Her Arms Embrace Me

 

Her Arms Embrace Me

21 October 2019

jp melville

Grey morning arrives

Or is it that I awake

Only fog of travel

In my head.

Mist, after all, welcomes us to new space, sensual alternative,

Offering us to learn to touch with skin,

To flare our nostrils,

To reflect deeply beyond the depths of our eyes

The phantoms we imagine we see before us.

Courage, when the world is sensual…

Courage….

Fog comes from unfamiliarity:

Cobblestone streets.

Trams that rumble past.

City sky lines with gothic steeples.

Vertical surfaces with stone sculpted relief and signage in strange language.

Fog comes from unfamiliarity:

Days pass in an office where laughter is shared and decisions made, not yours.

Weather slowly shifts from autumn to colder and leaves drop to ground, nakedness for which you miss the unveiling.

Child grows rapidly adding new words and inches one day closer to toilet training,

These blinks in a child’s time forever gone.

Woman rents room her daughter to share room,

Gender neutral they say,

Yet intimacy now an impotence,

As ephemeral as radio news

We do not hear, we have no discussion,

Radio news heard in an instant evaporates,

As do the screams of union that no longer can arise,

No before on floor of kitchen

No after naked coffee preparations

Nevermore spoke the raven,

No home,

Nevermore.

Fog comes from unfamiliarity:

We construct the opposite,

Our loins prepared to manufacture,

Through hoisted hips and wetted lips

A space we call our home.

We pretend there is no battle, that there is a right and justice,

That to fight, struggle, die for are antiquarian,

Though remember freedom is its absence from others,

So will it be, evermore.

Take care and watch,

For movement in space demands parameters, boundaries limbers limbs grows touch tenderness,

sympathies evolve in communion, a construct in which others are not allowed in.

Otherwise we have dead movement without space, we are refugee camps,

We float, pass, skim surfaces of faces, ignore the eyes, sounds are walls and in our minds moss grows, staunching our reach out to distances in infinity,

We are imprisoned by equity and neutrality for they die our flame within.

So hold a shovel, touch a cheek, throw on a sweater, take to the chill and face the wind, movement in space embeds electricity and connections thrive,

Take a risk, slide a key, leave a folded towel on a bed, prepare the shower clean,

Make promises until next time and honour them,

For movement without committed space unfolds but voids and weightlessness.

Now, as I write,

Grey morning, still.

Rain.

Take faith in self, your light within,

Not loneliness, but the gossamer thread to God

Breathe deeply, once, twice, and dress…

Enter the world one more day

All day remember home even while it fades

With desperate care ensure not yours,

But my candle stays alight.

For on return

Cold breath of autumn in my lungs

Your arms embrace me

With space defined, parameters, boundaries secure,

Deliberate construct secures our intimacy

Fog lifts

Movement, loins wet, community, and liberty,

Not yours, not mine,

But ours.