The Ghosts

Love, Gustav Klimt

And yet, there you are again

A fraction of a smile, a handful of a gesture, the fabric of some clothes

some soft music that plays on the background,

coming from an old and beaten radio in the basement;

a song that brings me back here,

to these memories

I long try to bury.

Even so — those fractures of you,

so transparent, thin, blurry

are not where and who you are.

So many faces, so many profiles,

not only due to the dimly-lit room of my chambers,

or from the corner of my eye,

all those faces in one — how could I understand it?

How could I read it?

Every time they would tell me something different;

and what I had before thought endearing,

now I realise was a counterfeit

of something that could have been real,

but never was.

All those ghosts I see on the street,

all those fragments of something that could have been,

all those memories that are incongruent with the present,

all of those I keep in a box

in the basement, deep down.

Next to where the broken radio lies and shouts

it’s dementiated songs

that it insists to sing

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even though no one is there to listen to,

even though no one is there to dance to.

That box of memories and touches and feelings and what I’ve dreamt of

that happened, but at the same time that were make-belief,

that box, one day will be burried

and it will rot, forgotten

and maybe like this, I can get rid of these ghosts

who are always there, behind my back

just around the corner.

Here I wait for this funeral

of not a body, of not a person,

this funeral of an illusion

that I was told was true,

until the very end,

when I was told it was not anymore.

Here I wait,

humming quietly to the songs of the radio,

from a song we shared,

a song that makes me think of you

and that you once said — remember?- that your days began and ended at the same place

with thoughts of me.

I hum quietly to the beat of this song,

not wanting to wake up those memories,

those memories that haunt me,

as ghosts, that follow me on the street,

those memories which I locked down inside the box

the box in the basement,

that waits for it to be burried.

And yet here I wait,

here I wait.