Backward, Turn Backward

Quiet in this square, stained wallpaper room, haunting low-toned mirror and slow moving music dancing out the short ban radio. My mind seems easily to walk backwards the steps of years. Then profoundly reality is repeating my personal history with so many persons. I lived through their faces, voices, events like a movie. I do not need to meet them as they are today as some memories are sacred like fresh linen folded and put away like rivers to the sea like beach bone-dried sea shells waiting for generations to be collected. Remembered for what they were, and went like stamps on letters, traveled. Just to be put away in glass jars like red sweet jam held to sun light. You wonder beyond yourself and with those who knew you as they are constantly on edges, disappearing, again and again, taking a little of you with them as if until now you had never been here, hardly lived, even known by others today. Then fate like gravity soon  has its way of placing you alone in this room somewhere in this hour. And the mirror you look into is like an abstract image you cannot fix. Becoming more invisible  each time you take a peek. You hate to cut the lights off. Fearing next morning the mirror can no longer hold you. Its the quietness, isn’t it, that makes you think of these types of thoughts.

Stanley Noah has a BGS degree from the University of Texas at Dallas. He has been published in Verse Wisconsin, B.O.D.Y.,  Main Street Rag, South Carolina Review, Poetry Nottingham, and other  publications in the U.S.A., Britain, Canada, and New Zealand.