The Fight

then the yield

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to share this postcard.
I poked my tongue into the why of it and found shame. I know the medicine for shame is light, exposure: offering what wants to hide up towards the sun.

It’s what I do with broken things, make something with them. It might be a poem of sorts, or more recently I have found myself playing with actual broken things, ceramic, mosaic, kintsugi, stained-glass.

This past hot summer was The Shed Project.
I made what I had thought was a dead shed into a micro heart-art space. Now I have a tiny place that is as much ‘me as a shed’ as Postcards From a Little Life became ‘me as a book’

I think I am out there making 3D poems, not really knowing what I’m doing, allowing and trusting as I go. I made the mosaic board in the photograph for my beloved niece for Christmas.

Still feeling into the yield and the resistance, I paused. I took Leonard The Dog around my North-West London block, as long as I can walk without escalating pain. It’s just under a mile I can do within capacity, and I walked it slow. It’s a day that Leonard gets less than he deserves. He doesn’t go to our beloved Dog Heart Hotel. His other familia are taking a breath of a breather in their always too muchness of running an impeccable dog centred business, and raising Pedro, the unexpected, unplanned son. Now over 2, he’s a force of nature.

So today and tomorrow, the last and first day of one year ending and another opening up, he just has me and my limits, and maybe Kevin if he can make it work. He forgives me every time. He never holds a grudge. Leonard the dog has taught me more about simplicity and love than I could explain if I tried - so I won’t.

I am learning the pause - my dear teacher Sue,. well she said a long time ago, if you’re not sure, it’s a no for now. In the pause, the yes arose.

So here I am.

Boxing Day Blues

I am should-ing myself: a futile pursuit, particularly when it takes a long time to accept that I am.

I turn the TV up loud
I have a whole Christmas day with my fingers in my ears

Binge watching American crime drama
I will not hear my desperate and lonely defeat
I will not
I will not

I bought a very expensive toothbrush (surely that means I believe in life going on?)
I light a hundred candles and try and work out this toothbrush – that needs its own fucking app

I don’t want to feel the weight of depressed, if indeed that’s what where I am, is called

I have patches for pain
A miracle
So I SHOULD feel, what?
Upbeat?
Grateful?
Open-hearted?
Creative?

I so don’t want to feel THIS,
it has taken a day, and a half the next day
to give up
trying not to be where I find myself

Stupid
Stupid
Stupid

To struggle like this, when I am the fucking map
to the opposite
to the place where putting this noisy head down
in a soft place
comes easy

Sometimes, I just have to love the violence that is happening
when it happens, when it comes up behind me
with a baseball bat, or a dagger – all manner of weaponry -
my forensic drama addiction has educated me in unthinkable deviant detail

(though come to think of it, I have my own real and remembered atrocities that would hands down beat any narrative from USA crime drama writing rooms)

This is me loving what I hate,
not soft at all
not tender
not any kind of lyrical, but somehow it is love

I remember when AM was inconsolable (no end in sight – just a tiny baby flooded with whatever unbearable storm moved through her)
I remember her punching the air (and me) with tiny clenched fists, writhing, contorting; the mystery of unremembered baby rage engulfing everything.

It was not hard, at all, though of course I longed for her storm to be done, to stay with her.

It was easy to stay, to love her, no question.
I wish it came that naturally and freely, to stay with this one I am with –

She didn’t get stayed with at all, all those decades long ago
And that is a legacy
And this is the very best I can do, to see her, to welcome her – to stay with her now.

Not pretty, or nice, or remotely easy,
but it is love happening
and a never not broken baby human
is not alone