rambling

i have seen this happening to other people. best friends. family. lovers. split and separated by diametrically opposite geography and situations, are wedged apart by circustances and slowly the tiniest mundanities of everyday life slip in the gap left between them while the drift apart. and ties are irredeemable loosed. i keep telling myself it wont happen to us, sister of my soul?

but maybe i should not panic so much. what is broken can be rebuilt. who knows that better than us? they say blood is rather thick. besides however much you value your people and relationships and permanency and completeness, there is only so much you can work you can put into them. sometimes you just have to accept and play along. and hold on to the faith, love and hope package. and tell the voice in your head saying i told you so to shut up and go away. and anyway, what choice do you have?

you are at a new beginning. i am at huge ending. you are at high noon. i am at midnight. orbiting in our cycles, we have come at cross points. remmber, you were born in the morning, and and i at midnight. in all your sunshine, will you lose patience with my darkness, or will you understand (the rolling stones wont be interested in this one)? in all my gloom, running out of light to share, will i run out of things to say to you, wisdom to share, life lessons to teach, patience to hear with, strength to silently bear with. or even, heaven forbid, miss a baobab sapling of bitterness one morning?

i am at the mouth of a tunnel. it's long and dark. my courage is a tattered dirty war-worn security blanket slipping off my shoulders and dragging behind me. my heart is weak and old with centuries of battle, and my determination to not quit is a nagging, complaining horse throbbing under me. but madcap is at the other end.

my madcap. i had seen you glistening in your broken tainted glory, shimmering in the distance. fatally alluring. before the thought of warning formed, i knew the thunderbolt had fallen. maybe it was destiny. it takes mere seconds, for the songbird to spot it's thorn. i slipped away in the dark of the night, leaving all that was known and safe, to set off towards you. are you to be attained? are you even for real, or just a shape in my head? a glorious figment of my imagination? the road ahead is so dark, and so long, and so unknown. do i dare? do i even have a choice? i like to maintain the pretense of deliberating and weighing decisions, standing here, at the mouth of the tunnel, but i am choice-bereft. i cannot not turn away now.

the first stretch was easy. relatively. one bridge crossed. foolishly, i have squandered all my courage and strength, almost, on that first stretch. that bridge has been crossed. but the shore is yet to come into sight. my ship stalls and awaits admission at the shore. will i be let in?

and in all my exuberance, i had not thought beyond that first bridge. it is only now, that i realise, the journey has just begun.

i was curious about the colour of pain
mine is like a mother-of-pearl shell

it glistens and winks in the afternoon light
and darkens with the fast falling night

floating in the flowing wind
it changes shape and weight

not for the first time, i am illogically afraid
but it helps if i dont think, but just wait.

in a way, it's just 'keeping some kind of record'
to mark these days as an end of some sort

home and away

It's a strange feeling.

All my worldy goods are packed and put away
in store rooms
in houses
across five cities in three continents.

In the last seven years I have moved house,
and life, about five times.

I am tired.
I feel like going home.

I miss the plain placid peace of those days at "home",
a city, a house, a room, and some people, I havent lived at,
or with, for more than a few months at stretch for the last decade or more
or ever, for the people.

I've scratched my seven year itch,
and I'm done.

I want to go back to the mindless job, the