pain

REMEMBER

I stand at my loaded easel, your canvas primed. Somewhere between, our white, breathless stories call for colour. I am the brush, but we are both afraid to remember.

An old memory, new.
Pain, the colour of closure;
this palette, courage.

Poetic Style: Haibun
Challenge: ‘Threshold of Choice’
Topic: The internal friction between fear and desire when standing at a major crossroads
Guidelines: Capture a raw, personal moment of human tension

THAT DISTANCE

Distance is a morbid dance
of lungs that fill with fresh donations –
in, and in, but never out,
for space decrees it needs collation

Eyes that filter through the void
(collecting dust that never settles)
zero in but never out –
through leaking tears they wrestle

Unscarved bodies without spare arms
forget, forget, and start to numb –
feelings leaving, shedding, cleaved
as meat from bones, like beat to drum

Silence loud as piercing shadows,
ears as strung as tightrope toes –
not a sound escapes, nor enters,
but deep inside a scream that grows

Fonder does the heart cry bolder,
bleeding rust from valve to wall –
scarlet red to wash each chamber,
fuelling love to reinstall

Soon, a chapter newly bidden,
alphabeting strength from flaw –
words appear to mark beginnings;
in the darkness, light explores

Fingers reach to sink in touch,
and emptied arms, for sought embrace –
closer, closer, bodies lock
and lungs exhale at desperate pace

Separate, once, but not again –
the cost of loss, a needless price,
for what had led to time apart
is vowed to never happen twice

PERMISSION TO RISE

Am I brave enough yet to emerge
to escape the regret
to dismantle
forget
to demolish the surge of this
plundering ache
to curb and to conquer
and famish the quaking
– this suffering silence –
this violent breath taking

Am I whole enough yet
to prohibit the shaking
snaking my flesh with
its mandible gaping –
and I
an invertebrate
sensing
it
raking
its
claws
like it’s tilling a field in my pause.

– I AM –

I am soul enough, rousing to roar
but will this awareness
alone be the door to implore me to forfeit
renounce and withdraw from
this former attachment
to lapse while I stall
while in fragments
I catch myself falling
before
I submit to this whiplash of
“worth less” and war

mauling through self–harm
rejecting my core

Perhaps in my rapture my courage will capture
the thrill of detaching
unlatching
resolving
forgiving myself for my lack of evolving
for dressing tornadoes I’d wade in
– dissolving –
while anchored by nought but
the grief I was holding
by swallowing pain
– almost framing each frame –
as the slower the memories
the faster they came and the longer they’d last
it would tighten their hold
and the closer they’d weave they would blindfold
and frighten
and once I was frozen and broken
– eyes widened –
they’d leave

Perhaps fate will gift me a shift
from my history to bask in my victory
and mask my past injuries
and race to new mysteries
and questions, unanswered
and answers, un–asked
but desperately fancied
as I take on this task to have finally been caste
to have grown from my hate
to have flown past a place
where my purpose was faceless
to race to a moment I have hungered to taste
in a time I had dreamt of
instead of erased –

to a piece of the peace I deserve
and a truth to embrace

Will the aching forsake me at last
and the healing re–take me
its journey as vast
as the path it will trace to re–shape me
I ask
and will it profess to regress to
a time I could heave less
bereaved less
and
survive long enough to emerge
at my boldest and best?

The answer is ‘yes’