SOLITARY LETTERS - Photographs; Memories

Photographs; Memories

Someday you'll grow old.

You'll look your mother in her monochrome eyes because all you have left are photographs:

Little paper gateways to memories,

Two dimensional portals to what once was and may never be.

You will hold them in your hands but you won't be able to feel the skin and curves of your ex-lover's body,

Or the wrinkles sketched around your father's eyelids like tiny water ripples.

Only then will you realize that memories are songs we composed in the journey of growing up,

But only a few of us can remember.

Some of us have burnt the paper with which we once wrote the lyrics,

Some of us have hung them up on the walls of our minds and put symbolic frames around their edges,

Just so we do not lose them,

Just so we do not forget.

In the end we are nothing but memories;

Etched on the chalkboard of those whose love we are worthy of,

Sometimes in a photo album bounded by paperback.

©Samuel Jr.

You stir up rage and bewilderment within me till my eyes let out the smoke.

I showed them everything which you were though you never did acknowledge me.

I brought you out and taught you to those who didn't know the texture of your name.

Yet I am still the flesh you choose to wound and leave watching from the terrace.

You have let the ones I led to you dwell inside your mansion and feed with the dishes which once belonged to me.

I have become the same stranger I was before I met you,

But with a little chain of discoloured memory.

©Samuel Jr.

Samuel Adeyemi (Samuel Jr.) is a poet and a spoken word artist. He currently studies English and Literature at Federal University, Lokoja. A lover of music, sports and art, He hails from Kogi state and resides in Abuja.

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