Poems about Change
Thought is diffuse and soft,
Feelings are liquid organic,
Light and dark are shades of one,
Movement is within not without,
Wrapped up snug and close,
Encased awaiting revelation,
New mechanics of self,
Old shapes absorbed,
While new structures bud,
Self-flowing solvent,
Morphing meta shifting,
Quantum drift relating,
Such subtle consciousness,
Efflorescence from within,
Old waves fall, a new wave rises,
The chrysalis crystallises.
Forgetting her craving, unable to stop
Impatient and thirsty for the first sip
The warmth as it spreads, the panic that dips
She doesn’t care for the taste, she needs the relief
Effective anaesthetic, by the forth or the fifth
Friction that burns, just by existing
Is soothed by the salve and mistaken belief
She drinks, and she drinks, and she drinks, and she drinks
And when she comes to, only then does she think
What the hell happened?
Who did she attack?
How did she get here?
To this bed in this flat?
Who is beside her?
This young brown-haired man
To piece it together
With no clues and no plan
Her head begins pounding, to a 4-4 kick drum
Which is nothing compared, to the shame that will come
As she picks up her clothing, and creeps out the door
Full of self-loathing, regret and remorse
Making earnest pledges she intends to keep
Only to break them at the first bottle she meets
Her single solution to this rot in her soul
Is to drown it in liquid, lose all sense of control
Obliterate herself, and wipe her memory clean
Find more bubbles rising, awaken thirst in her genes
Until one morning she feels it the path as it forks
With a brimful of dread an unknowable force
Asks with a whisper ‘Are you done now?’ Because
What’s next is a choice between the end or a pause
Where you go to a room full of stories like yours
She feels a special kinship with these fellow drunks
She asks one of them to help her, her heart’s so loud it thumps
As she dries out and defrosts she realises what she wants
Is to feel the sunlight on her face and her spirit free for once
I took the first step defiantly
To leave behind the pain and hurt
And breathed in the dawning of a new era
With each step I held my head up high
Refusing to continue to suffer the torment
That broke my spirit but couldn’t crush my self-respect
With each step I started to look into the mirror
Recognising aspects of me that were resurrecting
With each slip of the mask I’d fixed so tightly for so long
With each step I reconnected me to my soul
Excavating the interred me
To a laughter, no longer a subdued echo
With each step my eyes no longer burned
Which once had held the monsoon clouds
Overwhelmed, heavy and soaking
With each step my hair began to dance along
To songs that chanted on my lips
Replacing stifles that used to escape searching for the darkness
With each step I slowly picked up the strewn fragments
So they couldn’t cut me any more
And the precious pieces I’d mixed into the lacquer
With each step I became my Kintsugi
Beautiful, delicate, precious and strong
Carving out a journey from the path I chose for myself
With each step forward, I no longer had to keep repeating
The word sorry as each step forward meant
I was sure I would no longer look back.
God has many pencils
in many hands of many colours.
And everywhere.
Here, they teach me English,
give me words to barter with others:
faith, trust, belief,
relief that I am here
where they give me this pencil to
circle, underline and then erase;
to begin a new journey,
to dance the dangerous ground
between ‘you need’ and ‘you want’.
So many words flood in.
I learn to swim a sea of carefully constructed
opposites:
for every ‘certainty’ there is an ‘un’.
for every ‘trust’ there is a ‘dis’,
And this I know:
Words can twist, and bind, and trip;
Some build great walls,
Some tear them down
And here I am,
Still adrift within these feeble words,
fashioning myself with this pencil.
Is it a tool, or weapon?
In either case, I’ll keep it sharpened.
‘Things take time,’ they say,
and equip me with Capital Letters
and italics for emphasis,
but I feel more at ease with ellipsis,
an indefinite series of fullstops
suggesting so much more
than just you and me…
I used to be a happy egg,
My walls smooth to scale.
A child pierced me with a pin;
I was drained into a pail.
A cautious cactus I became
With spikes sharp and bright.
Lovers though flicked out long knives
Filleted me with scarce a fight.
My aura honed by loss of faith
Is diamond-hard.
No more a vulnerable waif –
so why do I feel more unsafe?
The swirling dance of the pen from her manager’s lips funnel me back,
Back – to a distant memory.
A languid haze of smiling smoke fills my gaze –
Instead – another time, another place.
Take me away from this mausoleum of an office and back there!
Let me inhale that perfumed smoke sensually slipping from her lips
Into mine. Back in our student days.
I could even hear The Doors, our music to get high by.
A wave of nostalgia hits me as the distinctively distant Hammond organ
Pounds over my line manager’s words.
I remember her name – the unusual name.
A name that was like an out-of-body experience,
When you stopped to ponder it.
Like a band name that becomes familiar with habitual usage,
But peculiar when you hear it again from a distance, as if for the first time:
Smashing Pumpkins, Meat Puppets, Soundgarden.
The first time again. If only.
If only I could seek my refuge in those dreamy, narcotic-filled dorms.
To get back to that sanctuary of lost youth – with all its hope and ambition.
To be in that precise moment – a vestibule to a moment that can never be again.
Even to go back would not be the same – tainted with lived experience.
Still, I take refuge and pleasure in
Momentary mindfulness in the home of those memories.
As the pulsating rhythm of the office printer whirs me back,
To the ever present Now – I wonder, what would I say if I could go back,
To my younger self. Of what I’ve become. Of what we’ve become.
– there’s no peace at home.
I can only control some things:
– stopping what does not work
– relying on my luck
I can’t assume that a stranger will have empathy.
I’m trying to move from chaos to quiet.
