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Category: Poetry

Are you paying enough attention?

It’s a thought that plagues me in moments of stillness: moments that capture me, like

great heaving breaths taken
in an instant as
head breaks water’s surface,
and for a shining, crystalline moment

I remember what it is to breathe.

Are you

Or maybe this isn’t an experience you have.

But my life is often an exercise in full-body immersion as I sink into mind and computer and achieve a state that’s nearly

 

dissociated

 

from my body.

And the sudden-ness of breaking free startles me, in the moments when I find myself back inside my body —

often with a thump.

This is when it hits me over the head how the hours have slipped by and I fear that I haven’t really been living. That I have instead been so completely wrapped up inside my mind that I’ve forgotten what it means to have a body. Forgotten what it means to sit in my body, to sit with my body, to

feel myself me.

And maybe if I weren’t me this wouldn’t be so much of a problem. Maybe I would relish the hours spent consumed by other, the moments when self falls so entirely free and I become one with machine.

Or as near to such a thing as can be.

But I find that art requires presence

That I cannot speak without tasting the texture of my tongue.

That I cannot see without knowing the slippery slide of eyelids upon eyes.

That I cannot feel without the dancing rhythm of my heart, thudding away inside my chest.

 

That I cannot know what I am seeing/thinking to speak it without first knowing that this body in it’s infinite
wisdom and fragility
is here and now and right in this very moment           with me.

 

And, so, I ask again:

Are you paying enough attention?

A faded summer’s day

The summer’s sunshine fades — sinking
into dusky pinks and gold that
glimmer into dusty motes which linger
in the air. Lazy, settling
floating, drifting until—

dis-rupted

by a curlicue of air that
reaches in through open window to stir
licking into the hazy swelter
of the room, still smothered by
the mid-day’s heat.

The breeze caresses, beckons.
Swirling dust motes into tendrils
like fingers: reaching, calling
in a drifting dance
to sway me from repose.

I linger at the window,
shimmer in the last golden ray
of rapidly fading day.
Linger as gold gives way to ochre, then
to rust. And then to dusky gray.

There’s night come swooping in my
open window. Her cold fingers rasp against
bared arms — raise goosebumps
and set me loose as I am

set adrift

tangled in the rush of cool air
that whispers in my window.

When you talk to me like that 

Your voice crawls 
from your throat like a monster 
with too many eyes and legs 
and it's

unexpected.


I'm trapped.


I'm         choking on your anger, 
dissolving in the 
thunderclap
that issues from your throat.

The certainty of entrapment eviscerates 
me as your tirade empties 
me out and then shakes 
me back up and leaves 
me quivering 

in the echoing vacuum that 
follows the crack 
of your voice like rope

when you talk to me 
like that.

As the city creeps towards midnight 

The city creeps towards midnight becoming 
a raw, unfettered place,
a dark and dangerous place.

My footsteps echo, hurried over
cobblestones — pounding to the rhythm
of my too-fast beating heart.

I watch for the shadows of strangers
in the dim, orangey glow
of flickering streetlamps and passing headlights.

The city at midnight slips sideways into strangeness,
becomes a place only half-way real,
becomes a place in which the 
mouldering and abandoned spaces—
now marked only for demolition—
resuscitate
under the moon's cold scrutiny.

In the city at midnight my footsteps
tap dance to the hum
of the ghost-fiddler's tempo floating
past my eardrums on a breeze
echoing from a dark and dusty window.

In the city at midnight I walk
alone.

It lingers within 

I felt the beast that sits within me grow.
Stretched, my edges thinning—
boundaries dissolving as I blurred, 
unable to see clearly through 
clouded eyes, and knew myself mortal.  
Buffeted by the onslaught
of my ever-coming end.

The hands on the clock march onward.
Their years make mockery of 
the seconds I myself have counted 
from their cracked and yellowed face.
The sum of all my breaths—
mere meagre seconds to 
the centuries contained within 
their wisdom.

The beast stirs—threatens to waken and
I quiet myself. Breathe deeply.

I hum a tune, a lullaby 
I only half-remember 
and do my best to soothe it back, 
once more to deepend slumber.

I feel its weight to shift and settle,
curled to rest once more against 
the pulsing structure of my heart.
Thumping eagerly against the edges
of consciousness.

Secure in the knowledge that
for now—
for in this moment only—


my death has been averted.