Jordan.jpg” alt=”A. Van Jordan” title=”A. Van Jordan” width=”180″ height=”200″ class=”taxonomy-image-term-11067 taxonomy-image-vid-22″/>/a>/div>p>If one rainy night you find yourselfbr /> leaving a phone booth, and you meet a manbr /> with a lavender umbrella, resistbr /> your desire to follow him, to seekbr /> shelter from the night in his solace.br /> Later, don’t fall victim to the Hypnotist’sbr /> narcotic of clarity, which provesbr /> a curare for the heart; her salvebr /> is merely a bandage, under which memoriesbr /> pulse. Resist the taste for something stillbr /> alive for your first meal; resist the cravingbr /> for the touch of a hand from your past.br /> We live some memories,br /> and some memories are planted. There’sbr /> only so much space for the truthbr /> and the fabrications to spread outbr /> in one’s mind. When there’s no morebr /> space, we grow desperate. You’ll askbr /> if practicing love for years in your mind,br /> prepares you for the moment,br /> if practicing to defend one’s lifebr /> is the same as living? You’llbr /> hole up, captive, in a hotel roombr /> for fifteen years and learn to findbr /> a man within you, which will provebr /> a painful introduction to the trancebr /> into which you were born. Betterbr /> to stay under the spell of your guilt,br /> than to forget; you’ve already releasedbr /> your pain onto the world; don’t believebr /> there’s some joy in forgetting.br /> There’s no joy in the struggle to forget.br /> And what appears as an endless verdant field,br /> only spreads across a building’s rooftop;br /> your peaceful sleep could be a fetal position,br /> which secures you in a suitcase in this field.br /> A bell rings, and you fall out of this luggagebr /> like clothes you no longer fit. Now what to do?br /> You remember when you were the manbr /> who fit those clothes, but you’ve forgotten thisbr /> world. Even forgotten scenes from your life,br /> leave shadows of the memory,br /> haunting your spiritbr /> until, within a moment’s glance,br /> strangers passing you on the street,br /> observe history in your eyes. Experiencebr /> lingers through acts of forgetting,br /> small acts of love or traumabr /> falling from the same place. Whetherbr /> memory comes in the form of a stonebr /> or a grain of sand, they both sink in water.br /> A tongue—even if it were, say, swornbr /> to secrecy; or if it were cut from one’s mouth;br /> yes, even without a mouth to envelopbr /> its truth—the tongue continues to confess./p>/div> p>br /> br> /body> /html>
