Really like this, Ken, particularly the beginning with the wonderful opening rhymes of broken/frozen and then the shift from Hamlet to ripe current vernacular. Should it be a full stop after 'ashes' rather than comma? Seems to need a longer pause here for the lead up to wonderful 'dessicated'. Latter part might stand compression I thought on first reading but then it's hard to see what to cut or revise. For me, the fifth stanza perhaps? 'that part'? 'Nasty garden' at the end is good again.
Bill
> On 11 Sep 2014, at 12:49 am, Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> I don't even try to define them anymore, just that it's very weird-feeling. A la recherche de temps perdu or something like that.
>
> OLD GIRLFRIEND, SO LONG AGO, MET AGAIN
>
> The camera in my head is broken
> so you've been flash-frozen,
> the time is not out of joint,
> simply then snapped into place perpetual.
>
> Flash-frozen, instant coffee, the piece of meat
> you were back then, to me and to yourself.
> "I can't love anyone," you told me,
> "but you can fuck me anyway."
>
> I could and did and it was ashes,
> we both fell down, dessicated.
>
> But today, passing on the street,
> I almost did not know you.
> How many years?
> I'd pinch you to be sure that
> this is not a dream, but
> you'd probably call the cops.
>
> Gone beyond 1968 you see me,
> and I remember that part
> without memory of sensation.
> It's my broken camera.
>
> I should have added
> 50 years to your face,
> grayed your hair, given you
> extra pounds and maybe
> even stretch marks.
>
> But then I'd have to re-vision me,
> look anew, look now, at what I have become.
> Vanity remains unchanged, but sadness grows,
> a nasty garden of withered regrets,
> of forgetting even what I've remembered.
>
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