My Body Still Remembers

My body still remembers

the frozen waltz of time:

your rings instead were embers;

your fingers, they were nine.

My body still remembers

my penumbral sense of shame;

the solitude of mercy;

your rancid stench of pain.

My body still remembers

the protean shriek of death;

the degeneracy of escape;

how in the morning, you’d defect.

My body still remembers,

but my mind, it soon forgets;

and shields itself with torpor,

with hallucinations and regrets.

*

From "You, Who Creates" by Daniel Viragh.