words

i found many things i thought were lost
but none that i was looking for.
yellow slips of paper with my thoughts from long ago
now strewn about with other trash in a clear plastic bag,
bills and letters,
numbers handwritten whose meaning now lost,
an empty box of condoms, a valentine,
still not what i was looking for.

my search spilled out across the room
into the closet, into boxes long dead,
treasure chests, time capsules,
my hands once again touching these things
that meant so much to me before
yet now exist only when they are before me.

notebooks, many pages of words that
once held so much promise,
now bitter disappointments
and reminders of what may have been.

still none of these things,
though good for passive nostalgia,
were what i had set out to find,
this holy grail of lost import,
this magistrate of broken memory,
this everything
i will never find.

-S.C. Martinez