“Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love,
the things you are,
the things you never want to lose.”
Kevin Arnold
“We all have our time machines.
Some take us back, they're called memories.
Some take us forward, they're called dreams.”
Jeremy Irons
“A moment lasts all of a second,
but the memory lives on forever.”
Annonymous
Safeway Parking Lot“It's surprising how much of memory
is built around things unnoticed at the time”
Barbara Kingsolver
“I've never tried to block out the memories of the past,
even though some are painful.
I don't understand people who hide from their past.
Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are
now.”
Sophia Loren
“If you haven't cried, your eyes can't be beautiful.”
Sophia Loren
><>
I wonder what trash smells like
it's been a long, long time.
Since I was a kid
cleaning offices
with dad's employees. . .
Back then it smelled like
cigarettes
marinated in stale coffee.
It's smelled like paper and ink
and sometimes the bosses cigars.
Corpses of grounds
wrapped in shroud brown filters
fell with a sickening "clump"
raising cloudlets of cigarette ashes
that settled on everything
to be dusted,
and 'vac-ed' next:
The reason that trash
is taken
first.
Then you dust from
up
to down.
The cigarettes, I guess, are gone.
Can you still smell the desperation?
The sweat?
The swears?
What does today's trash smell like?
It smells like a paycheck
to the least of these
as it did to me.
It smelled like my father
living only in sense-memory.
I never knew how happy I really was
at 15
wheeling my bike back home
through the wakening
city's
morning.
I miss ya Dad.
cloudia
it's been a long, long time.
Since I was a kid
cleaning offices
with dad's employees. . .
Back then it smelled like
cigarettes
marinated in stale coffee.
It's smelled like paper and ink
and sometimes the bosses cigars.
Corpses of grounds
wrapped in shroud brown filters
fell with a sickening "clump"
raising cloudlets of cigarette ashes
that settled on everything
to be dusted,
and 'vac-ed' next:
The reason that trash
is taken
first.
Then you dust from
up
to down.
The cigarettes, I guess, are gone.
Can you still smell the desperation?
The sweat?
The swears?
What does today's trash smell like?
It smells like a paycheck
to the least of these
as it did to me.
It smelled like my father
living only in sense-memory.
I never knew how happy I really was
at 15
wheeling my bike back home
through the wakening
city's
morning.
I miss ya Dad.
cloudia
