Long Spindly Limbs

For a week, I woke up every morning feeling like I'd puke

I keep trying to fit into little boxes
So tiny
I try to pull each spindly limb into the cramped borders

Achingly, hurriedly
One by one, I become frantic
Each time I pull the next one in, another escapes

And the process repeats
Over and over and over

It's a loop, a nauseating cycle
it goes
round and round and round

I so badly want to belong somewhere
Me and these long spindly limbs

A Home Borrowed

"What is it like?" You ask.

Various potted plants and oranges from the trees out front line the window sill, warmly illuminated by lamps resembling glowing orbs.

Art pieces, photographs, and an endless array of books line the walls, and tables, and shelves. Wherever they'll fit.

It's homey and pleasant, it's wood and white. There's lots of windows, their view filled with lush greenery.

The kitchen is strewn with various cast iron pans. When we cook all the windows steam up and cling to the heat they'll soon lose.

It's cold with the winter rain, but we gather around fires out front in the evening.

It sits in quiet contentment and asks for you to do the same.

The house-cat lounges atop vintage records collected together by the door. Satisfied and comfortable she never strays far.

Unlike you and I

A Disappearing Act

I’ve so often yearned to drop off the face of the earth. To shift and shed and start new lives.

Easier done than a past self once thought,
the realization scratches the underbelly of a partially realized desire.

But I’ve done it twice before now, and I mourn, holding the pieces of lives once had. Fragments of past selves.

We are all shape shifters. But now, with age, the shapes we take reform with less ease.
The skin I hold becomes stickier.

I suppose it will cling tighter every decade aged, as I settle into myself.

I’ve often wondered why adults and elders seem increasingly rooted and set in their ways of being. Will the skin that my youthful self once yearned to shake become solid and set?

In death the snake slows her shed.

An effort to grasp the ever-fleeting, tangible material world before the final disappearing act?

eggshells

Holding my breath
I move timidly

As if she were a sleeping beast

Each dive under as the wave ahead breaks
Every moment of submersion
an unease lingers

Tread lightly don't wake her!
Please don't wake her!

Each wave
I am realized by the sunlight glimmering on the slopey face
It seeps in, beckons for me to open

She gives me a push
Cradles my fall

Like eggshells crackling
Like a newborn duckling
Fumbling for footing
To find moments of ease

To be a guest

The sound of the ocean lapping against the cliffs washing across the beach
fills the dark space around me.

It’s quiet otherwise,
Almost like I am the only person awake.

Just mother nature and I
Telling one another secrets in the depth of night.

Tossing and turning, under the three blankets I wake hungry, my hips aching from the angle my bed sits downslope. I’d figured that parking on the slant was worth the ocean view.

The houses that sit permanent on this street overlook me, I am a guest in their presence.

That’s the way we ought to go about it, us visitors, as guests.

Maybe there’d be less “no parking” signs if we all moved about as gracious guests, honouring those who have set their roots in the places we visit.

I eat oatmeal by the candle light
It’s 4:25am

Sleep now, the rolling ocean beckons.

Warmed by the heat of the cook stove
I am lulled back to sleep by the whispering of the water.

My hips ache no longer.