Leave me alone

The day after they split up I decided
to sell my memory at a sidewalk sale.

A man ran a hand over my skull
‘Why do you want to get rid of it?’
I couldn’t tell him it had been stolen and smashed.
‘It’s served its purpose,’ was about right.
‘Memory can be very useful if it’s looked after,’ came the reply.
‘I was always careful with it, but they weren’t.’

His eyebrows did a dance with a schadenfreude smirk
and then he pressed a note into my hand.
‘Take it or leave it.’

I was sure I recognised him from somewhere
a bit player in a soap or a toothpaste commercial
and asked if he was an actor.
‘How would you know, son? You just lost your memory.’
‘I just thought..’ but he’d gone.

I bought something strong with the money
and sat dazed with a siren of foggy hunting horns
as elastic elephants made out across an orange sky.

Obviously I couldn’t remember my way home
so I found a spot in the park and made it mine
but then my face started appearing in newspapers
and people fought over me like I was their son.

A woman rushed at me in the police department
‘Are you out of your mind? I’ve been worried sick.’
‘I don’t know who you are,’ I replied,
‘but would you please LEAVE ME ALONE!’

In the end she took me to a nice apartment
and on the fridge was a picture of a man making a face.
‘Who’s this?’ ‘No one you need to know.’

Instinct’s far more powerful than memory
so I took the picture and ran from the apartment,
spent years washing up and cleaning floors
asking people if they knew the man in the picture.

I met a girl and we had kids
bought a place together and made it look nice
and then she found the picture.
‘You never make faces like this anymore.’

I left the next day.