You were my rock
Already laden with gulls and mermaids
And I was a wandering ship
My headwind weaving into your nooks and smoothing grooves along your chipped and chiselled face

We were a force that couldn't be reckoned with
The quiet breeze of a butterfly's wings
Catching and cooling
As the tide lapped and rose
Falling sharply away when it tasted the shoreline

The storm that gathered held distant
But its rhythm persisted in your lands
Small truths you'd held in place with busy times
Began to fracture
Splintering and splitting
There was no place that was not moved by thunder

The rope that bound us began to fray
Drawn taut and heavy, untended and laden with salt water

Tearing at the snags and sharpened juts
It eventually snapped
And I sailed onwards
While my anchor lay rusting
In the crannies of your lonely bed

Art. Rooms. Community. Eyes closed, I walk through it's entrance way, trailing my hand along the smooth wood of the wall; the hallway feels like a return to earth.

Light filters in through eyelashes and I step out of a close space into the heart of the centre - a domed, organic gallery, glowing peace; staircase to heaven spiralling out of it's core; up to studios and therapy rooms, a rainbow of colour encompassed by their interiors; soft space held by life.

The gardens sway in soft sunshine; herbs and flowers that lean towards the kitchen; a small cluster of tables basking in the scents of earthy, homely food; our chef at the helm, friend and confidante to all.

A circle of the smooth outer wall brings us to rooms alight with creativity; soft sweeps of brushes in silk and the dampened buzz of ink on skin; the gentle embrace of care and understanding, time within time. A room, full of messages, enriched with thanks and awareness and focus, for all of the experience that has helped us to feel our way to this place. We are a team, though we have not yet met.

In my head, there is a centre and it serves as the foundations for a community of those who feel. The idea grows and multiplies and I try to keep up and I hope that it is a dream that will support me with its curving, caring walls. I hope and I hope and I hope to be able to meet it, to be enough for it, to have the energy it needs to be brought to life. I hope and I dream and I trust. I let it keep me from despair, when all has gone black and full of nothing. I don't know how to get there but I am drawing the map every day.

With love and thanks for giving us this space.

I yearn for a life of loose clothes and footsteps
Easy smiles and arms, draped like scarves about shoulders
A life of contact and salt-washed skin
Arguments heated by the sun and rinsed off with the dishwater of an evening meal

Glorious nothing, it calls to me as if it were already mine
To toy with and pretend not to pretend that it is real and I am in it
To believe in the haze of those times that could be happening somewhere
To someone that could be me, somehow

Glorious nothing
I could make it my all, given the right conditions
Carve out contentment in the sandy rivers that water-fall
From the cliffs of my foot-bridge
Dropping over great cavernous edges of toe to rejoin familiar regions

Make a life around it there instead of here

But I don’t believe it needs me much
Not more than my family might
Or I believe I earned something else in the unknowing
And now my debt is stacked and not against the door of a beach hut

In the muddle and the mess that is my mind
I could do with some perspective
Someone else's perception
of this one-sided, two way conversation
that's been going on for hours
days
years
I can not be objective
about the very personal subject of
Me.

My life is clearly complicated
I am my self and all the rest of me
and we are a confused and cross-wired bunch

The answers lie inside
I try to dig them out
but when it comes right down to it
I lose the nerve
the will
the reason and I retreat
run back
to on-the-surface sanity
so as far as you can see, I'm happy
look at me!
I smile in all your snaps and photographs
and sometimes the twinkle is sincere
but what we have here
is a well-practised masking of emotion
Make me look more like the me I
imagine myself to be
so that, by the time I get there,
I can provide the fools with proof
that I was never afraid
never ashamed
never appalled or unsure or unsettled
never shattered
or shocked
never wrong, all right;
every night was my party -
and every place was my home.

You know
today I am okay
with being me
It is a fleeting thing
I can't lay dreams on it
or decide to life my life a certain way
but I can play my music a little less loud
and walk more softly
and be a little less scared of hearing what
my voice is struggling to say
I can entertain your company
without losing a little more of myself in your stories

It won't stay like this
I'll forget it in time, maybe minutes or days
and there will be no sense to be seen
my scattered personality will be scuffed
and rummaging for answers

it is so easy to forget

until the next time I arrive at fine
there will be highs and lows
and slow, slow walks home in the dark
past speedy days of phones and furious typing
trying to wipe the list clean and failing
sleeping fitfully as clients' orders flit through my dreams
switching off lights but not minds

not mine

but today
I feel fine
I am rested
relaxed and restored
reconciled to another quick week which feels rug-pulled from under my feet
while the world calls me lucky
without knowing my values

but no use in complaining
today I'm okay
and I'm grateful for that:
I know what it feels like to not be.

Sometimes it is too easy to see
no further than my own doubts and questions
What they have spent whole lifetimes working to achieve
appears in front of me as knowledge and finesse
and the process, the hard and twisting growth of it all,
that  had to break through rocks and fear
to get to where it now seems to be,
is lost in envy and insecurity,
is another reason to be less than anyone else,
less than possibility.

when all I have done, I have had done to me
and all I have seen I have shown
when all that is chained is unburdened and free
and all that is cut down is grown

when all of my silence is balanced by noise
and all that I've heard I have spoken
when all that is shaky is graceful and poised
and all that is complete is broken

when all that is foldered is strewn and un-filed
and all that is chaos is calm
when all that is distanced has been reconciled
and all that is burning, a balm

when what has come in has been duly returned
and what was dispensed is received
there will be no more straining, no lessons to learn
there will be nothing left but to leave