Crossing the Threshold

A poem about walking into a room and forgetting your purpose

Don’t you hate when you go to the kitchen
To get some scissors for a photograph
And when you cross the door threshold you forget
Your name and phone number, social security, 
Address, hometown and mother’s maiden
And father’s blue eyes
How your ex wife smiled and put a daffodil in your hair once
And said “how’s about that”. You forget you’re even alive you forget
About the life and times you forget that the window is a window 
and not a mirror and you forget that anything outside this room exists
Because honestly it may as well not. You forget how to gamble and 
You forget how to cheat, how to bluff and how to tell the truth too.
You forget how you got in a car crash and everybody was so worried about you.
You forget how you used to write things on papers and 
burn them so they wouldn’t trouble you no more
You forget how when you were born you had the umbilical cord 
wrapped around your neck until your head turned blue, they said you
Were lucky to even be alive past the next few days much less 27 years later.
You forget you were even born at all, a tall strong man who’s crying now for some reason.
You forget that you even bleed.

Don’t you hate it when that happens? 
When all you wanted were some scissors for an old photograph…