Memory

When a situation has exceeded
its date of expiration in the
weak-boned refrigerator of your memory,
the noxious smell that looms
from thick barrier to thick barrier
is enough to send your cat's hairs
dropping like branches of fake pine.

It must be, then,
this awkward moment,
or maybe this childhood trauma,
the smell of it,
that has caused this grimace
sealed by the cement of self-castigation
on your incongruously human face each day.

The past is our psychotic ex-boyfriend,
the kinds that breaks the windows
when your eyes have collapsed shut,
when our pretty little souls
were at their most exposed
and our frail little doors
were rocking on their hinges.

Save me from him-
rinse me clean-
help me ripen
and never rot.

Give my senses refuge
from the siege leering
in the Expressionist slabs
of my pitch black Memory.