Handshook

 

All it took was a handshake

to unsettle the masculined gaze

All it took was a kind look

– the warmth of a handshake –

for him to avert his teary eyes

All it took was a “Hello, Jack”

– the second-too-long handshake –

to expose the chink in the armour

to make him chin-on-chest humble

All it took was the simple kindness

– a handshake like an embrace –

of one who fought unseen battles

recognising one fighting another

telling them without stoic prattle:

“Feel no shame, and be brave, brother.”

Every cycle worse

 

“No greater mistake can be made than to think that our institutions are fixed or may not be changed for the worse. […] Increasing prosperity tends to breed indifference and to corrupt moral soundness. Glaring inequalities in condition create discontent and strain the democratic relation. The vicious are the willing, and the ignorant are unconscious instruments of political artifice. Selfishness and demagoguery take advantage of liberty. The selfish hand constantly seeks to control government, and every increase of governmental power, even to meet just needs, furnishes opportunity for abuse and stimulates the effort to bend it to improper uses... The peril of this Nation is not in any foreign foe! We, the people, are its power, its peril, and its hope!” 

Conditions of Progress in Democratic Government (1909), by Charles Evans Hughes (1862–1948) American politician and academic, Governor of New York, Judge of the Permanent Court of International Justice, Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, and US Secretary of State.

 

8 stades de notification

 
Insignifiant

Indésirable

Informatif

Intéressant

Important

Impérieux

Improbable

Impossible

 

In between dreams

Sometimes it’s hard for me

to fit in this world

sometimes I feel that I

could stop a rushing train

right there in its tracks

seconds before speeding off a cliff

absorbing its full momentum

saving hundreds at a time

that my roar could cause an avalanche 

which in one embrace I would stop

that I would devise an equation

quantising particles

manifolding them

thereby unlimiting food and fuel

that I could fly out in space

grab and chew a whole black hole

and spit out a new universe

in my mind’s eye I can

and have done all these things

of course in the real world I couldn’t

but my daydreams and nightdreams

are full of daily scenarios

because I am weak-bodied

and strong-willed

and because I know

what it takes to love

what it takes to be unloved

to seek refuge in dreams

when everything else

falls apart

for my inner world is larger

than the entire universe

Freedom in the shadow

 

"All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to be noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It's a positive thing. You can move about unnoticed and invisible."

Doris Lessing (1919-2013), novelist and Nobel laureate, as quoted in An Uncommon Scold (1989) by Abby Adams, p. 18.

Corps mourant

 
watching the cormorant
alert, scan the river
plucking torn feathers off –
bitter taste in the mouth
of the weary, backstabbed,
morose office worker

Three, or two, or one

"A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others."

William Faulkner (1897-1962), interview in The Paris Review of 1956.

Enough

 
Not everything was stolen, of course, but enough was robbed. Enough that I cannot love anymore. It was not just the one robbery, of course, it happened over many years. One kiss, one tryst, one relationship at a time. “I’ll take this,” they said, “who cares if it leaves a hole.” “He won’t mind,” they thought, “he has a lot of love left anyway.” “He’ll pull through,” they reasoned, “heartaches never killed anyone.”

Like this one day on a hike when I saw a procession of mountain rams circling around the dead body of a black fox. At the time obscure explanations seemed the most obvious. Now that I am the fox, I know enough.

Leave me alone so that I don’t have to harness my breath, so that I can freely cycle to and from work, simply, Monday to Friday.

Leave me alone so that I can do my work without interruptions, so that I don’t have to overthink about past and present miseries. I want to be able to enjoy my evening walks, my weekend cooking and nightly reading, alone, unperturbed – undoubtedly sad but assured that the certainty of hurt has gone, or has at least abated enough that I can move about untroubled, assured that I can pour over my books uninterrupted, with the obsession of those yearning for answers who yet doubt everything.

Leave me alone so that I can enjoy my episodic sleep, my epic and magnificent dreams and nightmares. Let me enjoy the carefully-nurtured illusion that I could ever have been and done enough.

And no, you cannot ask me to learn to love again. I am too old and tired for that balancing act. I have seen enough. You’ve robbed me of enough. My heart is like those petrified skeletons in the natural history museum: chipped, glued back together with dirt, with bits missing and instead bits of wood and rocks in the crevices, hanging by invisible threads from the ceiling, weightless, gathering dust, projecting ghostly shadows when the moon shines through the windows.

Yes, leave me alone. Now, and for good. Enough is enough.

Had you by chance any fear, may they rest comforted in the assurance I shan’t need any help, for I have gone beyond that. Leave me alone in the tundra of solitude, when the body tenses and melts when touched, eager and desperate, weary and numb.

The body will rebel, of course, but the mind is resolute.

I’ve had enough.

 

Aar

 

The desperate and the mad

Folk say to look for the light within

and for the light above

beacons in a world of obscurity

but when every light goes out

it’s all dark, isn’t it

all dark

and in a world of fugitives

the person lighting the candle

will appear as either

the saviour or the traitor

the brave or the fool

the desperate and the mad

no light is eternal but darkness

only darkness can remain