– 2019
Sometimes confusion or an unnamed feeling
explodes,
lit by words bursting
into meanings
previously hidden in darkness and silence.
Rejoice:
a part of your brain has
new synopses
shaping your
Mind.
The Impact of Reading
Time
2016
In youth we come through our bodies as explorers
seeking and measuring,
astounded and disappointed
as we grow into ourselves.
In our long midlife, we travel our path,
forgetting and wandering,
sometimes grateful, mostly blindly seeking
the more we yearn for.
Now, our bodies re-astound us:
aching and refusing,
complaining and attacking,
reminding us of time.
The Teal Curtain
2016
Threadbare, faded, ragged from its many unpackings,
each time, deposited in a different storage -
a teal woven curtain, worn meaningless,
hiding
nothing.
The building that contained it - gone.
the people who lived there - far away, most dead.
A memory of a memory of a memory luminous
once,
flaring again, as it crumbles.
Too Much
2015 & still today!
I have a horror
hangover:
a surfeit of tv news dribbles
repeating
the images and words -
addictive
and numbing.
To look away, to change the channel,
I switch to a story of plotted
murder, where the killer
is named and blamed
and hunted and destroyed -
and it’s over!
When I can’t resist tv news glancing again,
the crowds are still
raging in the streets.
Winter, 7:00 a.m.
I almost wake as I lumber
lurching on sleep-stiff ankles
and return to my night-warmed bed.
In the east, out the window,
I watch the pine boughs shift
and sway and still and shift.
Resting on the next street’s roofs
a pale gold light bleeds upward
behind the narrowing pine,
at the window’s top,
the sky’s grey-white
hints at blue.
Walking Alone
Snow -
enough to cover, not to shovel -
squeaks
under my feet.
Bitter cold
burns my cheeks.
Walking alone
is painful.
I raise my face
to the sun.
Terrible Comfort
This terrible comfort
of missing you
woos, wounds
and pushes me,
painfully,
into a new time,
a new way of being.
Excavating our accumulated
structures, sorting
and letting go of what
is not mine is
surgery without sedation:
scars and healing.
Absence
On the day I wake,
still on my side but
stretching into
the centre of our bed,
I notice I no longer
listen
for kitchen sounds
or the key
opening the door.
Knowing I am attuned
to being alone
is the loss
that feels like a betrayal -
as though I have accepted
your absence.
Sunlight
Golden from the top of the pine
and later lighting the curving branch,
showing the dull green
of all the wet overcast days.
New Moon sickle
above the hydro wire
and sunlit bare branches,
waving in the wind.
Change comes.
On Being Scammed
A poem I wrote in mid 2022
I don’t know how to live
without the carapace
Of coupledom.
Flayed, raw now,
every drop of anger or disdain
burns;
every discovery of smooth deception
rams
into my gut.
I want a leather dress
that reaches my work boots
and a masked helmet
with psychic glasses
while I grow
thick scarred skin,
armour while I learn
how to walk alone.
Learning Living 