We don’t search for old songs, but we search for old memories

 

We do not seek the song—

no, not the trembling note nor hollow refrain—

but that which lingers, ghostlike, in its wake:

the selves we buried in its mournful strain.

For every chord, once struck, becomes a tomb,

where echoes sleep beneath the ribs of time;

a whispered dirge, a perfume of a room,

a vanished gaze that once aligned with mine.

Oh, cruel remembrance! Draped in velvet sound,

it calls me back to what I cannot be—

a shadow chained where former hearts were found,

entombed within that lost identity.

And still I press—again—the fatal key,

to conjure phantoms fashioned out of me.