Poetry Notebook Entry: Shifting Reality

On the way to work, juggling radio stations, I found another approach to a stalled poem, due to a flashback in memory. Now I cannot even recall the song flooding the car which triggered the memory of Des Moines, Iowa, more than twenty years ago: that ill-furnished apartment close to campus, that never-ending winter of endless snow. The memory provided an alternative series of stanzas to blend into the existing mix of impressions and rants.

What I want to acknowledge is the perceived actions and perceived values of another, from my past, yet brought up to date with the current times, expressing the current formula of our individual lives.

I used the phrase ‘up to date’… perhaps ‘reinvent’ is a better choice. Since this is a characterization reimagined a firm understanding of actuality will never be certain. Which leaves me room for shifting reality— the persona after all is a figure based on my impressions, yet then he transforms into someone other.
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(I never understood why)
you always wanted Death to enter your rooms
personified as a trick in his late-twenties:
glassy-eyed, coked up with slicked back hair—
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indifferent, disinterested, immaterial, cold, unemotional, callous, distant, silent, unresponsive, unfeeling