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.
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.