As a child
I put my finger in the fire  
to become
a saint.

As a teenager
every day I would knock my head against the wall.

As a young girl
I went out through a window of a garret  
to the roof
in order to jump.

As a woman
I had lice all over my body.
They cracked when I was ironing my sweater.

I waited sixty minutes  
to be executed.
I was hungry for six years.

Then I bore a child,  
they were carving me  
without putting me to sleep.

Then a thunderbolt killed me
three times and I had to rise from the dead three times  
without anyone’s help.

Now I am resting
after three resurrections.

the page remains unturned
tho the bottom corner
has been worried into a soft dog ear

it is not that the words are boring
the plot mundane, or the prose stilted
it is I who cannot read the black ink
the same words repeating in my mind

as i stare out into the garden
my ability to read is well below par
as i day dream the hours away

content to be a  warm, squishy cushion
to the tuxedo rex cat,
as he dreams panther dreams
and purrs like a Massey Ferguson

outside the window, in the hazy warmth
a dragonfly darts about the garden,
before settling with dainty precision
upon the craggy green mossed rock
at the pond's edge, a pause, a blink,
then the insect alights again

i too should be up and about....
but i am anchored by lassitude
and  three and a half kilos
of contented cat....
whose daydreams  are not
to be disturbed....

I write to you in my mind
on beautiful crisp white parchment

I write sacred things
disguised as daily minutiae
things of magnitude only
because of mundanity

small glimpses of the vast empty
hidden in the overgrown wastelands
milestone markers to nowhere
to a land inhabited by ephemera
daliesque in it's discrepancies
in relation to the current realities

i write mile after mile of dragging letters
a breadcrumb trail eaten by carrion birds
that grow fat on both joy and misery

i am like a plough horse, in a field
overused and crumbling,  but still
i work the rows, for no one has
released me from the harness

my words are mud, on crispest snow
turned to water and frozen to rime

my words are finest gibberish

bedlamese, sublime,

vapour in a hurricane

a cry in a bottle

the salt in a tear

my words....are the ellipses
of my understanding of your life.

I write to you in my mind
and post the letters to you memory.

These days I am amazed
How this tiny apartment
Suddenly contains so much space
Vast, like an ocean
I am drowning in endless spheres

I am thinking about how we didn’t even fit a couch into it
How you threw away your old shoes
How I buried mine under pillars of clothes in the cellar
How the walls hugged us at night
How our hopes and dreams tried to escape the window
How we didn’t let them
How we wanted to adopt a cat so badly
How we were afraid the walls would swallow it

But this morning I woke up,
Sheets like a large blanket of snow
A heavy silence weighing me down
So much air but so little breath

I barely saw the end of the room
Just a dark tunnel where there is no light at the end or anything at all
Just me and is ridiculously large space
Suffocating me with its infinity

I recovered your stuff from the cellar
Hung your pictures on the wall again
Even put up that ugly shelf you used to love

But no matter how hard I tried to fill the room
The floor just soaked in everything
And there was only so much space

You notice things;

Specks on the wall
+ ceiling fan dialogue

                                                       ­      or finger-painting behind
                                                          ­                     your eyelids.

  You writhe,
organise your day.

Still you probe the sheets;

                             "Will I ever get there?"

In your fugue.
In your alarm-clock glow.