... (V)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ-fuFd4GXc&ab_channel=bonjr

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                I

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It was midnight, midnight

He knew

Because the blinking red-lines

Of his dollar store, digital alarm-clock  

Were flashing from his bedside table:

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11:59

11:59

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12:00

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12:01

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                II

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He wasn’t exactly accustomed to this room, it was strange to him

But he’d lived in many like it - he’d spent his teenaged years

In a room not unlike this one, quiet, often smokier

Than it ought to’ve been, with a midnight moon

Just like tonight’s

Peering in

From the blinds, swaying,

Beside the crack that he’d left in his window.

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He could breathe, then, and smell the summer flora

Through that gap: the smell of opening flowers,

Rhododendrons, azaleas,

Lilacs,

The peeling of arbutus, the waft of fresh cut grass.  

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He’d never really cared much for flowers

But he cared about that smell - cared about

The way it’d transport him,

The way it superimposed pictures

Against the ones he thought he’d forgotten.

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                III

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It smelt like that again, at midnight, tonight,

On this night - it smelled like he remembered it to smell,

Like summer, like growing things.

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It was a room both foreign and familiar to him

And he stepped, out, onto the balcony

With that strange cognizance  

Coating the inside of his nostrils, thickening

Against the walls of his throat,

The tired, crust and edges of his eyelids.

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He smoked cigarettes, now.

He didn’t before -

When he was a teenager he smoked something else -

And when he lit a fresh one, creaking from its place within the pack,

The smell that he’d attached himself to

Prior

Grew suddenly, eerily distant.

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And he puffed, and hoped that it’d come back to him.

But it didn’t. And the water he’d been holding behind his eyes

Crept gently to the surface. And he tucked his head,

Thought about how far he’d come

And puffed again.

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And he’d stand that way, in the moonlight,

Smoke billowing from the railing

And his nearby neighbors 

Wondering

After the sound of a dripping faucet,

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And he’d puff, and pretend there was a kitchen window

Open somewhere

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That wasn’t.

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IV

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And he wouldn’t know why, exactly, it would make him so sad.

But he knew it had to do with the smell -

With the imprinted youth that he associated with it,

The feelings that used to fester

Inside his old room, the sounds that would emanate

From beyond its enclosed walls.

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V

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He didn’t know why it made him so sad,

He wasn’t really sure of its nature.

Truth be told, it felt wrong to him -   

Like he was succumbing to an impulse that he shouldn’t have been -

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An old weakness that he’d since buried, held a wake for,

Nailed a makeshift cross into.

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And he’d bite down on the faucet,

And the cigarette, and the railing

Of his balcony, puff, as though it were

A pacifier

And it might alleviate

His mistake.

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                VI

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And he’d make a little pact with god,

Under the moonlight, there, 

Before going back inside …

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A promise, to revisit that smell

Every summer, from other rooms,

In other places,

So as lest not to forget:

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All the lengths he’d come

And all the things he’d seen,

He’d been given one more summer

And was alive, yet, for one more year

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With the means to feel another.

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