i'm not me

i got four good reasons why i can't go back there again.

 

my mother sent me a green chest

i had as a child.

i popped the rusty hinges

and scrounged through the old junk

looking for bits of treasure,

like old porno mags

or comic books i could pawn.

stuck to the bottom,

by old chewing gum from some unopened

packs of baseball cards,

preserved in my memory and in this trunk

in indistinguishable forms

laid the diary of a madman.

for fun, i flipped through the first pages,

mostly cartoons of myself

commenting about the situation i was stuck in

on the date printed at the top of the page.

mick, i don't know what to do.

what do you think?

smacked me across the face

in brittle brown paint.

the window to my heart broke

and the harsh winter chills

that had been so successfully held back

flushed in to freeze my toasty soul.

i didn't read the rest

for i'd read them everyday after that

for months.

i folded the cover over,

put it back in the trunk,

and locked it away in the attic.

perhaps when the last marbles of sanity

have rolled from my cranium

i'll return the the text again

and look upon the past

with ignorant eyes

as i did when they were penned.

but until such a day,

may those words rot in their green tomb

as quickly as they did

on the tongue that promised them.