Identity

These goddamn songs are so heavily laden with memory

it is a wonder they don't simply fall, leaden, from the air

beneath of the weight of such acrid nostalgia.

Each time they abrade my ears they sketch

the rudimentary skeletons of never-were's onto the back

of my eyelids. My eyes are so f*****g sore.

I'm constantly dragged back into this repulsive painting of glaring, urgent colors.

The brush stroke is continuous, the fingers of passing days never tiring

in their incessant effort to display my mediocre portrait.

Following the singular stroke backwards is a masochistic exercise in self revulsion.

I want nothing more than to forget that mindless prick depicted in sea-greens and

cobalt blues. The dark purple-grey of incipient storm haunts me beneath layers of fresh paint,

the memory sloppily concealed beneath reddish gold and orange ocher.

I spend absurd amounts of time attempting to avert my eyes from this endless stroke of changing color.

My eyes are so f*****g sore.

Eventually the pigments will grey, the brush-hand growing sluggish as color drains from the crusty splay

of century old bristles. It seems almost a relief, an eventual respite from this mandatory remembering. 

I despise these songs, dripping with an array of colorful pigments, miniature paintings of paltry epochs that meant

everything to me.

They flit by, note by note, splattering dribbles of color, creating a crude pointillism portrait of a past self, a past you, an interaction of two broken individuals; a mess on the floor of my memory that makes my stomach churn.

I can't tear my eyes away --

and Jesus Christ are they sore.