QUESTIONS I ASK MYSELF

I flee and leave my past behind me. Where I will go I do not know. But this is so: No one will find me. My flight into the all-consuming night leaves no trail behind me.

Who am I? Why am I? What am I? Will I ever know?

Is my memory playing tricks on me? Will it ever set me free? Let me be me? When I did not mind my mom and she caught me doing things I shouldn't do I wished she was dead. Then I told myself that wasn't true

"I love you momma, honest I do." I was surprised. I saw tears in her cold black eyes. "Of course you do. All sonny boys love their moms. That's what they're supposed to do."

I am grown but still the little boy I was that day. A boy grown tall who cannot cry. A youth who never learned to play or cared to pray. Am I the same old fool I used to be---a clone of the other me?

In my years of puberty, in moments of despair, when crisis crowded in on me I'd crawl into my shell where only I could dwell and in this shell I'd hide.

My awake world is a dream world of unreality. Dreams I create leave no guilt in their wake. They do not break my waking heart. They are part of the me that's me. My home is where chance alights me, dreaming of long-lost yesterdays, waiting for tomorrow.