For years, decades, the Lost Things were my minor muse. Eminently recognizable, impossible to grab a hold of. There is a type of poem that is mostly just a grocery list, words inter-connected by little more than you have placed them together and making them a group. I don’t feel the lost things so much these days.
There’s a couple of possible reasons; this whole area is lost in time and I’m not even sure that’s entirely true objectively but it doesn’t matter I am the subject of the subjectivity, just as I was with the lost things as a minor muse. You can’t wear a mantle when you’re under a mantle, well, I suppose you can but what would be the point? Another possible reason is that there is as much to be said for what is kept than what is lost. The meaningless little things we hang on to, maybe not meaningless exactly but things that we’ve long wrung out any possible meaning to and we keep out of habit. A different sort of lost thing; lost in plain site.
I don’t know, I tried to write a flash. It came out like a story. It’s a lie, a façade, I don’t really have a story in me. Ok, I have a hundred stories in me, today I don’t feel like telling stories. I don’t feel like thinking about lost things, not abstract lost things and for damn sure not concrete lost things.
The hospital kept my dad long enough to meet the requirement for a transfer to acute care at the facility where we will likely transfer him to assisted living. An obvious concrete lost thing for him is his motherfucking mind. I imagined for a minute cleaning up the stuff of his. I stopped thinking about it. I don’t understand it and there’s no one who can explain it because the guy who understood what was kept doesn’t remember, doesn’t know.
I’m not brimming over with regret, remorse, fear, sorrow any of that stuff. Maybe I will be, I sort of doubt it. I’m a little pissed off at myself for allowing this to happen so passively. I don’t mean raging against the dying of the light, I mean I could have started arranging this months ago instead of waiting for it all to sort of be a really slow accident, a low speed crash, a sliding down the wall. I’ll get over it.
I’ll get over the kept things too, but I’m hoping not before I either understand them or make peace with not understanding. I don’t mean for my own mental health. This here, what you’re reading, this is my substitute for mental health, for dreams (real ones ya nut bags, I don’t remember what I dream, I don’t write this shit in lieu of goals and aspirations). Sometimes it works out well, sometimes it doesn’t. That’s why you get this, dear fucking diary, and not the safe little story line of a flash I banged out.
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