You know the type.
She's probably called something like
Isabella. Rosalie. Ginevra.
and you find her in the sort of novel where
she's outdone by someone called something like
Jane. Agnes. Lucy.
She's remembered in criticism as
Trivial. Silly. Foolish.
She's defined as Shallow. Vain. False gold.
She's analysed as the mirror, the contrast or the foil
and you're supposed to vaguely dislike her.
She'll reaffirm to the reader that the heroine,
whether she be plain or beautiful, is always, in the end,
Rational. Independent. Brave.
She reaffirms the heroine as someone who
learns and grows
while the silly girl is left looking at herself in the mirror.

The thing is sometimes I feel more like the silly girl,
the girl who needs a hand, the girl who reads books
and wants to believe the stories.
Sometimes, I'm looking in the mirror,
chest deep in my own trivial, silly little worries,
looking at the puddles not the lake, and I know.
I know I'd be one of the silly girls,
not the heroine, out there, just surviving.
I'd be one of those silly girls and I hate it - and yet
- what's so wrong with the silly girls?

What's so wrong with the girls who love themselves,
or love the wrong people or love their clothes?
What's wrong with the girls who are
brave but not rational,
independent but trivial,
selfish but practical?

What's wrong with those girls,
because I always find myself preferring
the Ginevras and the Isabellas anyway.

It’s five thirty in the mirror maze,
and you’re all standing still,
surrounding each other at every angle.
There’s a way out but do we deserve it?
And the answer is no, no we don’t.
So we don’t try it and then it’s just you
and you and you in the mirror maze,
making yourself claustrophobic.
It’s hard to stand yourself in here
and it makes it hard to move.
We spend so much time alone together
that we begin to loathe each other
and then how can we get out?
If we can’t tolerate our self,
how do we leave the mirror maze
and inflict our self on others?
See, it’s better to just stab yourself
in the back three times over.
Let’s call it penance.
Let’s call it a lazy sort of suffering,
a selfish sort of punishment,
a sorry I’ve been such a bad person
but look at how much of my life
I’m wasting, look, I’m suffering now,
and I know I deserve this, I’m so sorry.
I understand I’m a terrible person.
We make no attempt to escape the
mirror maze that we’ve made for our self
so the life outside goes rotten.
It withers or it outgrows us,
and still, we’re standing in the mirror maze.
One day, I tell myself, I’m going to make it.
One day, things will be different.
But you can’t see it in the mirrors.
See, you’ve tried happiness before
and each time you find that beautiful blue winter,
that purple evening, that wide ocean,
you blink and you’re back in the mirror maze.
In the happy spaces, the mirrors put themselves back up.
Each perfect place and each perfect moment
becomes another mirror maze because we’re so stuck here.
You don’t deserve this. You don’t deserve this.
Why should you be happy? You don’t deserve this.
I hate you, we tell each other and try to turn our backs
on our self but you can’t do that in the mirror maze.
We ought to be sad. Why aren’t we sad enough yet?
It’s unproductive, it’s toxic, it’s pathetic,
all this self-inflicted sadness, but aren’t we
all supposed to hate the girl in the book
who refuses to be sad? I don’t know what to do anymore,
so today’s yet another day gone, six o’clock in the mirror maze,
wearing yesterday’s bad feelings because new ones don’t feel right.
​

Last night, I couldn’t sleep because
the dark and the blankets felt like guilt
and I couldn’t live as myself anymore.
I woke up in the morning anyway
and took a boat into the fog and found myself
on the island, walking across a cliff top into cloud -
walking into the unseeable, feeling alive.

-

So here I am on the island,
the fog – the symbol for that murky future –
is rolling in across the hills, across the cliff top
in one straight barrier.

I feel alive as I face the fog
and I stomp right through it.
One day, I tell myself,
I’m going to make it.
One day, things will be
different.
I just can’t see it yet.

I smile in the fog. I love the fog.

It clears and there’s the monument
that I’ve seen so many times before.

There’s the familiar at the end of the tunnel
it would seem
and I'm going to make it.

-

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here though.
It’s always going to be easier to face the symbol
as the I in the poem than as the I in the real,
facing the actual.

-

Back in the now, the fog has gone
and everything is blue and green.
I’m sitting on a bench below the monument,
remembering how a poet once walked here
and I really do feel alive today.

I stay on the bench in the blue and green,
quoting other people’s poetry to myself:

See, I’m sad because I’m sad. It’s psychic, it’s chemical.
I should hug my sadness like an eyeless doll
or just go back to sleep.
And I know there are promises I really ought to keep,
and miles to go before I get that sleep,
but aren’t the woods so lovely dark and deep?
And they are, but when it comes right down to it,
and the fog fails and the light rolls in
and I’m trapped in my overturned body
with fears that I may cease to be,
before I’ve had chance to write or love,
I must go to the shore of the wide world and stand alone and think –
and let there be no moaning there, when I look out to sea.
Let it just be sunset and evening star and one clear call for me.

-

I’m still sat on the bench, enjoying the sun
and suddenly I think

one day i’ll bring my girlfriend here
she’ll probably know of more exciting places
but i’ll bring her to the island
and we’ll sit by the monument
looking at this very same view

I find myself thinking in the future tense and it’s strange because
I don’t have any hope for beyond the now.
I’m still thinking I’ll probably be dead
and yet out of nowhere,
here’s the shift into a different tense
and the view of the end of the island
where it looks like it should plummet straight down
into the sea, but it doesn’t.

There’s more island beyond the end.

I sit on the bench, shocked at myself,
but I keep trying to believe that one day it will be different
and one day I will come here again,
with my girlfriend, whoever she maybe,
if she may be, maybe, please?

-

I come down from the cliffs and go to the shore,
to walk alone and think.

The sea casts gold and silver on the sand,
the sunlight gives puddles lilac halos
and I think maybe, just maybe.
Maybe, just maybe,
because today I feel alive.

-

The beach is a beautiful blue winter.
Winter, being the time of death,
blue being the colour of the endless sky and sea,
the colour of sadness and the colour of calm.
Beautiful, there because it is beautiful
and to nuance it further

The sea has left traces of itself
on the beach and I concentrate on those.
I look at the smaller elements
and try to forget the wide ocean.

The cliffs are crumbling and eroding.
The beach is rocky and ragged.
They are symbols for my own erosion
and my own weakness against the sea.

-

The beach is also real
and I walk on the sand,
feeling separate from everything,
feeling the possibility of everything,
feeling that maybe, just maybe.

I feel like something could go right
in this beautiful blue winter.

-

But this is also a liminal moment and while
I feel at home in the liminal      in the space inbetween,
you cannot build your home there.
The future needs a more solid base
and the liminal will eventually rip you apart.

-

I feel like a child here, but not quite.
I feel like an overgrown child
or a child in a too big body
or a child who knows too much about this world,
or an adult, who still feels inadequate.

I balance across stones, I jump puddles.
I don’t care anymore.
I’ll be the child or the adult.
I’ll be the I.

-

There is hope here, hope in feeling alive,
in curling my hand and imagining someone
will one day hold it.

For now, I walk across the sand and
look at the cliffs, the gold,
the lilac, the blue, the shipwreck,
the deposits of the ocean
and I write them down
into the notes on my phone
so I can turn them into poetry later.

I want to capture these precise scenes,
these precise feelings of being so alive
for the first time in forever,
of seeing the end of the beach and thinking,
maybe, maybe, some part of this will turn out okay.

-

The problem is,
I want it, this future, this something else,
and I think maybe it’s possible,
but I’m not sure I can get back on the boat
and carry this belief home safely.

Here on the island,
sipping at the brimming nostalgia,
breathing the blue winter,
living on the shore,
camping in the liminal,
it is all maybe, just maybe,
but maybe is a fragile word
and could easily get lost in the ocean.

-

I’m so caught between
wanting to end it all and wanting to survive it
and maybe it’s just the liminal moments
that make me want to live.

I pick maybe up off the shore
and tuck it into the pocket.

I have no idea if it will survive the journey back
but maybe, just maybe, it will.

So you’re clearing out your room,
clearing out more of yourself,
because it’s the end of the world, isn’t it?
The end of an era anyway –
the end of the bad decision to paint
your room pink.
You never really liked the colour pink.
Your old room had been sunshine yellow,
that bright happy colour of raincoats
and welly boots and sunflowers
(and yellow was still my favourite colour
when i painted my room pink –
yellow rubber in my pencil case,
yellow bow in my hair –
a sunshine happy kind of child
but not really. i painted my room pink
just because).
You wanted the new room painted a shade
called jazzberry but you were told it was too dark.
You wrote in the card to your dead great grandmother
that you were having your room painted jazzberry
and then you didn’t.
The card was placed in her coffin and cremated with her,
and you experienced that strange sensation at the funeral
of not feeling what you were supposed to be feeling.
I should cry, you told yourself, I should feel sad,
but you had cried all your tears in advance
and you’d cried them all for dead grasshoppers
and the old house you were leaving behind.
(always the same with me, isn’t it.
tears over everything except the things that matter.
i’m crying on the floor over lino, over my bedroom,
over a dress that’s in the wash and not my wardrobe)
The new bedroom had wardrobes you loved,
mirrors you loved and hated and it was pink.
It was your safe place, the space that wasn’t
really made for you, but was the one place
in this world where nothing could get you
(except me and yourself, but that’s another story).
Anyway, let’s get back to the point.
You’re clearing the room out because it’s the end of the world
and you’ve been putting it off for three years,
but you’re a crumbly cliff and waves are strong.
You’ve been thinking of train tracks
and gosh aren’t you dramatic,
but you’re finally clearing your little self out.
The toys are easy – you keep a couple whose names you remember
(Tallulah, Alfie, Tilly, Phillipa, Clementine
//oh my darling, ruby lips above the water
and the dream of kissing your best friend
that will forever be connected to
oh my darling, Clementine//),
the clothes are easy – in fact,
it’s all easy when you start to let go
of that nasty little girl from the sunshine yellow
and from the pasty pink.
You bundle her off into charity bags and bin liners
and then you find it – the Special Box.
It was your treasure trove in an
orange Jacobs crackers box  so you open it,
thinking you’ll keep everything, and then,
well then it’s a box full of *******.
Not just ******* things that once mattered,
but real ******* – broken pens, meaningless rocks,
used rubbers, crumbled tissues, incomplete
gifts from Christmas crackers
(and how very like you and me – to keep
things that go in the bin. we cling
to the sadness and the guilt and the fear
just because).
You throw away your special box
and you throw away all your junk
(except your new junk –
every train ticket you’ve bought
since the First)
and then the room is empty.
Were you ever here, you wonder
(and what toys will you have to give to your children?
you get asked, and you say you won’t have any.
i won’t because how would i, for one?
how could i, for another?
how could i put them through all this?)
and then you remember, that yes,
you’ll always be there – sunshine yellow,
pasty pink, nasty little version of nasty bigger you,
but for now, you’ve cleared yourself out a bit.
The new room will be blue
and one wall will be papered with books
(and i see what you’ve done –
you’re using the imagery of your own poetry,
because it’s easier to live inside of your own imagery
than deal with anything else, isn’t it)
and maybe, you think and the others think too,
this is a good thing, the sign of a change to come
(but your Special Box was full of *******
and what other evidence do you need
to know that you will never change or move beyond this?
this is as good as it gets).

I’ve spent a lot of time on this side of my island,
building my mirror mazes, my mirror boxes
and my mirror tunnels, and it’s just me,
walking into myself, looking at myself,
tripping over myself. It’s just me,
consuming myself in myself, just me,
multiplying myself until I cannot bear myself anymore.
It’s just me, at angles, again and again
and all I can hear there is myself.

I’ve spent a lot of time on those beaches,
lying face down in the sand,
filling myself up to feel something, to fill something,
and then I’ve half choked and washed it away with salt water.
I’ve spent hours trailing my fingers over the erosion.
I’ve spent hours searching for the ******* washed up on the beach.
I’ve spent hours lying back on the scratchy sand,
waiting for nothing to happen.

I’ve spent a lot of time breathing in the grey while
watching the murky ocean storm and spit.
I’ve waded into the waves and let the cold numb me
and I’ve made my home there and it’s not easy then
to get back on the shore. I’ve spent too long in the sea
and now I’m cold through and I want to be colder.
I spend my days crawling back to the mirror maze,
to run into myself and myself and myself, and I know,
I know, I know, it’s bad, but I feel safer here, with
the puddles I’ve made, the mirrors I’ve put up
and the cardboard cut out I’ve got used to.

But maybe, maybe sometimes, I ought to go
to the other side of my island. The side with the promenade
and the sea so clear I can see the rocks beneath it.
Maybe, I ought to go for walks in that end of day calm,
when the purple, orange air  stretches across the waves
and the sky and is so easy to breathe in.
Maybe, I ought to spend more time there, walking until
my chest feels so full that I have to stop and sit.
Maybe, I ought to spend more time sitting and listening
to the gentle sounds of that clear, purple sea,
until I feel happiness on my cheeks, in my ears, in my chest.

And I know, I know I’ll go back to the mirror maze,
I’ll climb back inside the mirror box and go back
to watching the grey stormy sea. I know I can’t make my home
in the purple yet, but maybe, maybe I can try visiting a little more often.

At the doorway to happy
I do enter
moving with energies of moment.
I dance at entrance way
awake to know the creator
I am when I vibrate love.
I sing at entrance
understanding I am sacred
as I move releasing old programing.
I breath deep at entrance
taking my power
to walk aligned with higher self.
I smile at doorway
finding the home inside heart
in oneness and free.

Note to Self (and Grace)
____

the simplest bottom line that tops off,
a writ that begins and ends
with its title of
perfect clarity.  

in my brief unremarkable existential passage
the enemy within needs our greatest concentration,
the floods, the pretty ravages, that come unannounced,
from outside creeping in
time-slow and life-sudden,
can't do much about

but the friendly enemies residing in the places hiding
where we have'em close kept, so handy for an instant
royal summons,
thems the apples poisoned we got to worry about,
the ones we grew from a tree planted from seeds in a package that came with a friendly note from the
Surgeon General saying,
"burn the contents of this container,
you'll never finish paying if you let them get planted,"

and yes,
it is 1:54am wide awake and still dying slow
a bit daily,
laughing that I entered myself in a race crazy,
where I am a
a guaranteed loser

so we end where we were born,
let it go.
survive, the (dis)order of the day
and it is
2:10am on just another Thursday,
that will end in the accord
of its own discord

<£>

2:14am

"just one phone call from our knees."
Matt Kearney