Tal Como éramos

Memory is an apparition of attrition, it spends like tokens at a car wash or arcade,
pragmatic and purposeful or urgent and impulsive.

If it’s true then I’m a collector of ghost coinage. Folder upon mental folder, teaming with ducats and doubloons
that I thumb over
like a parent with a photo album of an outlived child.

Things you can’t get back, reeking so much of regret
that you can’t help but gag and choke up.
Emotional onion slicing, you know what fumes will do, but you push the cutlery on through anyway.

Nostalgia, an ambrosia, flows so freely that the damned inundation can’t ever hoped to be dammed.