pack

I got my pack today

there in the mail but you weren’t in it

and I felt there for a minute

(illogically, irrationally, a tiny bit pathetically)

 irritated, melancholy,

let down and short-changed.

in the head

I have this head I cannot shake and I

have his tears collected up inside and I

am not the one on which he can rely

and I haven’t cried for many months but I

feel the river damming up inside and I

cannot shake it, cannot escape this cry.

mirrors

so the accidental girl exposed herself in

her own wobbly circus mirror, you know,

the one where you’re a bit squashed and skewed and not quite you.

she held a pane up to the one who means the world

to her and all the smoke and mirrors, 

upon which you may rely for warmth

receded and revealed a heartless deed.

she looked again and noticed her worst fears about her make-up.

she has the tendency to egotise, the very trait she hates to see.

so these mirrors have been weilded in some inadvertent war

and she finds she still is haunted by confusion long ignored.

unholy

If I were to play Anais Nin

for just one week or spring her on you

unawares then you would tell

me I was wrong, unfair, unholy.

And then you’d say “I just don’t know you”

and I’d say “you never will”.

Then that would be the worst of it and

cities in between would light again.

girly

“Now listen here” she whispered from the wings 

like a forgotten autocue she prompted

“Next time you look him in the eye and firmly…

(And herein lies the issue, for this is not my way)

recite these very words:

 ’This girl you try to tailor-make, ain’t what I want to be.’”

truth

can this heavy headed aching

brought on by his busy lips

forming  answers so finally sure

really be the truth of it

the last of it

and the end of all they were?

weary

will I ever stop feeling like a worn carpet square?

vista

Give me no more rowdy orange

or thirsty, faulty green.

What I crave is silent white

with the heavens bleeding blue.

Yukon

Oh river,

oh ice,

oh fearless glacier gale;

how I miss you like a long-lost love 

though we are yet to meet.

childless mother

there have been some times

indeed, in which

you have felt like

a motherless child.

then there comes

another time who 

cradles in its weary arms

a much stranger realisation

of the fearful fact  

you are now instead,

the childless mother.