A house fly scuttles up a window pane
Sudden bursts of six legged movement
Interspersed with false starts and hesitations
Feeling its way into the future
The history of a species
Encased in an exoskeleton
Protection
For its insect heart
Giving sufficient confidence
For it to start again
And dare
To meet this enticing situation of glass and air
That resembles but is not the same
As so many old flames
Gone now but not forgotten
Black letters march across the page
Fast at first
Until I start to find
My words
Absurd in their apparent arrogant belief that
There is something new to say
And that I have been cast in the hero’s role
Bravely to try and say it
Unsure if I can really reveal what’s hidden in this silence
So many utterances staunched at source
Before they could launch
Into time
And sometimes rhyme
This impossible freedom of white space that
I now have the calm effrontery to invade
As if it were my mine to mine
Smearing black ink
Like shit on the walls of a solitary confinement cell
In a mad house built by stupid white men
Lost souls like that boy I used to be who never sang his song
Cowed by fear of reaching the wrong
Conclusion
Like him
They too had to suffer from the vain
Delusion
That they were not insane
Green leaves on the branch of a tree
Wait patiently
In near perfect stillness
Unexpressed potentiality
Until the wind
Like a knight in shining armour
Rides to their rescue
Two cliches and soon a third
Is all it takes
To unlock these sleeping beauties from their slumber
Set free again
They jostle whisper bob up and down like
Buoys that
The smallest ripple can
Nudge into motion
There they float
Encircling a moored boat
That may wait forever to set sail
And let us not make the mistake of mistaking
Waiting
For a life that doesn’t count because it isn’t being lived
