Maybe You Forgot

Maybe You Forgot
by Matt Pennington

Do you know who I am?

I can think of no better question.

It’s what I ask the stranger at the door, the old friend, the old man.

Posed to a group of teenagers in the car behind me it’s sweet and unexpected, and just as right.

I read it in books, I see it in billboards and imagine it in conversations with the people who speak to me at work. It seems to want to be there.

Do you know who I am?

I know that I’m asking myself, I know I only want to be known there, that scene, that one I live, nothing else.

But the quest, climbing the mountain to seek the old man, and when you say it you know he does not have the answer but you get a glimpse of it before it swims away, something about clean air and perspective, is deceptive.

Because beneath that clenched vision is a sore landscape, the exit point of dreams.

A terrible place, fear and lust.

And I can’t stop.

On silent waves I arrive and embrace it, damn the old man and the children, the elite, the better the raw, I’m not much but I am this.

Ask it ask it ask.

I’m not sure you know more than me.

But here I am, it is wet and real so there must be more than my stupid mess of lies, and finding out is the game, I get it, whatever swims in the deep trenches is the prize.

I want you to know I showed up, and I looked.

That’s it.

1 thought on “Maybe You Forgot

  1. Mike Pennington in his open book poem is searching from and for his soul’s explication in his confessional poem trying to explain his own existential predicament.

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