Dark Blue History

Some days we belong to our past more than to the present.  Depending on our relationship with the past, memory can be a a pleasant place to revisit, or it can be a barren land that you tried to leave years ago.  I wrote this poem grappling with the hold emotion from the past has over me and my sadness over still being a prisoner of this past from time to time.  It is a poem written from a place of little hope.  I used to dwell there full time. These days I only visit  occasionally and, thankfully, it feels like an alien land that is no longer my home.

Dark Blue History

So many unhappy memories,

Years of grief sealed deep within,

All it takes is one jolt--

And they come surging upwards

As if you are a great tree

Whose roots have tapped

Into a wellspring of bitterness

Why so little joy to be found in this past?

You don’t want to return there,

But memory after memory

With its attendant pain

Rises unbidden;

The shame of rejection

The despair of being unloved;

Standing alone in this grief for so many years you have lost count

This is hardly your life now,

But in the face of this dark history

The scale tips easily;

Then the light becomes something weightless

And it is  impossible to redress the balance

The only remedy

To exist outside of time,

Forever suspended in the absolute now.

Is this another name for death?