We Are Ships Crashing in the Night

And I can’t save us

Ben Kassoy
Human Parts

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Photo: Sundaram Ramaswamy/Flickr

My memory

of you is like money in a glass case in the sea: beautiful, untouchable, distorted, seductive, sinking. Or maybe it’s money dropped out of a helicopter into the sea and I’m on some twisted game show frantically grasping for bills and trying not to drown.

I can’t

save you now; you’re at my memory’s mercy. Five weeks or 22 months chopped and screwed, laced with kaleidoscope dust, remixing the proportions of the past; a delusional narrator describing the sensation of my recollection’s fingers on the edges of reality.

Sometimes time

is a healer and sometimes it’s a weapon. I will use each second to destroy you.

I try

once again to recall your face, which feels like digging up a time capsule, dusting it off and spinning in a dozen circles, then putting it in a blender and seeing if it tastes like what I remember, which I know doesn’t really make sense, but neither does the fact that your face, the one that’s as elusive as it is beautiful, appears somewhere between “seatbacks” and “tray tables” and, like Mufasa in the clouds or Jesus on a potato chip, emerges in my diluted Sprite, and suddenly your lips feel permanently branded on mine, so I’m…

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Ben Kassoy
Human Parts

Poet, writer, author of THE FUNNY THING ABOUT A PANIC ATTACK -- available now! www.benkassoy.com/books