I awoke one day
To the soft knock at my door
Of a deep darkening fog
Where there wasn’t before.

I awoke one day
To the soft knock at my door
Of a deep darkening fog
Where there wasn’t before.
Now her hand lifts, beckoning
Me to step back into myself
And I tell her I will, but only if
She promises to stop watching
I think my skull would rattle if you shook it –
filled with an assortment of past things.
I’ll pluck and keep them as trinkets,
souvenirs, mementos of has been.
I fear losing thoughts, and days,
so I pocket reminders of each place I go
(in heart, in mind, in body, in soul).
I awoke with my head submerged in water,
ears blocked, the world locked out of my perception.
There’s a knock on a window somewhere but I can’t tell which one
this muffled echo is coming from – a pathetic attempt at a sound.
I’ve lost touch with my senses, like they’re running out of battery,
confused with each other, I can feel sounds but not hear them.
They surface in quiet moments. Starting small, with a spark,
with a glimpse into something else, a flash of mind,
like a blink going the other way, but they build in an exponential
crescendo and soon I’m stopping every minute to take my gloves off
and write something down because the thoughts just keep coming,
and by the time all the dishes are clean, the bubbles have all disappeared
and the water is only on the verge of being warm.
Old lovers, old friends, had beginnings and ends,
But as my grip slips from the recollection, vines wind
Their way up a sleeping spine to twist into my sleeping mind,
Thorns hooked onto the memory, grown into a dream –
Becoming a dance with the familiar amongst the unseen.
Hello! I’m going to be participating in escapril again this year, and I decided that to celebrate the almost beginning of that I would share a few of my favourite poems, and poetry videos. I am not going to be analysing the poems or saying why I like them because that would make this post very long, so all I’ll say is that these are all poems I always return to, or poems that have inspired me or had a notable influence on poems of my own…
Read MoreI can’t touch the heart of the rain, it can only touch me
As it slips right through my fingers
Where a liquid hand can’t be held.
And the rain may have a beat but it’s too soft and quick
To be human and too rhythmic to be alive.
The rain never stutters or skips a beat
And I can dance in it but it can’t dance with me.
I can speak a soliloquy and pretend the rain is listening
But it can never confess a single secret back to me.
The rain may smell like a breath or a familiar comfort
But the rain is everything that has ever felt lonely.
I have days lined up in bottles,
Hours pouring out the tap.
I fill glass after glass with minutes
And drink more time than can elapse.
Maybe tomorrow I will slip back into an old skin
To be momentarily reacquainted with
A memory, for the fun of remembering.
I will cloak myself in a costume of my past self,
Playing dress up in a skin and a mind once mine,
And the wrong-er it feels makes my new self feel right-er.
I will close my eyes and ignore the ill-fitting
Tight squeeze, stretched straps, and snapped seams.
For in a dance of vivid recall I remember: this,
This is what it once felt like to be me.