Month: October 2013

She will break you

with an unseen kindness,

rattling your shape

until the brittle fragments

form a destitute mosaic,

a natural, defeated jumble

of broken colours.

 

And though you fear the piercing power

of these sharp shards,

she laughs with deft hands.

 

And shakes some more,

knowing you have secret pockets

to hoard your offerings,

persistent in her demands,

confident in her right to steal

what you don’t know how to give;

hers the artistry,

you the sand and water

fused to catch light

and broken for new shimmering.

I am a messy painter,

it comes from the way

these brushes are clutched

between my fingers,

creating a long fan

in each hand.

 

Each brush a different shade,

sliding paint around my world

without precision

but dripping love,

profusion of colour.

 

And rainbows may be cliché,

artistically lacking,

but each brush carries tenderness;

my committed flailing

trails this beauty.

All these heroes

who find the front of the room

to disrobe,

to proudly say I am gay,

I’m an alcoholic,

I have been wounded

 

and can show you how to live

with the liberated raw.

 

And me,

after scratching for a long while,

and listening in the night,

and letting the black sludge

pour from my bowels

in a paltry stream

on a small patch of ground

 

… my name is Heather,

and I’m not very nice.

 

Huge secret, that,

which is partly the joke

shared by men and women

at the front of the room,

bringing stories into light

after darkness

mostly hid them from their own view.

 

And me, I live with

nasty Gollum,

not the famous quester

but a little one

that scrabbles on my path,

whispering my need of more,

darting off to check the path next door,

cold and lonely and quite mad.

 

All this old steel for cage,

checking at the useless lock,

keeping her out of sight

except for all the times

she slips through the bars

… I give up the warden role,

stop pouring resources

in false penitentiary.

 

Fighting her has taken too much

from my heart,

has robbed my loins

of necessary nasty,

has sucked air from my lungs

that needed fuel

for belly fire.

 

I am not very nice

and you’d better hear it.

My aspirations of niceness

depended on a static clean,

a future transfiguration.

 

I choose instead the journey,

leaving the cage behind us on the trail,

letting my Gollum

squeeze my neck and pull my hair

as I carry her piggyback

and we trudge

or sometimes whistle on our way.