What you did
I don’t wish to remember.
I wish it were forgotten.
Bad memories
are like opening an old bag
and smelling something rotten
and only you smell it.
My mind was rotting
from what you did.
My body was rotting.
I had to tell it.
All the boring memoirs
and novels which attempt to tell
what is bad!
Wasn’t that the best time I ever had?
Didn’t you write me a poem?
I’m not remembering very well.
Everything rotten burns in hell
and that’s why smoke is everywhere, too.
But no smell from those hot, hot flames.
I even forget a few names.
You practiced cruelty. A beautiful face.
Beauty, too, I seek to erase.
There were things you didn’t do, too.
Or say. And I didn’t do. Or say. That’s
another thing about hell.
I’m not remembering things very well.
She remembered it as rape
but he swears she smiled.
Yes, that’s another thing about hell:
It’s hard to see.
And everything not seen is reviled.