1 - acceptance
Ten thousand breaths taken
each day
three hundred days in being creative
(64 and a quarter doing nothing)
each year
decades full of years well lived
each life
a hundred thousand million lives deeply experienced
each cycle
this is exactly the place we sat when last we met
seven years ago
now again, barely two weeks after our mother died.
Died.
we say the word. no beating around in bullshit, like
passed from this world or transcended.
What do we do with all these blind spots
like feeling but never really understanding
not being liked
or grasping at the visions of what we look like
outside of ourselves
what do we do with trite and tipsy hipster tattooed
conversations about evolving as a human
or overplayed, kicked-to-death pop music
playing through scratchy speakers
or how now only Nelson Mandela quotes
appear on the back of sugar packets.
what happened to all the other mighty orators?
and
where does all this seemingly
unnecessary plastic detritus get generated
and what is the purpose of it?
we live in the ideal that it is an easy
navigating system
thoughtfully and elegantly designed to guide
the would-be discerning through
to the good stuff
that it flows in fun back to its source.
to be recycled.
surely.
2 - laughing
For history and trauma are slippery
narrow and biased
who said what and who fired the first shot
a series of convenient omissions and
half-baked authorities
on what really happened
as though we could ever be certain
in this sort of prison system of lost truths
and locked-down lives
lived colourfully and mysteriously otherwise
bodies
are buried under petrified volcanic lava comet strike floods,
blood and bones on battlefields make up green hills,
deserts, beaches
bodies
lie preserved in submarines or served as food
in sunken ships on blind black ocean floors
nameless names, our ancestors, comrades:
myriads and myriads, anonymous,
smitten.
wiped out of sight, mind, memory.
horror. darkness. silence. cold.
3 - yes
Flung fast forward i once was born
i was tough once
innocent
moved through life
got tenderised, me
spiced, marinated
beaten, prepared
for sacrifice
in crisis
so excited
witnessing first hand paradox
adjusting perspective constantly
so i don’t slit my wrists
or drink myself to death prematurely
just because i tend to
often forget
