My Life is Not Your Illusion
Mark Crisci, SUNY Orange
Life is beautiful,
diving beneath memories
into alcoves
saturated in magical realism,
awake in a dream,
an illusion.
where time deceives truth
to betray the fiction is spins
My misconception is not yours,
though it once was,
A thirst to understand why forms this image,
And I've become so enamored by the illusion
—It must be true.
Shackled to a looming sense of foreboding,
I move forward,
hand-in-hand
with optimism and dread
of how time holds a delicate future
in fragile hands
that relentlessly spins
Jumping passed seconds,
leaping passed hours
the hands on clocks crafts moments into years,
While memories fight to preserve “a time”
Because time took so much already
It’s a strange combination
Optimism and Dread,
Together,
but it's reasonable considering how magnetic poles are entirely different,
Truly Opposing forces of nature.
Still if aligned just right,
Nature holds on with ever bit it’s their might,
Apart chaos ensues
Together,
controlled by balance,
energy drawn from opposites
Things change but I’ve staked my place,
bound to the past
I’ll weather the storms,
Tethered by a kite string
I’ll fool the storm to unknowingly leave the past behind
I've not seen one person outwit nature,
but that was their life
not mine.
Still,
I can't silence a notion that echoes
—swim in the chaos—
But we are the chaos and the illusion
the past
and future,
Untie the string or you’ll drown
when the rains fall
and water rises
and no one is there to draw
you out.