"Forgetfulness" by Billy Collins

Forgetfulness informs much of what I do...

It takes from me my sacred past, replaces it with movie versions of actual events - as less and less of fewer and fewer of those movies play over and over in my head in their loops, like in a store that sells televisions, until the same few minutes of the same movie is showing on all screens, and the point of my memories isn't to help me be sentimental but to demonstrate relative picture quality. In the present, it gives me my persona, which is less and less that of the desired hipster and more and more that of a befuddled professor, and one who has not only forgotten more than he currently knows at that, but is about to forget even more than that. Besides, it looms over my future, a threat greater than cancer or murder or any other heinous way to die; first helping me forget my life, then making me forget that I am living, then leaving it up to the ages whether anyone else will remember me or not because I've forgotten to ask them if they will...

But also in the present, forgetfulness impels me to write this blog, to scribble out and peck down everything I know - indeed, to learn things I may only know for a day - as if to show those heirs I will have begotten without birthing that I was here, that I did know, that it's as possible for them to know as it was for me, and that I haven't forgotten them even though we've never met because I died years before they were born...
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