Richard James Allen’s ‘It Doesn’t Take Long to Forget’
It doesn’t take long to forget
Richard James Allen
our lusts and desires our shudders and urges our repetitions and revelations our confusions and disquiets our flickers and our secretions our dampnesses our rages our flurries our convulsions our hiccups our furtive glances our shy cover ups our stepping in for the kill our taking the bullet our intellectual vanities our sordid little pleasures our bones and tissues perfectly in tune or blithely forgotten our obsessive minds our broken minds our rising above our minds like departing space ships leaving their landing gear forever on the surface of far away planets our desultory attempts at this and that our failures to recognise our failures to clean up our messes to cut our losses our broken hearts our country and western songs the warmth of our beanies and the safety of our silly acquired gestures our capacity to recall the pitch of a string vibrating our cleverness and our manipulativeness and our faculty for imagining the work of god’s hands the climbing ropes that connect us as we fall our being born together and growing up together and never forgetting each other though we never think of each other the imprint of our personalities and the muffins that come apart if we try to put too many raisins into the mix our utter selfishness our desire for dick soft sweet hard long dick freed from the tyranny of rubber our lapping at each others torsos and soft crevices our need to put fingers hands wrists elbows biceps shoulders heads and nipples up past the fronds of dewy damp hair through the crease between the legs and into that deep cavity that ends in the universe our giving so much pleasure we almost forget about our own we don’t care about our own we see the smallness of our own our utter hopelessness the utter helplessness of our situation our wish to care for those whom we love above all else the completeness of our love for those we love our ability to love everything to be love our terror of dying alone our greater grief for those who are left behind our frantic attempt to pass on the best things the good things before it is too late our finding in giving the whole reason for our being our sheer blindness as to what has come before us and what will come after the prisons we have constructed of our certainty and uncertainty our difficulty in staying concentrated on what really matters or even what doesn’t the tiny frames of our technological great leaps forward the brass band parade of our self-delusions our willing gullibility to the spin the pitch the hype the fear in our eyes the market we have made of each other our specialty in selling and hating the signs we have set up that are meant to guide us the countless accidents we would rather not think about the numberless mistakes we have made and those we have yet to make the to do lists the shopping lists the prize lists the contact lists the wish lists the new year’s resolutions lists the love and hate lists that go out with the papers for recycling the innumerable turning points in our innumerate stories the band-aids we apply to our pains the self-help lines we forget we have left on hold while we are talking to someone we could love but don’t take the time to the lost in space reruns we struggle to set our set-top boxes to tape a year in advance the beautiful woman we catch a glimpse of through a window on our way home watching TV in her slippers alone the prayer that we may be useful before we perish.
