Tag: prosepoetry

ways of holding space

Mark the calendar:

the 29th of August, the day you failed her. After years of trying, imagining yourself a one-woman Marvel multiverse, you have turned out the lights,

and curled as adult foetus, beneath your fur lined, patch work quilt, one hand on your Calico cat who has curled beside you. Another hand on that blood pump other people call a heart.

You will not spend 12 hours in A & E in the bustling inner-city rooms where it is not uncommon to see a half clothed, stale breathed man handcuffed to the bedframe, a uniformed officer at his bed, and neither will you spend 6 hours in the smaller suburban A & E, where traces of blood have not been cleaned beneath hard plastic chairs-

You can no longer hold space for her, though this is your job. Holding space. Leaning in and listening to the themes that reverberate in the pauses and the sentence periods.

Because the way you listen can speak tomes,

listening as echolocation,

as homing device,

I am here, I am here

you are there and I travel beside you,

but tonight, you scream to be the heard, the listen-ee, not the listener,  

instead, you rest your ear against the Calico, letting her breathe softness against your chin, and she shares her purr with you, the vibration that travels through her when she is in her vet carrier, or when the neighbour’s Chihuahua ventures not too close but close enough,

she shares her purr, that self-soothing soft rumble from deep within her larynx,

come, the Calico says,

there are other ways of holding space.

a week of seeking kindness

will AI one day make men redundant, he asks, not humans, I mean just men because women will always be useful, and do you know how existence travels in cycles, and men have been on top for millennia, well it is probably women’s time now-

and you can’t get rid of him, the college student who arrives in your class before you, and leaves after all the students are gone, despite the torrential rain and the assignment deadlines, he likes to follow these threads of thoughts, likes to ask your opinion-

the day before you are sinking your own fingertips into miniature tubs of sticky acrylic paint. Your client is drawn to the IKEA bottles that squirt paint like tomato sauce and he is delighted with the swirls of gold and silver and fluorescent orange on the A4 paper. Earlier another little girl is painting a sunrise with glow in the dark rave colours, and there is colour everywhere. On everyone’s hands, on the table, on school uniform, hijab, wall, floor mat

and these are children whose minds slip-slide from surface to surface. Never settling. Yet here with this beautiful, fractal rainbow mess they are calm, and it makes you wonder whether therapists should simply be replaced by artists and acrylics, watercolours, oils, pastels available at every medical and allied health service-

before the colour smear, you sit three hours with a grandmother, a guardian of a teen whose mind doesn’t conform and therefore no one else will have him, but the grandmother talks and you lean into her talk, which is both direct and circuitous, and anyway

you have been trained to hold space,

and she says, no he cannot tell the time or understand his multiplication tables, but he can play the piano by ear just by listening to a song once. You tell her that perfect pitch is rare, a unicorn skill,

and she says,

yes,

my grandson has a gift.

**

Later, you remember what your mother once said, that nature seeks an equilibrium, where one talent or gift is outweighed by a deficit-

earlier that day you had called your own therapist because there was that familiar hatred, the urge to slam your skull against a jagged stone surface and over and you would do it, damage the parietal and temporal lobes to have a moment’s respite-

because you were never enough for people who charged inflation prices for their metered love.

Then you think maybe this is nature’s balance, that your patience, that your ability to hold space and colour and meandering thought, your patience with paper cup water turned muddy with children’s paints, your ability to delight in strength over deficit-

Is nature’s counterbalance.

Or, or as you want to tell the other therapists, the teachers, the condescending colleagues who say you are too kind, as though kindness is an intellectual deficit-

Maybe this is nature’s law, and there was no gentleness, no kindness in a home that forced psychic and bodily submission, that now, as an adult, you would sell your right eye and left lung and excess haemoglobin to live in a kinder world.

my light is not for either of us

A difficult conversation….

“No she’s nowhere here,” she tells him/her/them.

“Don’t you know what they used to do during wartime? when the axis was flying across your waters, and the prescient foretold of sky exploding into fire and desert sand crystalizing into iridescent glass because in a certain slant of light even plutonium is radiant, not merely radioactive and-

don’t you know they’d send their light to the countryside, to till the fields and live amongst the forest sprites, and no you wouldn’t believe in trees though you believe in a man three days dead ascending to the firmament, and that’s beside the point, I don’t want to argue-

this is only the second date.

You ask where my light is, well she’s not for you, and she’s not for me-

when the soldiers reached my skin I sent her away, she lives there now, through the door too subtle for humans to see-

What?

No.

No, I won’t be calling her back.

I am too full of shrapnel, muscle macerated by bullets built to rip through skin. See, from the neck down, I am simply metal teeth and scar tissue and besides she’s happy in the other space-

Of course. That’s where my heart is. So you can see this is why I can’t love you even though you’re loveable and it is your right to be loved. But you can have my thoughts and words and even my good deeds,

and no, no, you’re right, it is not enough, but it is all I have to give.”