archives empty

but it's hard to talk about a closed diner being made into an auto parts store; being made so completely into an auto parts store that i have to check my location on a map

i say it's hard to talk about it when there are kids in Afghanistan, you know, whose whole and complete childhoods are rubble now—

the ache of being
unable to appease memory by visiting an old scene

some of my friends are intentional orphans by which I mean they do not speak to their parents not because their parents are dead but because their parents are so horrible to their memories that they are pretending their parents are dead, and these friends sometimes call me and mourn that there is nobody to remember it all.

the way a mound of dirt might be all that's left of a city over which splendid men and divine women schemed and planned and bled for a thousand years—maybe not even that, say

we think there will be more memories because of photographs, and records, and data,
but i tell you it is not so. Nothing
hear me, nothing absolutely at all will fill
the empty archives where we laid our past

12/24/23