It has been a long time since I wrote anything that wasn’t just academic stuff. Even longer probably since I wrote poetry which, to be honest, I was never that good at. But recent events have challenged me in a lot of different ways. Certain issues I have, especially around anxiety and care, have become really prominent in my day to day life. It’s stuff that for the most part I ignore, I deal with it by never getting into the situations where I might have to deal with it, if that makes sense. Which for a long time has meant cutting off a chunk of the human experience and locking it away. That worked, in an unhealthy sort of way, until now. Someone from my past came back into my life though and by sheer force of feeling both triggered a lot of issues and made me realise how vulnerable I’d become to them, how much I’d been made a subject to my own problems and how much I was losing in that unequal exchange. I can’t dwell on them yet, they mean too much to me to be discussed openly, but the writing that’s helped me process things is something I want to share, even if it’s just projected into the void of an unread website. So…
—
An invasive moment
pushed out by myself
Shouted down by my own voice
Which only has to whisper
to silence me
the space is all self
but I can’t claim any of it
just cling to the margins
a shadow in unmoved sunlight
an unheard thought
in a mind hearing everything
you can’t welcome
or resist
what’s always there
—
A purpose with a person hanging off the back
unnoticed passenger
on a train they should be steering
—
Suffering makes you stronger
no
suffering makes you able to endure more
in all else you become weaker
joy, love, hope, faith
all capacities diminished by nagging wounds and trauma
What’s left is harder, set, tough
but so much weaker
for being impenetrable
—
Featured image – Kandinsky – Jaune Rouge Bleu
