Thoughts for Today

I'm muddling my way through today. It's funny how the best news can bring the greatest worries. I've had a week full of celebration and lucky escapes but now I'm numb with the prominence of it all. It's a different kind of numbness from how I felt when I first found out, it's hollow and is easily provoked.

I've been granted an opportunity of a lifetime but there's an ache inside me that feels it was undeserved. There's an erosion of the self-confidence that finding out initially filled me with. I'm reeling with "what if's" and my heart has sunk to the depths of my stomach, which incidentally refuses to keep still.

There is so much to be thankful for, but unfortunately also so much to worry about. So much, that all I can do is lay in bed with a restless mind and hope that sleep will come softly and quickly.

2 minute poem at the train station.

Uniformity reigned

Over cracked concrete slabs

Buried cigarette butts, scraps of

Gum wrappers, made home in its mercy

Its bleary eyed subjects emerged

Sheep shorn of their sides

And backs, shuffling as though it were

The Great Yorkshire Show

Or some such lark. 

Poem for Today

THIS IS A LETTER 

By Rebecca Dunham 

This is a letter to the worm-threaded earth. 

This is a letter to November, its gray bowl of sky riven by black-branched trees. 

A letter to split-tomato skins, overripe apples, & a flock of fruit flies lifting 

      from the blueing clementines’ wood crate.

To the broken confetti of late fall leaves. 

This is a letter to rosemary. 

This is a letter to the floor’s sink & creak, the bedroom door’s torn hinge 

      moaning its good-night. 

This is to the unshaven cheek. 

To cedar, mothballs, camphor, & last winter’s unwashed wool. 

This is a letter to the rediscovered, 

to mulch, pine needles, the moon, frost, flats of pansies, the backyard, 

      hunger, night, the unseen. 

This is a letter to soil, thrumming as it waits to be turned. 

This is a letter to compost, eggshell’s bone-ash chips, fruit rinds curved like 

      fingernails, & stale chunks of bread. 

A letter to the intimate dark—mouth-warm & damp as a bed. 

This is a letter to the planet’s scavenging lips

If me and Anais Nin were friends

I wish you'd forgotten Sunday
And cracked the glass of
The gilt picture frame
Depicting you; seven, red ribbon
Bruised knees.

Reflecting me, old, dungarees,
Shit taste.

I wish you'd cut your hair so short
That I could feel all the knobbles of your skull
And imagine how your smelled
Whilst we muddled through
Tripping over feigned cool

Clenched fingers at Communist rallies
"Statement" art: glitter glued condoms,
leopard skin and desecrated Manet prints

I don't know what kind of statement we were trying to make.

How I would like to go

It tasted like good wine
As he rolled it over his tongue
Inscrutable experience stood to attention
And dug its trenches within the lines of his face

Remembering the name of our mistakes
The candelabra and her grandfather clock

The lake glowed pink under a renaissance sky
Over lowered shoulders and shaking hands
With unstoppable, indomitable courage
It was coming

Another 3am Haiku (Western style)

Barren souls sauntered alongside
The endless desert moon
I sighed to see them go

What Remained

Jack's thick blue shirt
Huddled in the corner
Crumpled under the weight
Of the memories lining its pockets

Your jewellery box
Slurred its words
Gasping over the premise
Of unfulfilled treasure

My photo album, arms folded
Leaning against the dresser
Each yellowing snapshot
Slightly missed the mark

Whilst the memory of the tulips blooms
Its subjects cannot help their decay