I have carried regrets ~
the maybe’s and what if’s ~
carried them carefully tucked
in my pocket or back pack,
sheltering them
as though they were sugar -
if they got wet they would
melt and dissolve away ~
What if they did?
What would be missing?
Merely a shadow ~
only the weight of the past.
What wisdom will it impart ~
that shadow of past lives that
deserve compassion,
compassion for who I was then,
even if it was only
yesterday or 40 years ago.
So I take the lint from my pockets,
the crumpled tissues from my back pack
where old regrets reside.
Setting them out in the sun
I watch them thaw, dissolve and evaporate
into the nothingness that they always were.
If I’m not careful, I may just catch a tiny
piece of regret and just before it vanishes;
hide it in the folds of my life.
Yet when sunlight leans over my shoulder,
the shadow pen writes with me
in a new harmony of words.
“The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering.”
~ Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation
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