Old Boy poem – A. Van Jordan poems

If one rainy night you find yourself
leaving a phone booth, and you meet a man
with a lavender umbrella, resist
your desire to follow him, to seek
shelter from the night in his solace.
Later, don’t fall victim to the Hypnotist’s
narcotic of clarity, which proves
a curare for the heart; her salve
is merely a bandage, under which memories
pulse. Resist the taste for something still
alive for your first meal; resist the craving
for the touch of a hand from your past.
We live some memories,
and some memories are planted. There’s
only so much space for the truth
and the fabrications to spread out
in one’s mind. When there’s no more
space, we grow desperate. You’ll ask
if practicing love for years in your mind,
prepares you for the moment,
if practicing to defend one’s life
is the same as living? You’ll
hole up, captive, in a hotel room
for fifteen years and learn to find
a man within you, which will prove
a painful introduction to the trance
into which you were born. Better
to stay under the spell of your guilt,
than to forget; you’ve already released
your pain onto the world; don’t believe
there’s some joy in forgetting.
There’s no joy in the struggle to forget.
And what appears as an endless verdant field,
only spreads across a building’s rooftop;
your peaceful sleep could be a fetal position,
which secures you in a suitcase in this field.
A bell rings, and you fall out of this luggage
like clothes you no longer fit. Now what to do?
You remember when you were the man
who fit those clothes, but you’ve forgotten this
world. Even forgotten scenes from your life,
leave shadows of the memory,
haunting your spirit
until, within a moment’s glance,
strangers passing you on the street,
observe history in your eyes. Experience
lingers through acts of forgetting,
small acts of love or trauma
falling from the same place. Whether
memory comes in the form of a stone
or a grain of sand, they both sink in water.
A tongue—even if it were, say, sworn
to secrecy; or if it were cut from one’s mouth;
yes, even without a mouth to envelop
its truth—the tongue continues to confess.

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Poems in English 

• Robert Burns: A Poet’s Welcome To His Love-Begotten Daughter: The First Instance That Entitled Him To The Venerable Appellation Of Father by Robert Burns
• Robert Burns: Epistle To John Rankine: Enclosing Some Poems by Robert Burns
• Robert Burns: Reply To An Announcement By J. Rankine: On His Writing To The Poet, That A Girl In That Part Of The Country Was With A Child To Him. by Robert Burns
• Robert Burns: Ballad On The American War: by Robert Burns
• Robert Burns Country: In The Character Of A Ruined Farmer: by Robert Burns
• Robert Burns: On My Ever Honoured Father: by Robert Burns
• Robert Burns: On My Own Friend And My Father’s Friend, Wm. Muir In Tarbolton Mill: by Robert Burns
• Robert Burns: On James Grieve, Laird Of Boghead, Tarbolton : by Robert Burns
• Robert Burns: Epitaph On Wm. Hood, Senr., In Tarbolton: by Robert Burns
• Robert Burns: Remorse: Fragment by Robert Burns
• Robert Burns: Wha Is That At My Bower-Door: by Robert Burns
• Robert Burns: Green Grow The Rashes: A Fragment by Robert Burns
• Robert Burns: My Nanie, O: by Robert Burns
• Robert Burns: Song Composed In August: by Robert Burns
• Robert Burns: The Rigs O’ Barley: by Robert Burns
• Robert Burns: I Dream’d I Lay: by Robert Burns
• Robert Burns: Poor Mailie’s Elegy: by Robert Burns
• Robert Burns: Death And Dying Words Of Poor Mailie, The Author’s Only Pet Yowe., The. An Unco Mournfu’ Tale: by Robert Burns
• Robert Burns: John Barleycorn: A Ballad : by Robert Burns
• Robert Burns: My Father Was A Farmer: by Robert Burns

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