rim

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I am teetering on the rim of hell.
Can you feel it too?
A certain kind of danger.
A lure.
A vat of swirling hate; all the discouragements of my life
kept
Waiting, rotting, writhing.
Clamouring.
L’appel du vide.

I am teetering and it will take only the most
infinitessimal inner shift to fall,
I gasp.
Precarious in my very breathing, existing fraught with
concentration.

It’s calling to me now, I hear you,
‘Oh poor you’, ‘no change’, ‘it always fails’, ‘what a
pitiful and lonely unreality; you continue to delude yourself’.
Perhaps you are what is most true?

Hell, I tell myself.
I WILL NOT GO IN THERE.
I will not keep company with dread, defeat and deep
disillusion.

My story will be different.
Only I can make it from another thread.
Those voices lie.

I am teetering on the rim of hell.
And I will not fall in there.
I steady myself.

hovering, waiting, writing

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I’m here but not quite there. I can feel the jumble of myself, from working working working. The truths have got entangled. What I know I believe I can’t quite remember, can’t retrieve.

Yesterday an old thought stole into my pondering, as if it had dug its way out of the weary piles of tasks, remnants of the last months, and as if entered by another door, catching me off guard: ‘What if I lived as if the central truth of my romantic life is that I am living an epic love story? Preposterous, if the evidence is assessed, past disappointments lined up, absences annotated.

We are all living an exhaustion it seems, one we didn’t entirely see coming, because even the pessimists did not really predict it.

What if a greater beauty was still left? What if it was our choice of position that will unleash new hope. What if the story was wilder?

The thought had already made itself at home with startling nonchalance. Did I let it stay, or barricade it back out? If it stayed, it was going to require some rearrangements to the inner terrain, the inner furniture.

Do I let myself be vulnerable to hope (again)?

Suddenly, certain glimmering memories, surfaced, becoming fuel for dreaming.

And if I allow the preposterous to become the obvious, how do I then live?

still

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I am still here, it seems.

Maybe you have noticed the dates petering out, as if I was on my last legs, a disappearing, but no.

Somehow the me that is me, is an insistence, more, perhaps than is convenient to myself.

She arrives and takes charge and all the other mes acquiesce.

It is a long time since I started writing here. I am older. She is a mood, and often that mood is weighed down under Responsibilities.

I wriggled out of the skin of my old existence. I left everything and moved, for this self.

I had artistic space. And then I didn’t. Then I did, then not.

Everything takes longer.

I am in a struggle for the existence of a self almost no-one cares about except me.

Except I think you know the feeling.

I have a week in a studio. A week. It seems short.

I have decided to fill it with eternity; love and fire.

Watch me.

creaking

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Am I trying to 
inhabit a life
that no longer fits

Why do I creak?
Why do I fail to find the once familiar groove,
the seam in which all things
cohere?

I am displaced,
scattered and my senses
fail me.

Where am I trying to come home to?

I creak and hear my own 
groans escaping.
wild sounds that alarm
my younger self.

Am I becoming that?
Am I she who will
fail to meet imagination
with dignity?

I creak and now it is
a home-coming of sorts,

To my bones,
To parts of me long abandoned.

Have mercy.

away

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I have been 
away.
What can I say?

Except that, maybe 
you have too, haven’t we 
all, lost ourselves,
all our bearings,
signs we once thought we knew
scribbled over, what was it that it said there,
once upon a time?

What is this new strangeness
to which we are becoming
accustomed?

Can I continue to haul
my hopes along this wild path?

Will you?  Will you haul along beside me?
Or will you drop your dreams 
imperceptibly, numbed by the 
exhaustions, numerous and wailing,
hungry and afraid, eating you
alive?

Perhaps if we
sat down a moment, here?
yes here.  Bare scrub it looks, of course

it always does.
Rest, imperceptibly a stillness
creeps over
the pains, furies at injustice, which,
of course, must take hold, but must
not,
must not turn sour.
Stillness, friend, and rest
mere moments as a dew descends, hush.
Soak your wounds in wonder.
There is just enough

to keep going
til morning,
as still we are alive

I am away, yes,

but here