Childhood

Titled 'Childhood' on the source page, this brief reflection on youth and emotional inheritance makes forgetfulness sound like survival.

A short, spare poem on forgetting and emotional absence: 'Sometimes It is good / To have forgotten / What you wanted to say', it argues that 'Choices never rhyme' and that wishing otherwise 'Has not to do with / hate and sacrfice / being the best / part of youth'. It turns toward inheritance - 'Father's without feeling / didn't express that / There is no hurt / No feeling really' - and ends on a wild child's refusal of 'any cross about wood and stone'.

The poem's center is numbness passed down: 'Father's without feeling / didn't express that' produces a child who reports 'There is no hurt / No feeling really', so emotional silence becomes the family's only legible expression. The first line carries a visible revision: the typed 'Sometimes I is good' is corrected with a 't' above the 'I', so the page settles on the impersonal 'It is good' while the file keeps its earlier 'I is' slug; the correction moves forgetting from a condition of the self to a general mercy. 'Choices never rhyme' is the governing claim: in a poem so attentive to sound, the refusal of rhyme stands for a life that will not resolve into matched, redemptive pairs. The closing 'Wildness knows there shoulden't be / any cross about wood and stone' rejects the imposed symbol - the cross built of timber and rock - in favor of an unconverted wildness, echoing the cross-and-stone refusals elsewhere in the book. The handwritten title 'Childhood' at the top right names the poem, and source spellings such as 'sacrfice', 'Father's', and 'shoulden't' are preserved.