Part of my Feb 2024 Dream Poems project.
Tendrils
Those days when it’s all you can do to survive.
When nothing and no one is trying to kill you, today,
as far as you know, though you are ageing ominously.
Days when you could easily lay in bed until nightfall, dreaming,
not dreaming, and nothing would change.
But you’re up and you’re hanging by a thread,
and everyone knows it. And if they don’t, they will.
Flowers arrive, a luxurious scent, perfect palette,
and you take them in, their beauty, their tendrils.
You breathe. You feast. One moment. You’re here.
The next moment, a minor frustration, very slight,
unimportant. An annoyance. An aggravation. Another one.
The day slipping off into the distance as you storm and
curse, tangled in what’s missing, what’s excruciating
in the way that only technology can be, what’s frightening
in the way that only a collapsing democracy can be,
what’s beyond your ability as a human to withstand.
And, though giving off every appearance of standing, you sink.
After the dark threads swirl, have their moan,
after a small snack, you rise again, weighted
but moving. On you plod, doing what you do,
doing it clenched and hard, unyielding, as the sun glides
across the sky, illuminating first one room then another,
the pine needles out back, sheened, the blue jay’s
shimmering blue silver blue black array, sun
glinting off garden metal through the scratched and latched
window, starlight permeating the room where you sit,
not quite oblivious to this devastating grace
yet emanating your own wintry heat.
You drink your tea, peppermint, find yourself returned
to your 20s, a college town, absorbing the drifting warmth.
You try to focus on the tea and only the tea;
you try to be here with the tea and only the tea,
but the tea has its own connections to make,
and they’re there and then, not here and now,
and you allow it. You allow the crumbling of time and place,
you allow the dislocation, the lapse, the small relief.
©M Wms 2024
Leave a Reply