Fool Me

The darkness – I had thought – was spent!
But fool me, fool me, it returns!
The cold seeps so deep in my bones,
Forming a crackling pyre – it burns!

Disillusionment derides hope;
The cold wasn’t something to defeat…
Life burgeons in its anguish,
I can’t run and I can’t retreat.

So I walk. Look around and see.
What I’ve left, what is left to me.
I use the light breaking my bones;
I pay full price, I have no loans.

I dance with broken knees, making this light;
Till I burn, I defeat this endless night.

I Grew Up

I grew up.
It means that I don’t dwell on what I cannot control:
emotions and feelings,
the abstract,
an opinion,
a mind-set.

It means I am not interested in trying to change
something — or someone — that can’t.
We yell about environmental disaster,
but we don’t care about it;
we care about our future.
I am not interested in selfish rhetoric.

Children run with guns
and kill other children,
yet there is no end to gun shopping.
I have grown up.
So I understand how controlling women’s bodies
is more important than gun control.

I studied literature.
I have read history.
I learnt the horrors that war can manifest.
But when I grew up,
I understood that there are Iagos in the world,
who revel in motiveless malignity.
The power of a weapon is the only thing
that can promote uneasy peace.

I yearned for liberation.
I walked the walks.
I talked the talks.
As I grew up, I realised:
the leaders who walked ahead
were pretending to be woke,
under the guise of their materialistic agendas.

I get quieter with the passing years.
I smile when I have things to say.
I know how to deal with my tears.
I grew up late and slow —
but on doing so, I have begun to question
every little thing I know.

Pain

At this turn of fifty,
the pain isn’t figurative —
it is literal.
It’s a corporeal manifestation
of what used to be
poetic and tragic.

Youth broke hearts,
and feelings tore innards.
The joke is that the heart
still breaks —
and now it’s not just that pain:
the shoulder, the knee, the heel.

The validation of abstractions
into the concrete.
What divine irony.

Mary Carson said it best
all those years ago:
Nature is cruel.
Man, vindictive.

Age gives you wisdom —
and the price was always
pain.