Shadow Box Memories

"Forever Young" is branded in silver
upon the black card of a dance ticket
from a time gone.
Roses - still dark red, like drying blood -
frozen in a moment, never to bloom,
and unable to die.

Fragrance and velvet gentleness were beaten
and dried up, leaving a shell of life,
like the insects that shed their outer skeletons,
then moving on, but leaving a ghostly mockery.
Only the fragile musk of age clogs the captured space,
like choked silence that can never breathe.

Lace - an elegant map of white scars
which only fades to pale yellow -
circles forever around blurred images that exhibit
only an instant of serenity, like a snapshot
of a flower floating in a quick stream.

Two small white roses grasped in the small
forgotten boutonnière - standing out among the red and green
like two grains of sand that were trapped inside too long,
until the heart, or mind, manages to coat them in a white shield;
then, as trophies, we display their priceless cost
and sometimes learn to forget.

A distorted mirror - memories entombed behind glass.