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Zeigarnik Effect
“The process of paying attention to a known task until it is finished and then by forgetting
the first task, becoming psychologically enabled to move on to the next.”
The trick is to stay
focused on the loss,
death or it’s absence
which might not have been
bad except for the leaving.
Stay centered on that--
the one singular sadness.
You must resist temptation
to interrupt your grief
or it will never get used
up. Remember that
remembering is nothing
more than a roadmap
yielding alternative routes
back to the start. Make yourself
take your pulse at least twice
each moment, checking
for all vital signs
of memory and disconnected
heartbeats. Count out time,
useless time, restless time,
divided neatly into folders,
each tagged chronologically
by their own separate loss.
Warnings
The Surgeon General writes
Of sure signs
of addiction: Compulsive
use, cravings, needing
increasingly more.
Dependence. I turn away
from your face, relapsing
again into loneliness.
Richard Luftig is a professor of educational psychology and special education at Miami University in Ohio.
He is a recipient of the Cincinnati Post-Corbett Foundation Award for Literature and a semi finalist for the
Emily Dickinson Society Award. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals in the United States
and internationally in Japan, Canada, Australia, Finland, Bulgaria and England. His third chapbook of poems was published in 2007.
Email: Richard Luftig
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