Summer is a hammer

Some poems and reflections on the last day of the season.

The last few weeks have felt very heavy for me.

I struggle enormously with the school holidays. Without (hopefully!) sounding like a stuck record, my son is autistic and has behavioural issues. Without his usual routines, he finds it difficult to regulate his emotions. Without time and space to myself to process things, I struggle massively too.

There’s guilt too, because it’s summer after all. Summer with its connotations of sun and fun. Of ‘family time’. Damn it - we should be on the beach or having a barbecue!

To be sad or anxious in summer feels disingenuous, discourteous, ungrateful, wrong.

But sometimes, the stark light of summer magnifies any speck of misery. It saturates, blinds, intensifies. It spotlights any tiny fracture. Every grain of dust has rays shot through it like laser beams. In summer, you remember how the other seasons shrouded to assist your weakness. The white coats of snow, piles of autumn leaves, green finery of spring. You camouflaged your cold like a polar bear. You stowed away under layers like a hibernating hedgehog. You lay waiting under algae like a tadpole in a pond.

First few weeks, I did so well, addressing, distracting, busying………before finally, cracking like an egg.

My shell lies open on the hungry road, broken, jagged. The white peace of me compromised to spilled transparent guts. I’m eye to eye with sky, my orange yolk still intact, vulnerably pleading to that harsh, exposing sun. Don’t let me splay and bleed……warm me.

When I reach that stage; shining like a Tuesday bruise in Thursday moonlight, I cannot write about the larger issues affecting humanity, because all I see before me is my immediate world. Survival.

All I’ve managed over the last couple of weeks is a few poems of introspection.

You can take them or leave them.

I’ll go through them further at the end. Photos are all my own.

Summer has been a hammer, and I’m still deciding whether I’m beaten.

Night

Night spears me as a porcupine

Night spikes my sweetest drink

Intensifying fears of mine

Poisoning thoughts I think

Problems hang around my neck

A noose of twitching tight

Resolve, by day, robust and strong

Is whittled down to ‘might’

Slumber is a plodding train

Transported that bit more

To rid myself of earthly chain

Go where? I’m not quite sure

Parallel lines

Parallel lines

Never destined to meet

A consistent distance,

The gap, bittersweet

Parallel lives

A concept, the same

Channel of cruel

Two fools locked in a game

No taper, no focus

No crossing, no danger

No curving, no swerving

No point and no change

Spider

I saw a weary spider

As she carried her egg sac

The burden she had made herself

Clasped firmly to her back

And on she went, what could she do

But wait til it had gone

For nature knew better than she

Her fate to carry on

Each baby hatched, new life dispatched

Released, their chances random

Repeating patterns they won’t know

Until that weight upon them

I see a spider, see myself

The tangles I created

Thought I was clever, catching flies

My life, I complicated

I could have used my silver thread

To swing from tree to tree

Instead I wove myself a web

My greatest catch, was me

Stalemate Sky

I gazed upon a stalemate sky

A wad of ivory bruise

The sun in hiding from the cry

Of rain, her bleakest muse

The paradox of a ‘clean slate’

All slate I’ve known is grey

I plugged into the emptiness

Ebbed woolly hours away

Who knows?

Who knows what our fortunes hold

I ask myself a lot

My future’s been held hostage

In the land that time forgot

I channel my best Doris Day

Dust down my ‘Que Sera ’

Swap moping for the hopium

It’s gotten me this far

.

You see, at heart I am an optimist

My rosemary, she grows

Alas, entwined with rosary

Both win and sin, I sow

Crying with the onions

As I shrivel in the sun

Laughing at the funny stuff

Still keeps me holding on

.

He exits like a hurricane

Re-enters as a breeze

Sentient as summer rain

His fog shelters my trees

An evergreen demeanour

Of chill-inducing fever

A masterclass in broken glass

Denying my believer

.

Opens like a lotus flower

Then clamps down like a blind

Weeps on willow’s pillow

Treading water he can find

Sometimes water is a swamp

Up in it to your neck

Other times, a brief reprieve

A deck chair on the deck

.

Keeps his reddest blood in blisters

For he fears that they may burst

I hold the antiseptic

And I stay to play the nurse

With our selection of neuroses

My crystal ball prognosis?

“Who knows which way the wind blows?”

And with that, I think I’ll close this

Meanings

Night

I’ve written many poems on this subject before. The way night intensifies feelings of confinement, futility, makes everything heavier. Yet at the same time, it’s comforting to know you wake up that bit further ‘along’, like a board game counter nearing the end. (Yes, that’s the optimistic pessimist in me talking)😉

Parallel lines

I was walking a few months ago on the canal path. On the other side, lay a flowing river. Had a romantic idea to write a little story about a staid old canal that bled into a wild river during a flash flood. Gave me hope that two bodies that don’t normally come together, given the right conditions, can do. But I never did write that story. Maybe I will one day. Instead I wrote this poem about their separate paths. Close enough to hear the life splash of the other, never touching.

Spider

One day, I observed a spider in this state. Started thinking how everyone thinks of spiders as being clever, wily, calculating. But really they’re the same as the rest of us, aren’t they? Driven by their basic instincts. Their fate to reproduce and stay alive til the next generation is able to sustain itself to go do the same. If we are indeed, higher creatures, why do we succumb to these familiar webs? Evolution cares not for individuals I guess.

Stalemate Sky

I observe the sky, the way one might read tea leaves. I try to make sense of it, to assign meaning to each sliver of cloud, be it calm or angry. I analyse the colours. Relate, fixate, brood. Sometimes, however there is no prophecy to distil. The sky is a bland bowl of rice. Sustains you, yet offers no clarity nor inspiration. There is no ‘gap in the clouds’, yet also no storm. Then I started thinking about the phrase ‘a clean slate’, thinking about the colour and texture of slate and pondering that even when slate is ‘clean’, it remains grey. ‘Clean’ and ‘grey’ seem so at odds with each other, don’t they? Hm…..

Who knows?

This is one I wrote whilst trying to be tongue-in-cheek, cajole myself out of the doldrums a little. When you can look down upon yourself as being over dramatic and a bit of a self absorbed dick, you have the best chance of transcending that state, I think. If you know someone else who is struggling too, sometimes it makes it slightly easier too.

So, that’s that.

PS: I know I haven’t been active on here last couple of weeks, but I will catch up with what everyone’s been doing soon.

It’s good to have this space to create and vent and I’m grateful to have you all here. X