Not This Again
Here is a way in
pretending to be blocked,
an anteroom with what
looks like a locked
door at the end.
This anteroom has
various names: Disappointment,
Why Bother, Not This Again.
Turning in here is like
taking your place opposite
a partner you have seen
too much of: what you want
is novelty and allure,
but you are trapped here
in something as known
as your mother’s lentil soup,
your mother’s repeated words.
Something as known, as thwarting,
as sustaining and as true.
Take your place opposite. Wait
with disbelief, impatience,
expecting nothing to happen.
The nearest thing to event
you may easily miss: something in you
resists the mean lovelessness
with which you blame your
partner, or your mother, for all
the disgruntlement you feel,
your perception of all she is
bleached into boringness.
Fairness struggles to allow
she deserves respect, civil speech.
A scarcely perceptible shift.
How then, after all that
immobility, raging, muscles
straining, unable to shift
your own limbs or a latch,
suddenly you are
flowing, dancing, afloat,
energised and alive,
and generous thoughts are
as easy and limitless
as they have ever been,
loving, admiring the ones
you have known your whole life long.
The door from the vestibule
was not painted on wood:
it really opens into
a fine space to be in.
You have waltzed your partner through.
Page(s) 10-11
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