delicate
She's delicate.
She draws the hands she doesn't like across the skin that makes her nervous to expose.
And her eyes are wary
and weary for her age.
Their pale blue hides behind short lashes and glass lenses as she apologises yet again for something she never did,
And tries to make her curvaceous frame seem frumpy and unappealing
As a form of armour.
As if she could be.
She sits mouselike in her unsafe corner with her fingers clasped tightly together
To stop them pulling anxiously at the hair she shaved off.
Her breathing shallow,
Eyelids lowered,
Hackles flattened in the presence of danger lest she attract its attention.
Oh-so-carefully pretending not to exist until the clicking of the lock, the crunching of gravel, the distant fade of the engine finally edges into silence and she stirs.
Stretches,
Bathes and eats,
Does what she can to soothe her final fraying nerve,
Before opening her journal and calling to her other, younger demons,
"It's safe to come out now,"
And like a swarm of angry bees they flood around her.
With pen and ink and tools hard won she catches them and pins them to the page once more,
Keeping them secret and keeping them safe,
Guarding them stoically from discovery until once more she is alone and can let them stretch their wings.
Yes, she is delicate.
But not delicate, like a butterfly.
Delicate, like a bomb.
© mjc 19 February 2021
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Untitled 10
Why have you deserted me?
Your silken taste upon my tongue every morning has become a highlight of my days,
Along with the bitter sting in your tail that reminds me of my place.
But you're gone now and I'm lost.
I wander my house like a tortured soul, unable to fully connect with my surroundings,
And my family don't know what to make of me.
"It's like talking to a ghost," they say sadly as I stare into the distance,
My pale and trembling hands cold and bare.
Every second of cogent thought I can wring from my grieving mind
Focuses only on your and your absence.
I want you back.
And I'm told to "stay strong" and that "it's for my own good" but I don't care.
I miss you.
And I want you.
I want to feel you deep inside me,
Warming the soul that will curl gratefully around you and awaken once more.
"An Ode to the Coffee I Don't Have This Morning".
© mjc 21 December 2020
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never him
I reread my own words with a sense of revelation.
The misdirected anger, frustration... longing.
Whole worlds wherein I walk blindly,
Describing what I think I see through the wool I have pulled over my own eyes.
Each piece, startling in its own way, tells a story I never knew I'd written.
The comfortably empty spaces that were never truly empty;
The hands I held in the silence of my mind that were all too familiar;
The hearts I thought broken to pieces,
I now see in the light of this epiphany were merely fragments of my pride,
The few trailing strands that held them together sliced through
By the sharp but fleeting pain of rejection.
In truth, I have become somebody else
In the time it has taken for my body to renew itself.
The brand-new hide that still bears the scars of my old, discarded skin
Tingles at the realisation that the myriad stories I have told in this last septennial
Echo with a leitmotif
Of men falling short of a benchmark
I didn't realise had been set.
© mjc 19 September 2020
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lockdown
It chafes, to be arrested in this way.
The pressure of these four walls seems to graze my bare shoulders with every movement.
And my rebellious soul longs to burst out of the front door and go running down the street,
Even though my days of rebellions and running are far behind me.
I shake with nerves each time I hear a noise outside
For fear that someone is approaching my door…
And then again for fear that nobody will.
These days in isolation are old news to so many;
Indeed, before these last few weeks I’d have counted myself amongst them.
I imagine inmates of prisons having a bitter chuckle at the rest of us
As we thrash against the knots
We are tied into for our own protection.
Like so many battery hens, we near kill ourselves
Trying to all squeeze at once through the tiniest chink in the barn wall
For a taste of freedom.
The passage of time seems so arbitrary now that nothing is as it should be.
Our once-busy streets so empty,
Our cities frozen in a moment
As though some invisible ice age has swept through and petrified us.
The only activity now are the hospitals that buzz like beehives.
Two days from now,
I’ll be sitting alone at my kitchen bench, glass of wine in hand,
Staring at a candle stuck haphazardly into the top of a chocolate biscuit
To mark my forty-third revolution around the sun,
With no desire to blow out the flame while my world is crumbling around me.
But somewhere in the turmoil in my head,
A tiny voice is telling me that it’s okay,
And it’s going to be okay;
Two thousand and twenty will be the year of pausing.
© mjc 25 March 2020
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procrastinating
I flit around my house like a restless spirit,
Picking up stray dishes and putting down books
In places they were never intended to go.
Outside, the oppressive heat wraps its arms too tightly around my house,
And sinks down to lie beside the muggy stickiness
That in the summer months never quite goes away.
On days like these,
Though my work calls to me insistently from where it waits,
Dressed in black and white, but still festively adorned
With strips of red and blocks of green,
I resist and turn my face away from the overly warm room
Where my computer works tirelessly at filling the space
With the whirring of the fans that cool only itself.
I drift through the valleys between the mountains of unaddressed chores,
Avoidance-cleaning and procrastinapping.
On days like these,
Until the sun begins to set,
I am a paragon of malfunctionality.
My ineffective, out-of-order brain incapable
Of wringing some semblance of discipline from itself,
And some action from my sweaty, lethargic limbs.
Then, when the relentless brilliance of the sun has ceased resisting
And slid beneath the cloak of the horizon,
I fizzle to life like a string of solar party lights.
I fling open the doors and windows,
Allowing in a cool breeze that tickles across my skin like a lover’s caress,
And dive into the pages, scattering red lines and wrong lines before me,
A nocturnal predator seeking my natural prey.
© mjc 19 January 2020
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