The pasts: some profiles

The past loves spooning,

backing a cold back,

flooring a void,

dipping into a throat, so yum with swallowed tears and snot.

Scraping aching insides. Gutting guts.

The past hasn’t time for algebra,

for irrelevant times. Just add, inexorably, and divide.

And as for “the past is the past”,

that smug advisor rich with inexperience

is blubbering, rubbing its sore arse

while the past can't help but prance on its boots past.

The past wafts not perfume, but pot pourri--

crinkled petals

memory-crenulated touch

mould and rot and ashes

love gone off

blood-red pashes

nostril-stinging taunts

the metallic smell of eggplant that is love.

Rhubarb-crumble friendship

gamey snipes

the fresh itchy sweat from crushing a lawn when shadows fall,

the seaweed ozone of the very young,

and as though exhumed, that dank catacombic breath--the last horrific rattle of the too-soon gone.

The past is that clingy, loving but not quite lovable-enough guilt-inducing friend. The pet, the brat, the insomniac who will not die yet won't lie still awake without attendant present company,

The past is the torturer too many cannot do without.

Yet sometimes the past,

hurtful, howling, whimpering,

"lives" if you could call it that,

never quite believing its state possible: excised, abandoned as, for all it added up to,

waste.