A Mid-Lenten Meditation of Honest Remembrance

Note: During these days of coronavirus/COVID-19 social distancing/self-isolation, I find myself, perhaps, inexorably, approaching the threshold of my shadow-world.

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There is a place in my mind I fear to go.

Through the door to my history’s labyrinthine hallways

where once,
whilst penning many a life’s chapter or verse,
I, in foolish pleasures having partaken,
was mindless of the measureless,
endless costs of judgments mistaken…

Entire neighborhoods of my subconscious
populated by caricatured poses of shadowy memories
that, evanescent, arise as anguished wisps in dead-of-night dreams
and tread as blight
across the clean, freshly fallen snowy terrain
of how I’d like to remember that time-ago called “when,”
of how I’d like to remember me;
but which cannot, can ne’er be.