Regaining Self

‘Get up, stand up and climb the rope of hope
and open up again’ – Etheridge (from ‘Lucky’)

Last night dreams of a blue-eyed man, insistent, intent –
leading me along a city street, past
wild buskers singing the day into being.

Today, the rain gone, I sit on the verandah,
devouring Metelerkamp, who wrote a book-poem about her affair.

The sun as fierce as the poet growing her hands back,
as eager as my dream man, animus,
to lead me beyond the darkness of the house into the light.

Blue sky mirrors his azure eyes, and the poetry like flame
declaims itself across a dry hillside.

She speaks of becoming simpler : perhaps this is my gift,
my ability to distil, clarify, to sense the power beneath?

‘Hey, hey, hey’ sings Etheridge, later, night having fallen
‘I am a child’ – raucous, rough, different from me,
she who chooses to love women.

I – the abandoned one – who sought to restore
what was taken from me – the lost soul who, only once,
traded the same kind of sex for comfort,
before realising too late, her mistake,
I too can confess to indiscretions.

Then, my heart hurt as if I had twisted a knife into it.
I was shoved to the margins before I even realised
I had left the centre.
Now I work hard to reclaim an identity I did not consciously reject.

Foucault’s Panopticon reaches straight into the all-seeing sky.
‘Big Brother is watching,’ and beware those who would
wander into the shadows.

Sexuality’s a continuum, and love’s a sliding rule
But the feelings take me into a world
where bravado and logic do not apply.

Where reaching for his hand feels as all-consuming,
as holding a small baby who looks at me with
the strange unknowing eyes
of the helpless, of the still-to-be-loved.

24.10