The hard-wired habitual loneliness of one night
Safely contained in one room [door bolted]
There’s a perverseness in the safety I feel
I mean it’s not safe
Lonely isn’t safe
It’s grey-wooly-can’t get out
It’s not a gilded lullaby sung to me as a wide-eyed child
Not the comfort of a warm embrace in winter
Lonely offering safety is lying to me
Lonely knows I know that
Lonely knows I know they know that
It offers joyous solicitude, quiet, peace, hear-the-clouds-moving-in-the-breeze
But delivers stillness, sadness, stifling to get air in a hot room
Sometimes I don’t know what I’m craving
The buoyancy and agility of a speedboat on the glitter of some sea abroad pock-marked with sun specks
Or the emptiness of a breeze through a valley where no-one treads
It’s the not knowing
The changing, flip-flopping, push up then shove down
The fragility of brittle glass being hammered by a storm
The lack of stability, of golden contentment
Watching the shadow of some ancient sun-dial move fast, faster, faster still
Day into night into day, circadian
I’m stood static in the middle of the scene
Colour of city scene around me fast-forwarded
All this there and I can’t grasp it
Because I reach [out] to touch it feel it experience it
And all I feel is air [or maybe sand] slipping between fingers
Slips away into cracks and crevices, imagined hills and valleys
Slips off from me as it has nothing tangible to hold on to
Winds away into the river, into the ocean
Where the drop of something turns into a blue-black mass of disarray
Like it never touched or knew me
—
I’m not sure I’ve ever known real sunshine or vibrancy
Was it just sugar-sweet-sickly-coated dreams that one sunrise brought
Was it just the vulgar gloom-aggression of the storm that day
Am I just frittering, flitting, fanciful
imagining some neon-bright, ultra-vivid dreamscape where I
walk, jump, dance, fly into the night
absorbed completely with nothing to frighten me
—
Did I tell you I once felt the wind go through me, like every molecule felt it
Did I tell you I once felt the leaves in the tree make movements so small in the air yet I felt them tickle ever atom in me
Did I tell you I once felt birth, life and death all in one beautiful, fractured azure day
That just for one second, minute when time stood still
just me air, the universe, the glittery promise of my next breath
how it felt like everything in that moment
everything
Did I tell you I understood, I understood how everything worked and came together
That there’s gold, glitter, shine, an unspoken whisper of unity and solace
Did I tell you for that tiny fraction, that tiny soft silver fragment of time
that it all made sense
—
but then quickly [like a sun setting on fast forward x 100] it went
it left me
and it left me so confused, so empty
Like I’d been touched so gently so powerfully
that I felt it there after for so long
but not long enough
Did I tell you how I craved that crystalline clarity of knowing
knowing for sure, with summer-day sureness and conviction
of what life meant
of what I mean and will have meant
—
If only, oh if only I could explain
how the light feels
how the darkness feels
how they entrap me and entwine me, every fibre of my being
kidding me I’m in control or sated
with the inevitability of the impact of a no-grace fall
with the absolute certainty there is no clarity, no magic-pill
—
But I felt it still
head to toe to head
Felt it fizzle up like static
wind its way through my soul
and then it left.