The Economy of Memory

I'm watching a sea of static on TV
    late at night

I'm talking to my girlfriend on the phone

I'm writing a poem
    and finishing it later

I'm living in a tent behind Hampshire College

I'm going nowhere

I'm standing on the balcony of F2,
    going nowhere

I'm living on Bridge Street in Northampton

I'm thinking about thinking

I'm thinking about memory

I'm taking off my shirt

I'm looking at the clock

I'm wondering how it will end
    and when it began

I'm floating, a tiny black-eyed fetus
    in amniotic fluid

I'm making notes for a future poem

I'm learning to write the alphabet
    by tracing sandpaper letters

I'm writing a story for the first time
    in my life

I am six

I am twenty-five

I am thirty-four

I'm telling her about myself

I'm using her attention
    to search through my memory,
    to reconstruct myself
    from different angles

I'm telling you about telling her

I'm remembering remembering



-Jim DuBois
Dec 13, 2003

Artifacts of my Intelligence

Artifacts of my intelligence
Artifacts of my imagination
Artifacts of my existence,
    like a poem or a painting

Artifacts of my consciousness
Artifacts of my memory
Artifacts of my mind,
    like a signature or a sentence

leftover creations,
manipulated playthings,
static reminders
of a fluid mind
-- they can't be me --
I just leave behind things
which illuminate a tiny fraction
of my complexity,
that might give you that clue
you've been looking for for so long
that shows you are not alone
-- someone, some other mind,
    is out there,
        thinking,
            doing,
                creating.


-Jim DuBois
March 29, 2009

Overlooked

I hear there is more
    old growth forest left in Massachusetts
    than they thought.

In narrow bands,
    too high for logging,
    too low to clear for skiing,
        they stand in the mountains
            like they always have
                because no one had a use
                    for the place they lived.

And I want to look
    behind a person’s eyes,
        to the ruined landscape,
                to the left-over places
                of their minds
            just to see what
                is still growing there,
                    undisturbed
                        by the turbulence
                            of oppression.

Those places that went un-noticed
    by society,
    the places they forgot were there.


-Jim DuBois
January 20, 1999

(Discarded Left-over Abandoned Forgotten)Edges + Lost Places

                             vacant upstairs apartment
I broke into the

And crept out onto the roof

I kept thinking of
            the cracks in the sidewalk
            the grass growing in the alley
            the vines on the fence
                  between the parking lots

The forgotten places where
      two things border one another

The discarded, left-over space between
      one clear definition and another

Cracks
            Borders
                        Edges

The places people rarely look into
            like beneath the sofa cushions where the change collects

or
      the strip of trees beside the highway where I
found the skull of a dog
and undergrowth so thick
      you couldn’t walk through it


-Jim DuBois
July 20, 1998