Fever, Forgive, Wild Heart, Mirror, Culpable, Trapped, Insomnia, Sea-breaker...

Fever

As if a fever broke.

In the shower, warm water pouring over me but as if I came in from the storm somewhere out in the wilderness. The steamy fog unrolled itself and you found me sipping morning coffee and we talked.

Of uncertainty and even though decisions were made I felt they were also being unmade and that endings were beginnings.

Can the paint on the canvas be unpainted? Or must we whitewash and re-paint? Will sandpaper take it off? Could I sand myself to an essence, a place of blank openness, the untouched whiteness of the beginning?

Forgive

To forgive is not to condone, to allow the same behaviour to continue, the patterns to play out their relentless rhythms.

I forgive myself.

For being there: for being hurt or hurting.

That is all we can do.

Wild Heart

It is so precarious, day after day,
these inner desires, meltings,
flames.

The Mirror I Don't Want to Hold Up

Do I pick men who can't make a commitment, unattached, single, deliciously attractive, brilliant, because then I don't have to?

How many years did it take me to learn how to spell commitment? It was the word I balked on, always. Entrapment. Then I had to become liquid and be what he wanted.

Commitment is a deep promise.

Not ownership; not possession. I can make a deep promise to love you unconditionally and with futurity.

Whoever you are.

Culpable

In what ways are we culpable?

In what ways do we cause the events that befall us?

How often do we set up situations that implode and then we can disappear back into our lethargies. Perhaps whining; perhaps blaming; perhaps only sad.

If I look deeply at the words I spew forth I find hidden pins, off-putting things, tiny hisses and flashes, not quite the blinding spitting snake, but almost. Or do I exaggerate?

Sometimes I prevent myself from having what I most want. It's a determination against myself.

What can I say, Monsieur? I am a complex woman.

Trapped

I am trapped in my own fears, fears which disperse and vanish like fog in the gleaming sun when confronted.

Fears don't like to be faced: they hide; they lie; they rationalize; they obfuscate.

Like insects fleeing the light in the night on the counters of an old kitchen.

Insomnia

When I decided to obsess about writing the way I do a lover, I stopped sleeping. Now I keep my notebook with its empty white sheets beside me to write blindly in the night with a pencil without looking.

Words that flow in the symbolic between the imaginal and the real.

Reflecting and shaping.

All day, euphoric and tired,
such nights of intense love-making.

Sea-breaker

It was a small sea-breaker, Monsieur. But love flowed over it.

An ocean of love that could not be
held back.