Poem To Be Forgotten
By Jehangir Saleh
Written: May 17, 2005

You say you love me
But it is nothing I can hold
Those times when you protect me –
Protect is definitely the word I want to hear –
I believe you, softly
But doubt myself
Have a [I] created something
At the expense of writing the story
I always thought I was meant to write

But I regress¹
It’s what we do²

Your arms around me
Like a national flag
Of a war torn country
The deep eyes of its peoples
Well [will] never really see again

I will send you

¹regress verb – to return to an earlier or less advanced form or way of behaving
²In this stanza you are saying that you are returning to a previous point or feeling, but I don’t understand how the line “It’s what we do” fits in here

Off from these lines
With a fading of your memory
There is a way on
But contrary to what he will tell you
We are the enemy

The intellect persists
Where the heart is destroyed
Like a tortured animal
Left to die

So promise yourself
To remember nothing
And come with me
There are³ many lives
To destroy
With what we thought
Was love⁴

³there was an extra space between “there are”
⁴Poem To Be Forgotten is really good. I feel it becoming stronger at the end. I love the wording of the last two stanzas. It seems to send the clearest message to me.

AMENDMENT TO WHAT WAS FORGOTTEN

This is a fragment
A moment separated from the rest of time
Which occurred tonight on a⁵ the westbound train
platform
A kind solemn gesture
In a time of war

I rode the train to my home
Forgetting
But this time the more thoughts I let decay
Into the air
The more I was filled
With a wholesomeness and awe
Like those moments when you see a tree
And try to imagine its creator

I felt
I felt
War is so numb
Forgetting the mama’s
Skull I cracked with her sons hammer
Unused life and rice spilling on the kitchen floor

⁵“a” or “the” should be removed

There⁶ lines are not violent
They are as real
As I can be

They are trying so hard
Inking⁷ bleeding through the page
Trying so hard to be free

In a place where
We have no concept of that word
F r
E ee⁸
It falls apart
A time where bad poetry is still poetry

I will be punished
For these false stolen moments
For these false lines

Run with my words
See how far you get

⁶did you mean “these lines are not violent”?
⁷“Ink bleeding through the page”?
⁸I love how you did free, but why is there an extra e, and why is it capitalized?

Before you
And these lines
Are
destroyed^9/10

⁹I love the last two stanzas!
¹⁰Amendment To What Was Forgotten seems more even in flow than Poem To Be Forgotten. The darkness in both is apparent. Is the message of your poems that love destroys words?