Wedded with My Memory: Revised

Wedded with My Memory

I choose to unite with safe Memory,

The only sense that yields at my request.

She raises walls against my enemy,

Time the Ruthless, whose legions never rest.

I cling to her as Months and Years march by,

Encompassing the fortress where I lie,

And wait for the pain Time will force on me

When he bursts in, a most unwelcome guest.

Time, himself, will seep over my body

And leave his mark on a tenuous thing.

My spry limbs will become weak and knotty,

My vision, a blur, and my ears will ring

At every noise above a whisper.

With Memory, my motions stay crisper,

And even when my hindsight is spotty,

I hear the songs the mermaids used to sing.

When I sleep, she comes to me in my dreams

And brings a thousand faces from my past.

They all know who I was, and so it seems,

I cannot meet a stranger in the vast

Wastelands of cumulative Memory.

Time is stumped by the inconsistency

Because we can bend instants to extremes

And cause fleeting seconds to last and last.

If we choose, she can watch me in the womb

Though I try to avoid such confusion.

I’d rather have her stand over my tomb

And witness against my life’s conclusion.

We can kiss again the first girl I loved

In a reformed time that will not be moved.

For my whole life, Memory creates room

In the folds of my mind’s evolution.

Therefore, Memory’s who I’ll take to bed,

And, though I’ll have no children with my wife,

Our progeny will live inside my head,

And all who see good sense will think I’m rife

With proper dreams for our unborn children.

Besides who knows what will or might have been

If I had married Memory instead

Of circumventing Time all of my Life?