Thread of the Amnesiac

The thread often slips. I try
to keep it clasped tight between my pincers
through the long-winded goose
chasing. I fail.
Even in this moment as I clatter backwards
on all fours recounting
all of the ways I have fallen short – all of the music
I began, with what heat!, and promptly cut off cold
turkey. Oh, I’m sorry, yes,
an accident of course, just
slipped my mind. Socrates
stood motionless for days on end
to keep a palsied grip on the kite’s
elusive tail that whips up sometimes, pulls taut, 80 degrees
skyward, significant
I’m telling you, easy to follow.
We get this hallowed sense of self, religious
inflation, which, in the course of things, is lost
when the kite dips and the rope
goes limp,
and I’m left alone
in one place, trying to re-collect the story,
trying to patch together clues
to my amnesiac life, amidst a rabble
of circumstantial evidence, and this ridiculous
rope strung backwards through time,
tied always - strange now that I think of it -
to the successive images of me.