3

The human memory is violent tool.
It takes just one spark of feeling to set a chain in motion,
that almost knocks you off your feet.
Guilt is a strong one, especially when it feels, on the surface,
to be completely unfounded.

I feel like I did then, so I taste what I tasted then,
my skin contracts like it did then,
The weight that pulled down from behind my lungs
now pulls in the same way.
The smell, the colour of the air, and the unflinching sense of oncoming doom,
all as vivid as they were then, and the time after that,
and will be again.
The same bubble rests in the bottom of my stomach,
keeping me from sitting at ease.

Soft flesh, pink air and a dry mouth.
Strained eyes and an unexplained smell of burning.
Every step feels like another on the slow trot to the gallows
and I really can’t explain why,
this is two thousand and eleven
and I am pretty much the model citizen.
Yet I still sentence myself to death.

Again and again,
coming back to a feeling I cant shake,
stuck on a loop
Destined to re-live every feeling I know,
always ending in the guilt.
Perhaps this is purgatory.