Through the Whole Night of Your Life

You practice dark arts of forgetting
To sidestep dangerous memories.
Don’t curate them like cuddly monsters

Who could behave themselves if always
Kept directly in your line of sight.
Memory isn’t a boiling pot.

It doesn’t work like a steam engine.
It’s not a substance or a surging
Something that might be repressed. It’s tracked

Like a path through the grass. Tramp through it
Enough times, it gets wider, deeper,
Becomes a desire line, kills more plants.

You don’t have to always take that path.
You can’t heal the woods by exposing
And treading back over the trees’ roots.

Put a little fencing up or not.
Just consider there are many ways
To wander through grasslands and forests.

Forgetting and memory alike
Have their own cost-benefit waltzes.
You don’t have to dance with who brung you