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The Perversity of Forgetting 
or
why pain itself is much simpler to forget than painful memories
1.
Because such memories love openings & are remarkably capable of compression,
intruding through the smallest cracks, worm-holes, skin-pores.
2.
Because their skins are covered with a sticky residue like figs or the honeyed
sheaves of baklava.
3.
In their palaces, unlike the great Palaces of Memory so esteemed by the Greeks, in
their palaces the windows are never shut, the doors never
latched.
4.
Because they prefer slopes to plateaus & thus always roll back down even if
we
haul them to the mind's higher elevations.
5.
Because they are linked with the antipodes of death & birth, especially the
former.
The dead forget every place they've lived or visited, the newborn only the womb &
perhaps the remote gush of a fountain.
6.
They prefer the blooming landscape of a child, whose thick groves of flowers
are
more conducive to hiding than the relatively sparse woodlands of the more mature.
7.
Like plucked hair, weeds, & cancer cells, they tend to grow back, given
their depth
& stubborn tenacity of their roots.
8.
Similarly, they are close kin of shed body-fat.
9.
The biochemistry of their stains renders them impossible to remove completely
unless one uses lethal detergents.
10.
In their own way they are friendly, so much so that their hosts might not only invite
them inside but offer food & drink long past midnight, swapping
reminiscences—heard any good ones lately—& amusing moments. For they are,
after all, well-known as family.
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