tide

I write with a mechanical pencil, like so many things in this world.  But I want to kneel with shells pressing into my legs as I scribble with my hand in the damp sand where the water has been, but the tide has called away to explore distant lands.  That someday I hope to follow.

thin

Life is moving so fast that all I can do is throw words down behind me as I run and hope they leave a trail that can be followed.   I hold my thoughts awkwardly in one arm, trying to select the right ones with the other.  The path splits and folks off til I’m spread so thin I feel like I’m playing twister with the ones I love.  No one gets more than a limb.  Those touched be a hand do better than ones about to get the boot.

seesaw not seen

cold stones stacked tall. dark. empty.  we grew up, they moved away.  now i pass by everyday and sigh.  fleeting in and out of lives, now only i remain.  summer nights spent in mustard yellow and blue; on couches in the dark willing time to stop.  first loves lost.

the ball court where no ball could be played for the cracks in the heat and the puddles in the cold.  we talked for hours until we were caught by parents, who had been looking for us for those same hours while we should have been at home.  a simpler time, before phones on the hip of every seven-year-old, though much harder for a mother searching for a child.  but our parents should have learnt to come first to the place where Tora once stood.  sitting on a tree stump big enough to fit five. 

now the seesaw has not been seen in years, the playground fort but lost.

but the stones don’t hold our memories.  this time before rent and responsibilities lives on in the spark in our eyes when we meet again, and talk about the way the floors creaked as you tried to sneak and how we thought we knew it all. 

ugly sounds

I am a perfectionist. I always have been.  I stopped learning guitar because I don’t like making ugly sounds.  The fact that you are witnessing this is testament to the fact that I am ok with being ok. Ok so I am learning. I may one day look back at these musings and cringe.  At the forced rhymes and off timing.  But maybe time will tell of my journey.  Of the young girl I was who thought I had no right to aspire to inspire anyone if I could not achieve in all.  That girl would not be so disheartened if she new what was to come.  That her daddy would be proud to call her ‘daughter,’ that her daughter call her ‘friend,’ her friend call her ‘lover.’  I hope she gets to the stage she accepts who she is before she is much older than I am now.  It is an exhausting existence hiding talents under baskets, no matter how small the baskets need to be.

I have learnt one thing, though I have a way to go.

I used to think my handwriting was too left-handed.  Too squished and smudged and slanted to be the sort of script someone would want to see in a love letter. But those slanted sentences are the pouring out of my soul.  They are proof that I am. That I think and feel and breath.   Though my letters may not look perfect they sure have character.

poetic

There is something poetic about going to a poetry night with a failing voice.   Sore and raw.  Where it is a struggle to speak.  Then leaving so tired yet so inspired that it hurts to swallow your words.  I can speak with my hands so this shouldn’t be a problem.  I can express my inner most thoughts, secrets and confessions and lay them out in space.  Leave them there as an offering of myself.  But when no one understands, they hang, like a morning fog between us that just won’t clear.

So I have sat in silence for five days.  My brain all a haze.  These thoughts wafting through my head like smoke, slipping through my fingers.  These thoughts that won’t behave, won’t sit quietly on a page.  These thoughts that are not ready to be heard. 

I need to be patient with these thoughts.

can you keep a secret

I have a secret.  I could list every person who knows.  That is the best thing to do with a secret, periodically take a mental roll call of the keepers of the undisclosed. Make sure new names on the list are checked with character references.  ‘Does not associate with other involved parties.’  I can’t let it get out.  This whole operation would fold.  Every time you bring a new person into the inner circle you lose a little bit of control.  You give it to someone else. You strip off a layer of armor.  My heart needs all the protection it can get.  I’m so careful I sometimes keep the secret from myself.  I can’t risk it.  So I will continue to hold my tongue, to keep mum, to keep quiet, to hide the effects.  To keep the peace.

command the sky

The moon stole my breath tonight, though I would just as gladly have given it.   Hung so low and large, shepherd to the stars.  Commanding the sky be still.  His dimples and defects tell of the battles fought and won. Of times long past.  I wished to sit and listen to tales of the things he had seen, with no regard for the ties I had made with the day.  But now to sleep, I will offer up my breath soon again.

awake

let sob

A sob for every realization.  Each one from a deeper part of my chest.  My ribs heave to take in air for that is all I can manage.  Tears fall to page. Freeing ink to run. Escape.  Even it can’t stand to be here.  My hand won’t leave my mouth in some vain attempt to keep my grief in.

There is no resolution. Yet. Though there will.

second hand

I’m not one for New Year resolutions.  I have never made one before. I’ve not made long lists of well meaning intentions for improvement with ‘I will not strive so much’ lost somewhere down the dot points. Though ironically such lists exist. Sadly, motivation of others around me seems to peter out as the digits flip over and increase.  Days. Months. Those who were clinging soo tightly to the belief that with the passing of the second hand across it’s highest point that night the past will be forgotten. Slate wiped clean.  ‘This year I will do better. Be better.’  Soon their backs are whipped by their own whips for failing to succeed at everything they had promised to succeed at because it was written on a ’to-do’ list for the new self. So it must be so. 

To say that I don’t feel the pull to put pen to paper would be declaring a false freedom from all this that I wish I could avoid.  But I refrain.  I understand the symbolism behind a new year being as a new start but if you screw it up you have to hold onto that for much longer than is healthy.  A resolution is meant to be a way of articulating something about yourself that you would like to change but the stakes need not be soo high.  That second hand passes it’s start point every 60 seconds so there is no need to hold on to your own feelings of failure.  By all means pursue your dreams, strive to do better, we were not designed to grow stagnant, but make it your everyday.  Change because you want to, not because a calendar tries to make you take a long hard look at yourself.  Make a decision to change on the 3^rd of March and be ok with the start date.