Melting Times Ago

Memories or dreams. Which come first? With age, dreams often become the new memories.(Painting by Dali)

Melting Times Ago

 

Alone in the dark

 

An ice-strewn Austrian tundra

beats your picket-fenced white house

says who

whispers she

says me

bellows he

 

And so it goes

those endless dream nights atop the pillow

when melting clocks

invade pages of pinned butterflies

 

Up there beneath dusty cobweb corners

where shiny Buster Brown shoes of yesteryear

succumb to an attic-baked cracking of today

trapped memories hold vigil over

open cigar boxes of prized decoder rings

and crystal radio intrigues

 

The latest then

The oldest now

 

A Jack Armstrong comic book

astride the beloved Lionel train tracks

now but a figure eight

absent cars

absent pipe cleaner passengers

lamenting exotic travel

across Erector Set bridges

past Log Cabin stations

through paper-Mache tunnels

wide vistas of painted rock sunsets

 

Still oohing

Still aahing

 

Once again sitting here now

eyeball to eyeball

while my memory-laden hand roams

beneath our table’s checkered cloth

 

 

I smile

You giggle

 

My other liver-splotched hand

grips my Paris souvenir glass

half empty of caramel-colored dream juice

compliments Tennessee’s bottled black and white genie

 

 

All the while

my mouth gapes at the ready

as your manicured slender fingers

seductively tease with

tonight’s forked pieces of steak

while remnant sounds of Pratt and Whitney

hum from your lips

 

Red Barron’s brazen loops on high

meet my persuasive climbs from below

the rata tat tat of 50-millimeter pleasure

making smoked trails behind once more

as I chew yet another memory

to feed my insatiable slavery to swallowing

 

Alone in the dark

 

Through gauze-filtered journeys

we visit our attic wastelands

those fate determined canvases

not yet dry of oils

 

The satiate of YES whispers she

The voracious appetite of FOREVER bellows he

 

Melting times ago

inner workings ever wound tight

still ticking