The Fragility of Memory

Cities are like dreams,

Everything imaginable can be dreamed,

But every dream conceals a desire. Or a fear.

Cities are the work of the mind, they can't share their first delight more than once,

They only know departures not returns.

Perhaps these cities exist only in the shadow of our lowered eyelids,

Because memory is redundant and nothing but a zodiac of the mind's phantasms.

Contemplating with fascination their own absence, memory's images,

once fixed in words are erased.

When in life the dead outnumbered the living we reconstruct fragments of a fortress of indestructible leftovers.

Swaying through calendars of bygone years, withered flowers, submerging one in its own past.

Objects shifting within a given space,

Leaping from alive to dead less abruptly.

The inferno of the living lives in their past.