Cold Cases

I was sitting here just now
thinking about why I hadn't gotten up for my coffee yet
and how it must be cold in the pot already
and what was wrong that I have become so lazy.

And then I looked up to see my cup of coffee.
I must have filled it some time ago, and it's gone cold.
I have no recollection of walking to the kitchen.

This incident, extrapolated,
as I am driven to do from the smallest of things,
worries me.
It tells me that I have forgotten most of my life.
I feel as though I have left bits of my experience littered behind me.
Like skin peeled from a finger left on the edge of a table,
it's grown brittle without me.
Nothing's what it once was,
but the things I've neglected must be even less so.
It feels sociopathic to leave so much carelessly forgotten.

I wonder what I care enough about to recall.
I doubt there is much, if I am honest.

Yet I still savour painful things, unhealthy things, unnecessary things
like the soft Drum tobacco I used to pull apart
and press into a paper crease,
how it smelled like bacon and bread,
sometimes threading its way onto my tongue.
I remember long afternoons spent alone at a window in a sour blues bar,
but I think I am wrong.
There were people there, or a someone, but I've erased them.

My history's littered with cold cases,
and I worry about the fact that I don't mind the holes so much.

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The above poem is a response to Amy Turn Sharp's call for 5-minute breakfast poems on Fridays during the month of April.

Comments

[Noel]

I *love* this. I think you described so perfectly what so many of us feel, being in fast forward all the time ... and how sometimes the things that help us hit "pause" aren't always the best things. So instead we try to find new things to help us slow down. Healthy things, like yoga and mediation and good books.

(Isn't it funny, though, how smoking, aside from being terrible for you, is such a good way to STOP? Stop your day, stop rushing, that is? I miss my after dinner cigarette on the porch in the summer time. Sometimes I felt like I was breathing the whole day in and letting it go again. You can try just sitting there without a cigarette, I guess, but it's not quite the same.)

[The Flying Chalupa]

I love the concept of five-minute breakfast poems, early and raw and simple and foggy but also sharp.

And Cold Cases. The line "This incident...worries me" - wonderful. And of course, killer ending.

[Amy]

beautiful insights on a Friday morning. It would be interesting to turn the table on this and pay hyper attention to everything. Noticing all the little details. Noting them. Trying on the other shoe.