Tangled

Sometimes I get tangled up with everyday life.

One fine, straight cotton thread becomes entwined

around my family, work, children and economic situation.

Once it was easy to thread a needle and get to work as I please

now the loop is twisted and turned upon itself around others

and then back to me.

The more I try to pull away from it the tighter it becomes.

Like those poor sea lions and marine animals caught up in plastic

fishing lines cutting into their own skin

around mouths, restricting movement until they starve to death

Could I cut myself out?

What would be left of me?

The thread is cutting off chunks of flesh

surely there won't be much of myself left

the tangle is too tight to be unthread.

Confession

I confess I am lost

without hope

free falling through life

doing enough to barely

keep breathing

is that enough?

To live with each breathe

holding onto this existence

through inhaling and exhaling

in the most basic of actions,

hoping death doesn’t come

filling the lungs with air and

expelling carbon dioxide.

It seems so little a thing to do

when a new plague

robs people of this

simple action

taking their lives

by taking away

the abililty to breathe.

The trauma of broken things

I carry my fear like a heavyweight

many kilos of fat

pushing down on my bones

making my movements slow

and wearing down my momentum.

I'll never allow fear to make its

home in me

I hope it moves on

I push it away.

A violent act forced fear into my life

like so many random accidents,

which happen when no one expects

so much bigger than any one person

forcing us to live with

the trauma of broken things.

On seeing an old photo

Was I ever so young?

I don't recall being so fresh and new

I feel so old these days

like I've lived a thousand lives.

I have an older partner

live in an ancient country

all of those decades, centuries and epochs

of delusion have become a part of me.

I've always been shy

but my eyes were once filled with possibilities

now there are no new tastes

and I've heard it all before.

I'm feeling so very weary of this world

even if I've still got time to live.

I wonder what Twain, Lawrence and Woolf

would make of these days?

Would the modernist wit, energy and wisdom

Give us any solutions?

Would they hold the paranoia in check?

Or would Virginia drown herself again

After witnessing the first beheading?

Are we reliving the Crusades

or is it the madness of history's

fanaticism spiralling out of control?

Will the Jehovah's witnesses rule over the world

after we all die from a new pestilence,

or finish killing one another.

Promise me you will remember me

when I disappear into the heavens

without ever coming down to earth

blown to smithereens …

at least I died going somewhere or

coming home, rather than lying in a coffin,

an octogenarian with a tube down my throat.