Nostalgia Bites

Nineteen twenty-nine and the Great Depression
But my eyes are misted over with nostalgia
The decades have digested the hunger and the sorrow
And my past is a Utopia and you sit with me
Undoing that complicated cat’s cradle that are
The stories I tell you. My history, for they are
Permissible lies. A kind of comfort blanket
I wrap around myself. A land in which I was Queen
And I always played the role of heroine. Perpetually
At the centre of my own epic tales
And I despise

The pity in your eyes
That disbelieving smile playing around your lips
Why did you come? Why are you here?
I remember explosions, muffled by time,
Remote now, clattering deep within my head
Embedded, the pulsating ground rose up to greet me
Carnage without agony. Numbed now, I no longer feel
That venom toward the enemy. For every village
Has been wiped off the map. And death’s discharge
Is so distant now. And I wonder if it was
Really me who witness all those atrocities
And I wonder if they really happened

And your eyes
Those disbelieving eyes, cannot help me now
I am ancient and incapable. How could I
Have ever been young. And time ticks by
You have accepted the inevitability of my demise
And you wince and you turn away from the thought
That someday it will be you who will be sitting
Where I am sitting now, wondering
If I was ever really here at all.