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I SMELL LIKE YESTERDAY

I smell like yesterday.
I slept in my clothes again,
Still hanging onto yesterdreams
Like when I could truly call myself young
And I had not one grey hair
On this head.
Now middle age looms.

I smell like yesterday.
I forgot to remove the
Combat boots of former years.
Still playing the mad resolute artist
Who aspires to be one of the Crazy Greats
Like Van Gogh! Jack Keroauc or James Baldwin.
I’m holding onto former loves.
The ghosts that haunt my waking moments.
Like when I hear a song
I have not heard in some time,
I go to a translucent place,
Like staring through thin sheets of glass
And see the world in a different light.
Oh the smell of wind!
The touch of an autumn leaf
As it falls to the ground
On its spiraling way down.

I smell like yesterday.
Of dreams I can no longer reach.
The unanswered cry of an artist’s love
Unrequited and hidden
Behind a world of musts and have-tos, work, day-to-day life, and priorities.
A world filled with no time
To answer the call of the raging heart.
So the poetry book remains empty
And forgotten.
Stolen
Like leaves from the tree
When winter comes.
And all my yesterdays
Are locked in a secret place inside.

I cannot help
But to smell like yesterday.
For yesterday’s love
Cannot be denied.

Helena Marie Carnes-Jeffries
Bezazian Branch Library
Journal of Ordinary Thought, Summer 2010, “This City Bus”

The Neighborhood Writing Alliance (NWA) provokes dialogue and promotes change by creating opportunities for adults in low-income Chicago neighborhoods to write, publish, and perform works about their lives. These works are published in the award-winning Journal of Ordinary Thought.