To wake up every morning.
To have faith.
     (We are drawn to edges,)
To be your own best friend.
     (to our own parapets and sea-walls)
You find out that the years don’t span wide. They hang flaccid, rotted. And remain so.
You wake up not the same person, but as someone who willfully exchanged time for hollowness.
More insular. More brittle. All of this in the name of protection.
     (finding our lives in relief)
So many faces, so many lives, and you wake up: you must bear the cross of allowing them to have fallen away.
     (in some forked storm.)

I watched my grandmother’s hands, with their parchment-like skin, scooping coffee, making a sandwich, cutting a banana. Those mundane tasks that in ten years time will have become so dear as to be excruciating. And you realize: everyone deserves to have someone to love. It really is that simple.

We rob these of others; we’re doing it now. And we rob ourselves of the same.
     (Returning with our unimaginable gifts,)
To keep moving.
To live for the moment, for self-pleasure.
     (badged with salt and blood,)
You wake up: not with a lifetime, but with thousands of days lived in one spin of the earth.
You wake up: not as the same person, but as someone else. The number of your counted days eroded past recognition.
     (we have forgotten how to walk)
Flaccid, rotted. Protected.
     (Thinking how much more we wanted)
And you discover that single-mindedness is seldom rewarded with instant success. Few things are.

To reflect.
Reading a tome that spilled from your fingers, but long before you sold your soul to mediocrity.
     (when what we had was all there was;)
And every day bleeds you out, silently, painlessly. A thousand pinpricks.

To start over.
     (looking too late to the ones we loved,)
To pick up where you left off.
For you must willfully be something else entirely.

But you wake up: to continue yesterday’s work.
     (we stretch our our hands as we fall.)
And you sleep: on a crest, to ride it out to shore.

     (”Apart” ©2002 Robin Robertson)

Filed by Trevor at 4:13 am under General