You cannot resurrect
Memories
That
Have wedged themselves between
The future and the past,
Yet are too fragile to
Exist within the present—
You cannot
Resurrect
The way you felt
(The way you felt invincible)
In remembering mannerisms that outlive
The moment.
You cannot reconcile
The heart's defiance,
Deliberately giving yourself to
A void not of your own,
Gathering gathering gathering
Sentiment and stitching it into
The fabric of your narrative,
When you should have
Gathered your senses in a pail
And lowered them down into a wishing well...
You cannot resurrect what never
Wholly, entirely, unconditionally
Existed without
Your warm breath
Encompassing it in meaning,
Feeding an emptiness not of your own making.
Yet,
You cannot escape it either;
So it lingers:
Your regrets, your self loathing, your incapacity
To accept that
There is no way to breathe life back into
Something that was dead before you
Pressed its surface with your fingers,
As if you, yourself could
Impose a pulse upon what you could not
Understand.

Understand this,
Time will not resurrect
That which you long for in the night,
It will not reconcile
The incongruent nature
Of desire:
To feel
To be numb
To hold on to
To understand
To forget
To destroy
To save

Save like a wilted flower pressed between
Two aged, yellowed pages: present only in its allusion to the past.
You do not wish the flower a different fate,
To fill its dried up veins with green, pulsating life,
To have it become what it once was.
You cannot reconcile the purpose of its carefully preserved petals.
You do not question its existence,
Question why it has been uprooted from the ground,
Why it has changed shapes while remaining a flower.
It was never meant to remain the way it was.
And so, it exists
As an indicator of what it once was,
As a reminder that it will never be again,
As memories do
When we press them down
Between the past and the future,
Until like the dried up flower,
They cease to change,
As we continue.