The Persistence of Memory by Charles W. Brice

The Persistence of Memory, by Salvador Dali, 1931.

The Persistence of Memory
 
Dali made me late for everything,
made me never think of my age,
made me frame time as
a mess of melted clocks.
 
Memory persists, pushes, penetrates--
hallucinates the past that lives in
the future, the now that is always then,
always soon to be. Still
 
it is those fey atoms of biology, our
cells, that imprison us in time. All
the philosophers on the planet can’t
stop that final moment’s approach--
 
the moment those clocks reconstitute,
drip by drip,
and stop.

Charles W. Brice

Charles W. Brice’s full length poetry collection, Flashcuts Out of Chaos, will be published by WordTech Editions in June, 2016. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlanta Review, Chiron Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Avalon Literary Journal, Icon, The Paterson Literary Review, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Spitball, Barbaric Yawp, VerseWrights, The Writing Disorder, and elsewhere. He was named an International Merit Award winner in the Atlanta Review’s Poetry 2015 International Poetry Competition.