The past holds me by the ankles,
Dragging me across the floor
Through the wreckage
Of my desperate decisions.

There is no destination,
Nowhere to drop me,
Or leave me to bleed
After the debris of memory
Has pierced me
Like a nail through a tire.

The fixed,
Glass eyes of the past
Stay locked into the dark distance behind us,
Retreating into reminiscence.

In the moments when I am strong enough,
I twist to face forward,
In search of the present
And something sturdy to hold onto,
Lest time immemorial flay me
On the rubble of my insatiability.

Just yesterday,
The tearing of skin
And willful deterioration into anamnesis
Came to me as effortlessly,
As sweetly as wine on my tongue
Washing down an ambrosial pill.

But today,
Though it would be easier to concede
To times' torment,
I aspire to want a grounding in actuality.
Praying I find that now
Fills me with a more substantive contentment
Than then.

But everything I grip
Rips from its roots
And disintegrates like a forgotten semblance
In my frenzied hands.

For how am I to know
What lies beneath the dirt?
How can I anticipate the integrity
Of his assurance
And avoid shallowly entrenched
Semi-permanence?

There is nothing but eternity
To continue falling into.
So with tepid hope
And resigning repetition
I keep looking
And I keep grasping
At tethers showing tenable-enough sincerity.

The hours will pass anyway
And, for now,
I retain the belief
That my languid attempts
At thwarting history's absconding of my contemporaneity
May eventually prevail
In standing me upright,
Existant in currency.

Then I may turn
And face remembrance as I please,
With ankles rubbed raw
And stationary feet.

I can visit the displays
Of bygone horror
Without becoming part of the atrocity
Again.

Clutching fast
To the most invariable helve
I've yet found,
I only fear that the past
May rip me in two.

Leaving me halved
And but a fragment
Of the entirety that I was
Before recollection animated
With retribution against me.

I beg to heaven
That he possess me
With the same fervor that I cling to him
And that his coherence
Stays material enough to
Wrap my despairing fingers around.