Showing posts with label stroke. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stroke. Show all posts

Coming of a Different Age

Strength is shown in many places:
bitten lips; grey gaunt faces;
blistered hands and leathered heel pads;
resistance of ugly school fads;
standing next to a pariah;
rescuing victims from a fire,
but the most extreme example of this
is true compassionate forgiveness.
And this loss I feel deflates me but with no sense of giving up.
Just filed away, in mothballs, covered and carefully hung up
at the back of my wardrobe with your old red checked shirt
its brutal gesticulations told the history of our hurt.

Arms dangle now in darkness,
frayed, threadbare, faded.
Rubbing shoulders with my first date jeans.
Both are uncomfortable. Unwearable.
Costumes of dead characters.
Self-interested adversaries
deprived of the fight.
Victories have never been so hollow.
Generations realigned.

I don't like being found.
Lost girls never have to grow up.

"At the second stroke the time sponsored by experience will be..."

The passage of time has never been stranger than now.
Objectively, I know that we still orbit the same mass of energy.
We still rise in the same light, live in the same dark
and watch the trees metronomic renaissance every Spring.
But the last few have trumpeted past as elephant-mice.
Events eclipsing the passage of time like never before.

And before...

There was a time that to you, every day before this one was yesterday.
There was a time when all days that follow today were tomorrow.
Then came the signifiers: "One tomorrow"; "Our yesterdays".
Now greatly extended we say "The Olden Days" and "Dinosaur Time"
and "50 hundred million years in the future!"
But the one that broke my heart was this:

"We saw Amalie and Isla there and Amalie had broken her dress on one of these" [wrought iron gate post]

"Oh, did you see them? When?"

"Before. When **** could still walk"





This was inspired by my son and a poem by my sister. She blogs over at www.bookwormsandcoffeemonsters.com on all sort of things and has just had one of her short stories accepted by a very exciting magazine. That's her story, though. I'll let her tell it.

You know I love you, right?

In TIAs

They call it a stroke, but a stroke's a caress,
A present borne through gentleness.
T'would be better to call it a bolt from the blue,
A malfunction of synapses- give it its due.
This burgalar of words.
This remover of movements.
Imprisoning souls in disconnected flesh.
Self-enforced censorship, unable to express.
The Orwellian Nightmare of frustra-lingua.
(feelings unnamed continue to exist)
Inside this less-than-lustrous figure
The personality refuses to cease and desist.
Surreal conversations
rebuild the connections
and help to recover the words.
It emerged to me
the best neuro-surgery
is performed in the theatre of the absurd.