kaberett | Entries tagged with a year in poems

Alright, let's make-believe that I'm a tree.
So dream: what storms have broken me?
What fruits adorn? What loving scars
graffitied in my skin, how warped
or changed with time? Do I give shade and,
later, warmth? And most of all:
please say I'm safe. Please dream me sound.

I love you means
that I would have nothing of you that
is not freely given; that
you have no obligations, are
not beholden unto me, that
you owe me
nothing.

We practise with building bricks and breccias.
Just so--a castle. Just so--in my embrace
if only I hold fast enough, you'll be transformed--
your fragments grown into a plated armoured whole--
your red unblinking eyes your sturdy heart.
As with all complex structures, engineering is required
on every scale from child's play to mountain range;
chance and happenstance tend tenderly toward decay.
With these hands I thee knit together
or a sweater or a scarf; with these hands I thee play
music, best I can; I write for thee solemnities
in careful lines. I create for thee this waxing
waning love, albeit it small, or great--
and at close of day we'll sweep
the sawdust from the floor, we'll bank the fire,
we'll knead the bread--from these quiet domesticities
is all love made.

What joy, this, to learn what others find in you:
to watch people I love adore anew, to take reciprocal
delight as you illuminate each others' facets
too often hidden from my view by busy-fingered fates
and orbital mechanics. Yes: this too
expands the borders & horizons of
my familiar faithful heart. I'm astounded
by how much I can encompass; by how large
I grow. I learn from you.

Without: the patchwork of the comforting dark,
the sheets of rain, stitched firm
with nets of light we've wrapped round trees
as reminder, to help us find our path.
Bubbles, catching street lamps, float like stars.
Look up. You blaze. You, too, are a landmark.

            In relief's ebb
the shifting sands of selfhood un/
cover rocks of hope/lessness.
You once said we were magnets:
does that hold?
               I've learned, I think,
why some comfort's called cold:
because it burns. Keep it
in your mind's-eye's heart for just a beat too long:
you'll find it shan't depart without
its layer of skin. It leaves you raw.
Salt stings; Weltschmerz. Stretched thin,
stretched to translucency, I've no idea
at all how I might best begin to say:
Please.

They say, I think, that moments
can hang preserved in drops of amber
suffused with bone-deep memories
of setting autumn suns.
In Mass I see the elderly &
think of my Grossmutti, who
placed sacrificial flowers on
the altar, very nearly til she died
& in so doing offered up
her blood, her knees, her strength;
I think of Papa, who still heaves
his way through grassy lanes
to kneel, to genuflect, to offer peace.
And in Mass I hear the children
as they whisper to their parents
having not yet realised just how well
the church carries their voice
(nor yet been taught: above all else is silence);
in them, and in the fretful babies
this strange unwieldy future
reflects me backwards to myself.
That imperfection is inevitable
is without doubt its greatest grace:
the same is true of love.
Take heart. Take strength. Take space.

For all of you; and specifically for jelazakazone, a bit.

I am living a borrowed life on
borrowed time, in that
the theft thereof has not been noticed yet--
my other selves are paper-thin;
they echo in the corners of my eyes,
their futures circumscribed by our own hand
and thereby written out of history.
Egal: perhaps they would be better, but
it's me who's living this, who's
strong or weak enough to hold on tight.
I will make a patchwork of my fractured nights,
my scraps of grace: as ever bound together
with the brilliant shining thread that you,
unknowing, trace.

As a species, we are dedicated
to post hoc rationalisation:
the tidying away of inconvenient emotion
the reduction of the self
to an ordered
             sequence
                     of steps.
If this, then that. Well, no:
everything happens for a reason.
The reason, though, does not come carved deep into stone
(every conceivable dictator
being characterised by sublime indifference):
but is rather what you make of it.
This is what it means to tell the story of your life:
to take your whys and somehow give them form.
This is the solid ground of poetry:
two roads diverged; think, two things, both at once:
and every meaning you create is true
or true enough for now. Is this about...?

Yes. Yes, it is.

If only for this moment, we
are mirrored mirror twins.
I only wish I'd any clue
along which lines I'd break.

And if the Earth should be too great a gift
(too inconvenient, too delicate, too messy)
then I will give my self to you instead
(for all the same might well be said of me).
I conceive myself in motion. I believe
myself most wholly in these momentary
scraps of grace; perhaps what scares me most
is to be still. The closest, I suspect, that I will come
is falling into orbit around your indifferent sun.

(By which I mean: I own more button-up shirts than I do clothes hangers. I tend to wear button-up shirts to work if I have anything resembling a healthy amount of grip, so when I am making it to work regularly in clothes that aren't the ones I slept in, this isn't an issue - enough shirts are in the wash that I've always got a couple of spare hangers in the wardrobe. Currently I have two shirts sat in the bottom of the hanging-section of wardrobe, because insufficient hangers. I think I am probably going to ask my GP to a bloods workup checking - among other things - vitD levels, because I'm already at max dose of antidepressant and on a daily vitB supplement, and ruling out other easy fixes seems like a plan, sigh.)

In addition to crossing the housework items off my list (not therein discussed: emptied green bin, moved lots of things through to recycling, etc) and somehow managing to get all my chemistry done in an approximate 9-5 (... 8.30am to 5.15, okay), I have finished up responding to poem prompts:

The Threshold As Home (prompt: Heimat)
Granat/Garnet (prompt: your favourite gemstone)
(the world will end in fire) (prompt: Monsters that are also landscape features)
Love as praxis (prompt: wheels within wheels, geared to annoy you; content note for abuse & domestic violence)

Current Music: sleep's so healthy that it's out of the question

and with every heartbeat
I say yes
and every poem
is a poem about love:
the warp, in tension,
a thread of anti/matter

even if
it is present only in its absence
defined only in negative space

and I am writing this poem
with my life.
I love you.
Yes.

I turn to you. When
my voice falls silent, when
I find I cannot speak, when
my tiredness stretches taut
and every sliver of awareness
hums distantly with pain, monotone and dull:
still, I turn to you.

You absent yourself from any map
I'd care to draw - and in so doing
create for me this space,
let radiate a sense
that nonetheless there irgendwo exists
a solitary wellspring, pouring quiet
out onto my landscape of debris.
Is it a kindness that this
patient sort of strength
rubs grit into my wounds and smooths
them out? Perhaps. I live in hope -
should I freeze over - I will find
my feet (at last) and teach myself to skate;
to dance unmoving with reflections of my skies.

for J.J.

Write your dreams upon me.
Carve them bone-deep, filigree
and fretwork of my flesh:
I'll bear your weight. I'll bear
the wait. Here, hear
as my heart beats. For all that's wrong,
for all I cannot do, this,
at least, is steady, sure.
You're not the first. I am a beast
of burden. I am strong.
Beloved, if you'd only dare to ask
you'll find me more than able for this task.

Say, for the sake of argument,
that my foundation is movement
that at root all I do
is flow: my breath through my lungs,
my blood in my veins, tides of fluid,
neurotransmitters leaping, all daring, all flaring
between synapses. I'd have you believe
I'm solid and sturdy, not limestone
nor karst, and I'd lie:

You permeate me. The spaces I move in
that move in and through me
are porosities. You love
like groundwater, like rainfall; you creep
through my depths as a ghost, leaving only
your traces: calcification, my vesicles
filled, lending strength, making brittle,
and stealing my freedom to float.
And in your wake: stalactites hang
silent & sharp within the caverns of my heart.

How is it that so very great a gift
can be as fragile, tiny, tenuous as this:
this sun-bleached bird skull, feather-light,
caught in protecting nets emplaced
from June til autumn (dawn til dusk).
Nearby: a poised and outspread wing,
tenacity of tenderness made flesh.
Unwieldy metaphor, perhaps, and yet--
and yet. O best belov'd: take flight.

(It is the lightness of your embrace
that will let me go adrift. -- Meg Bateman)

I will burn.
I will burn for who I am
and I will be a beacon.
I will burn with rage
and light up skies
with starfire, eye-searing
incandescence, a guiding
pillar of flame.
I will be lighthouse.
I will burn warning.
I will burn jubiliation,
firework-bursts of fierce joy.
O ye dispossessed, take heart:
I shall light for ye a path.
I shall consume.
(I shall consume the dark.)
And I will say: this
I would choose again.
I choose. I choose, and choose to burn.

The clouds that scud across the the heavens of my moods
are only water, for all they cast me into intermittent
shade. The tears that scour my face are only water, too;
so too my thunderstorms, so too the streams
through which I tread, on which I float, reminded
I can move. My heartbeat echoes through the spaces
between atoms. I am two-thirds water: I'm
composed of opposing forces; it's
the water with which I quench my thirst that snows
bitter-cold upon the seedlings in the garden of my soul.
I am two-thirds water. I am whole.

Love is a universal constant:
by which I mean it is
as remote, pervasive, and unimaginable
as the speed of light,
as ir/relevant as Planck or Avogadro,
and as varied and as integral.

You are loved
and love is absolute.
Years of light may separate you
but distant stars are no less hot,
burn no less bright:
you are a vantage-point, alone.

And you are an alchemist
of people: you have spent
your entire life in study,
the weights and measures easy in your hands
as flight, as wings.
You are a scientist. You choose
how to employ your tools,
what to discount, how best
you might experiment.

Love is not an answer, nor a framework,
nor a limit: it is a block, an element,
a piecemeal part of firmament
and you are gravity, mortar, gluon--
choose your scale: you,
sine qua non.

In the moment when someone else's laughter tears
you away from joy
when their face turns mirror-mask, reflecting
back your past, when your breath
catches, and your heart stutter-
skips, the beat of time confused,
gone wrong, when you
startle awake to find you've gone adrift--

when you put down your anchor, set aside your anger,
settle once again into the fabric of your days--
when the details of your life burst blueberry-bright,
delight for all the landscape's swathed in mist--
when you notice you've forgotten to be scared--
this, too, has the taste of victory.

Hoard your small victories like sugar-cubes
or pearls, the coarse made sweet & light.
Remember that the everyday counts, too.
If it is all that you can do to wash your face--
even in this, you'll find you can find grace.

We will part ways. Then, should your thoughts return
to me, I ask of you this gift: do not permit
your memory to soften me, erase
my scars and snarls, elide
my impatience and myriad cruelties.
Do not forget my lies.

Remember me complete. If I am kind
I am not only kind; if I am often fair
it's no less true that I am quick to judge.
I can't be brave without that I know fear.
We love: and we anticipate our loss.

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30	31

who only by moving can balance

only by balancing move

#20 [a poem]

[poem] In Earnest

[poem] Making Love

[poem] &

[poem] Afterwards, Low Tide

[poem] All Souls' Day

[poem] Craftwork

[poem] Everything happens for a reason:

[poem] Only This

The clotheshanger metric says I'm quite mad

[poem] and (yes)

[poem] Still

[poem] Collecting Dreams

[poem] The author reimagined as a rock

[poem] And so the seasons

[poem] (I'm gonna let it shine)

[poem] Survival

[poem] Love is a universal constant

[poem] [super draft-y]

[poem] Reflection

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May 2025

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