Decision, a poem by me

It will change everything, she says.
Are you ready for this? Are you ready
for the palms of strangers to read your future
for their stars to influence yours
to throw you off course, out of orbit?
Are you ready for a bomb
to be dropped in your neighborhood
to blow out your windows
to leave you homeless, perhaps friendless
ostracized for something you did a hundred years ago?
Are you ready, she says,
for the irresolvable to park itself
on your doorstep, to take up residence
in your garden, to leave your home
a designated site, a historic battlefield,
a national cemetery? Are you ready?

I don’t know if I should change my name
move to a new town where no one knows me
where my confessions are as shocking
as an empty paper cup blown in the street,
littler of my early days, my indiscretions written
on paper because that’s the only place to write them,
I don’t believe in priests or fiction.
My other voices clatter like wind-tossed shutters,
they creak and whisper but they do not tell the truth,
not like the real story which I no longer believe in,
which no one may believe let alone understand.
Still, I’ve written my memoir
and I will probably stay where I am
and keep my name like a landscape
in a hurricane ravaged
then renewed.