I have rebuilt so many times. Every
love is a dispair.  I have room for
none but the lonely, the broken
pedestrians of time's sidewalks.

How old I am is irrelevant.  I
am tuned to the rhyming night.
I listen to the frogs mating in the
swamp, the crickets and, in
season, the cicadas who do not
love but for a breath.  

My house is now a ramshackle
of old memories, songs that
burn my fragile skin, and the
sloe gin of my youth.

You retain me, and in the end,
the currency of my life
is writ of you.

I have rebuilt so many times,
love's fires ring the sidewalk
around my memory .
I write of the past that
is in runes.  My thoughts enact
in me that youth that was always
yours to have and to hold.

We are all phantoms of our pasts.
We are rubbed with it. For you
my skin sings of the tight tan
you knew

once upon a time.

Caroline Shank