I will remember little to finally nothing of this poem in time
Writing is the act of pushing words like these out of your mind
For someone else to read or remember – or not
But in this birth of words arranged some way to make some sense
Of jumbled thoughts that run around my aging brain
Is the forgetting of them onto paper
This exercise of distancing them from me
It’s the way writing goes for every author I know
The longer ago you’ve packed your children off
The farther they’ve disappeared into the fog
To where you won’t remember their names
Those titles you labored over so to capture crystalline focus
And you will rarely be able even to summarize some piece without exhuming it
But on some chance night you may find
When you’re wandering the streets with a drunken friend
That to your great surprise he begins to recite something from memory
His spouting words an act of foreign intervention that prods your brain
And then you realize those words are yours come back to visit and say hello
Lanning Lee 