Behold

I watch from my urban turret
I see people move through the world below
cutting through the street as through water
faces set, destinations known.

I wonder at the shapes they have adopted for this task
the demeanours they have chosen
like they have chosen their clothes,
and I disbelieve them,
these armoured creatures,
I think they are covering up, faking, surviving.

So, I cast myself puppet master,
and fashion for each a narrative that suits, my
beliefs about life's complex humanity
about clamouring thoughts and desires
about contradictions and hypocrisy
about yearning and dreaming and making do
about shopping and reading and needing a wee
about how hard it is to be alive and how compelling

then I sit back, sip my coffee
behold, it is very good.

Contained

I can feel the shape of my aloneness
my skin a chiselled edge
carving a path between me and the world

I am contained, separate
vast landscapes within
looking and watching without
I am in the world
but not of it
a marginal character in a sweeping narrative

Sometimes this is safe
a cocoon, a chrysalis, an unfolding
sometimes an oppression
a desert, a blank, a numbness

Meeting in the street

How do we meet in the street and share heart breaking things?
How can our human truths be unmasked
offered up in bare hands and received
amid cars and trams and pedestrians?

And yet it seems sometimes they have to be
an envelope of privacy is carved out of thin air
while one broken life reaches out and kisses another.

The banal and the profound rubbing up against each other for a moment
sharpening and wounding what is, then

shopping and lunch and work and cars and trams and pedestrians.

Lost

Today I found
a pair of glasses in a box
a hair grip under a pew
and an earring perched high on a wall
each abandoned, missing, lost.

And somewhere
myopic eyes strain for clarity
a strand of hair catches in the wind
curls back and tickles a furrowed brow
and a newly naked ear shares its loss with those who care to see
and unbalances a face.

On the nature of waiting

Waiting

looks so much like
standing
or sitting
or staring

but beneath the still waters
each fibre of being is
poised
pricked
sensitive
pumped
suspenseful
anticipating

looking toward the end point
the thing that is being waited for

a unity of purpose
that casts everything else
besides the point
not really engaged with
easily dropped

Origami knives

I had decided I was annoyed with you
and so I was prepared already

to fold
all your words and actions
into origami knives
and wound my own skin

the smell of weather turning

She sprayed it on my wrists
and asked me to place them together
raising them up in mute worship
to a god unknown

and all day I breathed it in
that liminal aroma
and with each breath I felt it
drawing me to the very brink
of a different state of being