Thursday, November 24, 2011

Thanksgiving and The Archaeology of Self

December 2 Poem

Sometimes in moving forward with our lives, we forget about who we used to be. Do you know this feeling? Man, I thought I was past it. I was looking through the internet and found a poem I had written a long time ago, published in American Poetry Review.

A relic from a time where I was without money, suffering in the ways only a 29 year old can believe in suffering, full of the certainties that there was no future and no past capable of redeeming the life I was living.

And now I am here, wherever here is. How strange to look back on that person. How fucked up it all is, seeing the shadow of who you once were, burned into some virtual pavement.

I guess with Thanksgiving I have been thinking about what and who I have to be grateful for, a lot, for some reason. The person who wrote that poem. I am grateful he existed, that I can visit him in this way, remember that other things used to be important to him, and perhaps they still should be.

Happy Thanksgiving.