Digits, negative space, and trying to stay still.

Sleeping Lions

At the first birthday parties I learned how to be still as a hungry lion hiding,
and when I can't stop moving, these nights,
I picture myself a big cat being poked in the ribs by my mother
who is saying, 'It's time to go home.'




The Long Walk to Stillness

The negative space around my shape still remembers how it feels to be anticipated.
As it is now, the blanket that sits snug around my mind is unravelling one stitch at a time,
facing an early Winter with nothing but a single last thread for warmth.
And at the core, I'm no longer really here.
If I stand still for long enough in a busy place,
I forget my limbs and the mind forgets its hurry.
Everything slows and the focus of emergency is abandoned.
And I remind myself the heart has no part in this.
It fuels the blood that keeps my insides moving,
that aches these shaking limbs, yes,
but as soon as the digits are still,
the extremities, the eyes,
everything is lost to negative space,
who knows what it is to tessellate.
An admirable lady once told me that everything hurts the most when it's coming back to life,
and she'd be right.




Having Turned A Corner

There was a time in the Summer of our lives
when I held my head under a tap in the corner of a field.
My brain froze for a moment.
I looked at you, grinning back at a dripping me,
and I thought, 'this is it, this is us, this is you and me,'
and so that image is forever preserved,
frozen, in the corner of a field in a flooded corner of my mind
in that, the Summer of our lives.



The Middle of the Night Knitting Circle For the Incredibly Alone

What we'd do is not sit in a circle
for a circle is indulgent, assuming,
cuts corners with no escape route.
Four straight sides around the edges of a small room,
space between, space for elbows and four millimetre needles,
and far enough to humour a sadness each to our own.
The curtains will be musty with the scent of old, too high to reach,
they'll be set wide apart or pulled in, shut,
keeping the cold out and the sorrow in,
or the space out but a chill within.
What we'd do is talk about how there is nothing any of us can really say;
nothing anyone can do,
how it's only us who know the size and shape of our own negative space.
We will not discuss absentees,
or the trembling of our hands and our knocking knees,
and we will keep our minds still,
exorcise our energies out through busy digits
and into every little knit, each imperfect purl,
into a tea cosy for a loved one,
a blanket for a child we've yet to meet.




(Untitled)

Gently stirring in the morning,
words leaving me in ribbons,
I feel everything, as if it were all new.
Under this weather that's only ever some shade of rust,
I'm still thinking of you and me,
and this is the furthest away from home I've ever been.

It's the smell of cheap meat cooking,
and the shock of a fox looking larger than in the story books.
When the wind is up
and the slow breath of far away cars is low,
I'll stand outside with my eyelids high
and know that what I know is all I know.