Junk

 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