ir a principal |
Ir a lateral
Today, time just waits while people pause
and find a feeling.
The quake broke the clock,
timed all that was meant to be
and stopped intentions from fulfilling.
I speak without a voice;
despair: my vocal chords,
with no verbs, just sheer implosive emotion
eager to shout and save
in its scything silence,
echoing the sound of bone.
Downtrodden, Christchurch ushers in a new day
this 22nd afternoon,
dismantling the old one
brick by brick, life by life.
Now, I wait for confirmation
that my child is alive and well
and my mother's still out there breathing
and my friends and aunty and
the elderly man three doors down, are all okay.
Life is still.
All of the lights strobe red in sawdust fog,
cars rake along the city streets,
away from the concrete caveats.
The buildings creak to stay statued
before the worms start feeding under them.
Faces hurt,
ache to react and contain and release
but freeze, uncharacteristic, undecided, disabled.
These dust-covered ashen molds
from which I hope life may still emerge,
I cannot even touch,
though they have touched me.
We're all innocent souls
Trying to get by the best that we know,
Trying to feel in our hearts
What every day is like.
We're all bystanders watching
Life unwrap its gifts of grace.
Won't we all miss it
When we go our way away?
Just a little goes a lot
In our senseless stints of thought.
Does this moment seem forever,
Cause it's all we've got?
We're all innocent.
We're all pure.
Distance is reminding us
We're here but we're gone.
I see the fear of being abandoned, of being lost and excluded from the circles of the people I look towards and see as my family and friends. I am pushed away, and no one says anything. I can't fulfill their expectations, especially because none of them are willing to show me how. Maybe no one knows, but I believe they all do; they just refuse to tell me I'm a wretch, a should have but didn't, a should be but isn't. They all walk over me and don't look back. But still within earshot, they laugh amongst themselves, shadows painted right over this feeble doormat that I am.
I hear the fear of what they say about me. It makes it hard to trust because I hear my own thoughts sweat and brood and plot endlessly (seemingly) a way out, escape from the death sentences these people utter about me. Their thoughts of rejection are loud. They don't want me near them. They don't make an attempt to understand me, to see me as I am, because they can't accept that I do hurt.
I think the fear of not being liked, and conveniently, of not being told there is something wrong with me. It comes paired with the belief that there is something wrong with me. I am wrong. Listen to it in my mind. I am scared the stuff my mind is telling me is actually true. I am so wrong, no one dares tell me. Yet they all fuck silently over it and glance with their minds into mine, shooting darts of spite. They keep me apart from all they do. I want to be included, and they shun me, backs turned, unwilling to let me in. No redemption.
What did I do?
It's who I am.
I fear their judgment. I fear that I am not good enough. I fear I have lied to them, and they cannot overlook that to find the truth in me. I fear that truth is a lie, and they can see it clearly, but I hold on to it.
I feel the fear. This is the worst, because this feels like the proof to all that they do, that I deserve this. Hurt. Abandonment. Exclusion. Silence. Poison. Breathlessness. No reason. No forgiveness. Hate. What a hated bastard I am.
I fear all this will come true. I fear this is more than just writing. I fear it has momentum, and will invade my life and spin it out of control and into death's eager hands. Then I'll have lost. As if I hadn't lost by now.
I quit. Behind some attempts at poetry, is honesty. These are my reasons for quitting. Life's not worth it if all of this is true. It's not worth it if any of it is true, actually, because the possibility of one makes the rest seem real. All this has come about because I have listened to my mind religiously, trusting it that it was telling me the truth, even when it made me hurt badly because sometimes the truth hurts. I believed it when it said it wasn't my fault, that it was all their doing.
Fuck it. I listen to my heart, and you know what, all I can hear is its beating. No shit about anything, it just does what it does. And it's quiet. The mind replays recorded messages about guilt and disharmony and weakness and powerlessness, all on fear's album, out now. My heart is kind, and at least, honest enough to let me know about the shit I've been putting up with. Yes, I am scared I won't be accepted for sharing my fears, for shining this light. I admit it. But I choose the path already laid for me before me, not the rickety road nowhere I made.
This is where I let go.
Merci.
Boldness and bravery connect too soon,
too soon do heroes appear disparaging;
they look, bored, unimpressed
at what they had made and forbid
any talk of it happening again.
Suck it, abstraction,
vacuum the senses out on full power,
then repeat the picayune without their
wind blowing them up into some
perfect display of navigation.
The heroes will find their way away,
sway lead them back where they came,
but unable to complain, somewhere
will be lighter without an excess
of feathers clogging up the railway.
Pick the pellets up
and throw them in with the coal
and watch, volcanic piss, ventriloquism
be replaced by fascism, with no hero
in sight to fight the better than worse fight.
Catch on to what they say.
Don't give up just because you don't understand, but don't try to understand.
Out of my personalised sopor I awaken;
out of a shell's worth of pieces unbroken
I hear these words being spoken,
reminders of happiness' little tree-like
veins reaching within from the extremities
to that bulging center of importance beating,
serenely, supremely succinctly,
undisturbing any appetite I may have had
for teeming, killing, suffocating, dreaming.
Repercussions, I accept
before any all secrets are unkept
and naked, I stand unkempt,
but am I free, I am free, free to feel
how it feels to feel free without feeling
a freak fleeing fear, me, upset by what has been set up,
ere stolid now solid,
but such gauze, such a window,
such a veil blowing in the wind,
such a flag, glad to be waving and saluting
to the laconic riposte of the sails on the road.
I travel, through blueprints voyage do I,
chalking a trail of words and compliments
and a backlog of unused breath mints
still on the counter, still,
like silence,
still weeping
across the bow of the horizon,
for the telling of love.
An ethereal head on an ephemeral pillow, I am,
I do, unthink
unblink
return to sender my post
a bird's nest I host
as I wake up to the scent of dust in the dehumidifier;
on
I turn myself, too;
I do keep a tumor of nerve endings
on a spot of space just beneath my skin,
just so that the day can pass through.
Settings and design
in appropriate proportions
are spun out
longingly
by me ego
when he tries to rule
the world that he made up.
When I, the holder of the atlas,
page through the cartography,
I sometimes laugh,
when I can tell these are maps
that have been drawn by him.
Yet when I can't,
when I forget he painted this picture,
I get lost in it
and it's a whirlwind's journey across creation to get out,
until I do,
miraculously,
when I'm reminded that
what I am scared of
is what I made of
misunderstanding how life works.
And no, I still don't know.
But I might not need to
while I can still flick through
and laugh.
Je me trouve souvent entre plusieurs mondes,
assis, quelquefois accroupi tenant fermement
les genoux à ma poitrine, regardant entre eux
comme s'ils étaient des grilles d'une balustrade
sur laquelle je pourrais m'appuyer; et entre eux,
je verrais en bas, ce qui se trouve en face à moi,
ma peur, amplifiée et avec sa force renouvelée,
un sourire mécanique qui rappelle la folie
sur un visage des visages, renvoyant
un fac-similé.
