Halcyon

patronus

someone once asked me,
what would i think of,
if i had to,
had the power to,
all of a sudden,
out of the blue,
cast a patronus charm.

i thought, and thought, and thought,
until thinking lost its meaning.
it left me blinking,
staring at the hollow
between memories.

and then it dawned
acrid at first,
resigned at end
maybe i just didn't have any.
ha, ha, what a joke.
a secret too quiet to tell,
a memory that never learned to glow.
none of them ever contrived
to bloom in the vacant garden of joy
in my secret mind.
(are you for real?)

i conducted the post-mortem,
by tearing open antique stitches,
and sewed them back
with an age-old vow:
swear i'll bow,
swear i'll stay whole,
even when i'm coming undone.

i have a bad thing
an eidetic memory for sad things.
and when life finally shuffles
its cards and deals a spark of joy,
i'm cursed with selective amnesia.
ha, ha, no. well, yes.

if magic existed,
maybe i'd cast a spell
of everlasting strength,
for the endless pretence
on my own self.
happiness is a state of mind, they say.
oh, come on, really?
maybe it's true,
and i'm just the exception
that proves it wrong.

or maybe i could just
charm myself into
an endless oblivion
of counterfeit peace.
it might just be easy,
to learn the darker spells,
to achieve darker things.
but isn't happiness
the most elusive magic of all?

so please, i pray
let me be privileged
to master the simplest magic
to embody hakuna matata,
for one blue-moon spark of joy.

i'd trade my soul,
my heart, my name,
for one moment that feels like magic
just enough to cast
a patronus in
a dementor-filled life.
just let me be once happy,
without having to pretend
for it.

Just once.