Sine qua non

I spent the morning with my father. We had breakfast―coffee and toast, completely pedestrian. We talked politics―headline news, completely surface. He asked if I would like to go for a swim with him. I said yes. He looks even older in the sun, the folds of his flesh gathered unwillingly on his once-proud frame. He did not swim, not really; he ploughed through the water, his 'bad arm' immobile and rigid.

'You taught me how to swim, father,' I reminded him, falsely bright.
'So I did,' he replied, his sparse head of hair wet and clinging.

Now I watched over him the way he once watched over me, as he bobbed along the length of the pool. And I felt the ache swell into my heart, until I had to duck into the water so he could not see me tear.

Love―as ineffable as it can get―will always be my sine qua non. Viva amor.

Vive Le Roi

One of those days; words will not come. Not naturally anyway. I keep turning phrases and lines in my head, but nothing sticks―one or two shinning words, like dummy trophies, but not good enough to erupt, not structured enough to flow, not telling enough to be. I grapple―backspace, type, enter, delete―think, type, delete, blinking cursor cursing―blank―

I feel starved―of knowledge, of sentiment, of sense. I cannot draw on a blank and pretend I have something of value to share. I cannot be an abstract artist with words―I need to make meaning, bring something to life, or kill notions, or arouse curiousity. Something. Not this. Never this. Stupid, unresponsive fingers, a deadened mind, eyes misted with exhaustion. Not this.

***

All my fallen kings, my iconic men, the posterboys of my Sargasso.
The king is dead. Long live the king.

Desultory

I cannot be happy. Life―my life―needs that certain tragedy, that tug-of-war between what is and what could be, for it to become the ritual of sacrifice that I think it is. If our original sin is life, and our final decree is death, then everything in between is but the mercy-killing of time. I cannot be happy.

I steal moments; I do it best. Like a petty thief, I crib from people and circumstance and memories. I nick and I swindle and I plunder―unmasked and disarming, my intentions subtle but unmysterious. I'm not here to be your wife, your daughter, your sister, your best friend. I'm a goddamned recorder, a slut and a scribe, looting your stories so I'd have more of mine.

And then in my quiet time I flag again in discontent. I question, I burn, I struggle―alone, because this self-drawn misery deserves no company. Because there is no real malady, there is no clear remedy. My pathosis is my own.

My pragmatism runs up against the blood-and-thunder nature of my fantasies. In the vein of my own thoughts―that space, my life-blood―I am tense and tragic, theatrical and thrilling, a bastard, a beauty, a beast. I am a hyperbol, I am overdone, I am a scrim of confusion and comedy.

So when this―this shell, trumpeting dead words―tumble out of a bed a heratic and stumble out the front door a polished, corporate thing, the tension grows. A sallow, sulphurous strain that broods, quietly malicious, like a tumour.

I am shouldered into a corner now. Father―unwell, sick at heart, Parkinson's, a frog-eyed demon waiting to gorge itself out of a life unlived. Mother―dim-sighted now, with thundering headaches, strength sapping from her spirit with the universal worries of a mother, a wife, a previous poet. Sisters―young, fragmented with their own stress, unseamed by their father's temper and their mother's unhappiness.

I dropped the corporate reins that had chained me firmly for the last three months―I ran, jobless, back into the embrace of my books and writing and my mother's gentle grace. I have nothing to offer now but me.

And I have nothing now but me.