If you are what your memory says you are,
I wish for a shorter memory.
But the mind will not abide.

So I take a pink pill every morning,
75 milligrams of forgetfulness,
ER for extended release,
and all the selves I was and am
splinter out in branches branching,
and eventually I’m not the boy
who jumped off his father’s roof,
half-naked into a drift of snow,
blue with moonlight and cold
(who knows if I was angry or depressed
or just plainly afflicted with bravado).

Sometime after my faithless leap,
they first gave me the pills
and something for sleep.
I was just sixteen.
I refused to take the pills properly,
as prescribed. One night,
I ingested four or five days’ worth
and slept for 24 hours straight.

When I woke,
one whole day of life gone, evaporated,
I decided never to tell the truth again.
Now I’m taking the pills again,
with much more to forget
and less of a capacity for forgiveness.
Yet the days ahead seem more precious
and sleep somewhat less restful.

And in spite of the splintering,
or because of it,
I can see myself in everything,
in musk filled bedrooms of morning,
in crowds shuffling through half-hour lunches,
in pink and blue Masonic dusks,
in stars burning hard in night’s cold darkness.