I spent fifteen years falling in love and separating, as my lungs breathed in and breathed out, as the sympathetic system balanced with the parasympathetic system, as expansion and contraction bloomed and retired all around me. Life.
In times of 2020 covid I decided, sat in my room alone and actually rather happy when I wasn’t being rather sad, to collect poems that I loved and to make a collection. It turned out that so many were about love, love for a man, love for a woman, love for animals, for trees, flowers and nature. I realised that I was writing a book about love. I sorted the poems into a semblance of a romantic relationship, the beginnings where colours of the rainbow seem to gleam out from all the corners of daily living, to confronting the barriers of fears of getting close to someone, who is more than probably going to show you who you are in your totally, rather than as a rainbow elf of beauty but will hold the mirror to the monsters within and the resolution, either a deepening or a separating.
In this book, there is a resolution to continue. Which I am hoping is a talisman for a future possible relationship with a person who, right now, I have never met. Will I?
But what this book showed me, as I moved through each poem, setting margins and fonts and spelling mistakes, is that the ‘other’ is actually the least important aspect, and though they are the ones holding the mirror up for us to see into our souls, the process of discovering our true being, of connecting and deepening a relationship with love itself, is actually what has been going on, as I drank in deep of soft, smooth intimacy, or felt the burning fires that gave me the gift of burning through parts of my ego, long obsolete.
While the Weeds Grow
You cannot argue
with a lighthouse,
nor dance
with a statue.
You cannot
rely on iron
not to rust
or the rain
in England
to stay away.
You cannot
know your future
or even who will be there,
you cannot guard
from death
or disease
or heartbreak.
There is no security
that money can buy
nor poverty that
will not alter
your perspective;
there is no friendship
that will not change
your heart.
There is no child
that did not grow,
nor person who lived
without harming another,
nor an eternal
clean bill of health.
There is no garden
that will not grow weeds
nor skin that will not wither
there is no cup of tea
that will not go cold.
There is no piece of cloth
that will not wear away
and shoes do not last forever.
So what will you do?
Keep still
holding your breath,
inanely preserving
an unused life?
Or live yourself
into raggedness,
breaking, hurting, crumbling
until there is space
to see through the cracks?
Meanwhile the weeds
continue to grow.
