Memory: Atlantis

The first time I went over
my handlebars, I expected
a soggy crunch.

What I got, instead,
was a lifetime of weightless
confusion, followed by the
latticed cuts and green stains
of nettled hedge.

I had been practicing "wheelies,"
I had been trying to "jump the curb."
Now, I find it hard to imagine words
that would feel more foreign
to my tongue.

Where were we, exactly,
when you last put a blade
of grass to your lip
and tried to whistle
around the sour earth?
What of the callus where you gripped
the tree limb?
And what cries out inside you now, when
you remember?

I have long argued,
argued with great spittle-flinging
red faced
unmarked bottle
intensity:

there is
only one disease;
one scourge
that strips and offends our collective conscience:
a sickle-celled ineptitude
of recollection,
thick
and slow
and decadent.

Memory is the lost kingdom
or will be,
in the ragged centrifuge
of the future.

I will fume and spray before it, before
the grandest end of the grandest story:
one human remembers another,
remembers a taste, remembers the
fall that precedes the bush,
until I cannot.
In that moment
when I am torn out of my own life,
when my mind deserts
my friends, my home, and my name

in that moment,
when I am finally and
utterly lost to you, please:
tuck my blankets tight
against the darkness
and define "wheelie".