Life has turned you into a jumper
and not the knitted kind
but the kind of jumper
who jumps at the chance to pick up a knife
or miscount your dosage
and if I had known life was going to turn out this way
I would have told you never to grow up
but what good is a time machine now?
Tag: spilled ink (Page 4 of 9)
I am awoken by the call of a wood pigeon.
I don’t know what the call is regarding,
and neither does he. It doesn’t matter.
I think he’s trying to tell me that
a good day is ahead.
I believe him. He should know.
I drove past the Marie Curie
Field
of Hope
today
and almost every daffodil
was
dead.
Almost.
Sometimes it’s okay
to write a poem and then
throw it away.
You don’t need to keep what kills you.
Isn’t it interesting how we can talk to and sympathise with each other about bruises, broken arms, accidents and so on, but we can’t do the same with things we really need to talk about, like life-threatening diseases? I stepped on a plug last week and spent the following days walking around like a drunk hunchback in slow motion. It hurt. A lot. But I didn’t really mind at all. So that’s where this has come from.
I don’t want
sympathy for sciatica
because I know what it is
and it’s not much to me
and what’s all the fuss over a foot?
A bruise, a cut, it’s nothing much –
soon it’ll be nothing to me
I don’t need tuts and shaking heads
for being unable to drag my leg out of bed
Anything I can see is no real issue to me –
a twinge is no big deal
and pain is okay to feel
if I know its rhyme and reason
But fear is the worst pain
Fear is the sharpest stab in my side,
the most familiar ache
I would welcome a broken arm instead
A fracture is just that – a fraction of a problem
So I don’t want sympathy for sciatica
I don’t need support because of my limp
or anything solved by sitting down
because none of that will drive me underground
We haven’t even left for work yet
but already I’m thinking about
coming back home to you.
what if we were never in a tunnel
and the light was just a lie we were told
to make us keep walking?
what if that burst of morning
was something they were holding
just out of our reach?
what if they watched as you ran
on that treadmill, as you
racked your brain for a lost memory
when you fought their grasp
when you held your head
when you were just trying
to remember
the softness of a neck
Your bare ring finger
is the most provocative thing
I have ever seen, matched only by
the nape of your neck.
I am tortured by the things I said I would do.
The list of things is mounting up,
things I said I could do that I just can’t,
things I wanted to do but was apprehensive of.
Where has my resolve gone?
Why no sense of urgency?
Which way does the crow fly now?
It zig-zags, taking any diversion it can.
the amount in which I miss you
is matched only by how ridiculous
it is that I miss you
and the certainty I hold that
it doesn’t bother you
