That You Will Never Read Titled “The Lifting”

I.

[maybe more properly referred to as “thoughts of what’s not happened”]

[this is where it gets strange – this is where I try to forget – and often fail]

[I have repeated this over and over now. Not to overstate the importance, but now I realize something is at work here. Before medical books and trained specialists, I would have died long ago, I’m sure]

[these memories are still painful – unsurprisingly, I am well versed in the art of hiding thoughts and words]

[the speckled one my brother had]

[or hit him]

[for my own safety, five lines here have been deleted]

[this line has been erased, as it has caused my hands to shake violently, even now]

[without his sword, for the love of God, I had to lose that sword]

[“was with God,” my grandmother said this]

[this section has been removed and erased from all other copies, save the ones I have lost or given away. I believe one is with a locksmith who had a thing for careful misspellings and the other went with a girl to Atlantic City. This information never should have been made available to anyone. I have trouble swallowing and blinking]

[god damn sword]

[please pick your own number to insert here – the point is the fact that it is unnatural]

[god damn video game]

[but I played it any way, my grandmother gave it to me]

[someday I’ll look for it, I guess, because it was a nice penny and one can never underestimate the feelings of inanimate objects because Leibniz said that even these things have souls. Simple souls, but souls none-the-less]

 

II.

[a reference to my age has been omitted here – these words should remain outside of time]

[rhymes like this are a suitable way to keep the mind off of things it shouldn’t be concerned with anyway]

[I would later learn these symptoms were probably to do with the medication – they would give it to those suffering from “shell shock” after the war – all it did for me was keep me in a state of semi-lucidity where I refrained from cutting my fingers]

[I’ve learned that some metaphysicians say we are only perceptions and relationships to other higher spirits]

[broken teeth]

 

III.

[the remainder has been deleted as it only talked about how there was a very real chance that the lights I saw in the sky were real and how she had dyed hair and was a fast draw on the Zippo. The words just ran together as I was medicated and laying on a living-room floor with the notebook – TV lightly in the background and a glass of ginger ale growing steadily flat on the coffee table]

 

John Findura is the author of the poetry collection Submerged (ELJ, 2018). He holds an MFA from The New School as well as a degree in psychotherapy. His poetry and criticism appear in numerous journals including Verse; Fourteen Hills; Copper Nickel; Pleiades; Forklift, Ohio; Sixth Finch; Prelude; and Rain Taxi. A guest blogger for The Best American Poetry, he lives in Northern New Jersey with his wife and daughters.