Feel the breeze through the trees. Even the leaves strive
to stay alive. The energy is flowing through you, my love.
Pause and feel its spinning. The way of this world , freedom
is for the taking with every breath, linger
in the outside, the black outside while still enclosed within,
for now.
Day 9 – Goofing off Revisions/ redrafting
Ten years. Ten long years of changes, I’ve been dreaming on paper.
I had to give myself permission.
To create again. Safely.
I was fearful. Fearful of the word. Images are safer. Images speak to the soul.
Paint. Takes me back to being a child and all I wanted was love and joy.
Tapping into this feeling of being with self, I show up to the page. Each day.
Each day, I have the opportunity to start again.
Each day I have the opportunity to meet the sunrise anew.
We obscure the outline of the belly of a mountain*
when we write about nature
we enter the realm of words being useless
we enter our narcissistic imaginations instead of being in with the mountain
I miss the mountains, the Highlands, Glencoe
At some point, I became marred by immobility, by staying close, staying safe
Now I return in my dreams, awake and grapple to describe their grace and poise
Abstracted longing. Never enough, never true enough to capture their form, their presence
I wait for my return. To sleep within the belly of mountains,
the mountains I’ve always felt are old Black women resting together, safe
*Day 10 prompt was: Find a single sentence someone else wrote that sticks out to you and use it as your first line. Let your poem unfold from there.
This adapted line was taken from ‘Against Nature Writing’ by Charles Foster.
Letting my brain catch up with the happening, I allow my heart to stop for an instant. Feeling unmoored to make sense, far too soon.
If only I had saw it coming. If only someone had thought to talk to me before this. Maybe things would be different, maybe the wound wouldn’t cut so deep.
Needing to rewind the clocks, to go back to that ignorant bliss, that season of love and acceptance, is a fool’s wish.
Under the avalanche of words, I move silent into the dark night, to piece myself back together following a different schema, charting an undiscovered course.
I know I was in the full of it all. Life overflowing.
With all its distractions and demands and me thinking I’m the central force.
I know I was missing from the family home, chasing the next big gig, the next recognition slip.
Maybe my family had eaten for the day and I’d missed it again.
Maybe I had to circle the streets trying to find a parking space for at least half an hour.
I know I carried loads of bags with stuff packed just in case, always worried about being unprepared and found wanting.
I know I lacked the self-belief and love of self. I know I needed more of everything.
So when night fell, and I found myself still working, reorganising books for god’s sake, I know I wasn’t prepared for the public shaming.
But my gut probably knew this day of failure would come to expose me for the imposter always felt and knew.
We’re always looking for answers.
I think that’s why I tell stories or lies.
The purple sky really sets off the creamy whites of those stars.
Silence plays itself. Silence.
I just wish you’d open your eyes when you hover over me.
I just wish you would see me.
Let us linger here in this room with the curtains closed with our other lives forgotten for a little while longer.
Let us not use words when our hands, lips and tongues can communicate our needs, our wants.
Let our breath be silken on our skin, let our bodies entwine still able to promise bloom and ripple.
Let us slow it all the way down, slowly, slow, so we can feel each stroke, each gliding smooth folding into each other.
Let us hear each others moans of joy, of wonder as our bodies wander together away from this room, this bed into our happy place where we can ride out the rest of our time here on earth.
Let us dream this lushness as we reach for each other, conjuring connection beyond the here and now, in the here and now.
Let us linger in the lingering light and just enjoy this afterglow, this pleasured pain like passing ships never to traverse these same desire lines ever again.
This wasn’t the way he promised it would be.
Bare floors, five to a room, babies’
faces lined with hunger, piercing
cries towards an empty oil lamp.
Love squeezes out of lives.
Boys shooting boys as regular as angel
dusting on banana leaves, long
and glistening. Violence standing
caged on corners with broken
standpipes, living next to dread.
The seething and faltering silence
as the dreamed for life
bobs on a distant horizon.
The moon is nowhere in sight.*
*Laventille, Smokestack Books, 2015
I’m practicing how to show up in spaces, alone and with others, in fullness.
I’ve used wholeness before. Striving to get back to that sense of being whole, as we enter as already into this world. And then for the rest of our lives society and culture pull us away from our wholeness. When we realise, usually when much older and not giving a fuck, we spend our time and energy attempting to get back to that wholeness. This is a practice too, but to be whole sounds final and also out of reach.
Fullness. While fullness seems something that can be embraced now. In the present, moment to moment. Fullness for me gives the middle finger to those who have criticised me by saying I’m too much. Too Black. Too fat. Too loud. Too enthusiastic. Too Alive. Too much.
Fullness is me embracing my too-muchness and giving off that ‘don’t care less’ energy.
I’m showing up in fullness. Come join me.
Living Wild Studios 