Category
Poems
Poetry, by me and favourites by others.
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03.12.06Words, wide nightSomewhere on the other side of this wide night and the distance between us, I am thinking of you. The room is turning slowly away from the moon. This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear. La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross to reach you. For I am in love with you and this is what it is like or what it is like in words. - Carol Ann Duffy
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02.13.03Mindful, mindlessI pointed, and told you I was like that coffee cup but you stood on it just the same; balancing, arms outstreched, in an uncharacteristic moment of grace. I held my breath and awaited a reply as you shifted your weight delicately, calculatedly. And inevitably, the cup broke under the strain into sharp, complicated pieces. I asked you why you had broken it and you simply shrugged and replied "Because it was there"
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02.13.03Your NameI turn your name over in my mouth like a boiled sweet and enjoy the way it slides over my tongue clings to my teeth. Perhaps tonight I will open my mouth, let your name rise into the cold air. The word will escape my lips, un-noticed, slipping out like billowing breath, hanging in the night, like the angel's share; invisible but present, forever.
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02.13.03UntitledYou haunt my days, my nights, the inside of my eyelids. Every blinking moment is full of you.
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01.01.03VaselineA decade disappeared tonight: I touched my lips with yours - But two steps removed Chilled and chapped, your fingers dipped to my pot of blue and white Vaseline - so clinical, so practical, so normal - then, fingers to lips, I watched them smooth the ridges I used to know. Later, I reached for the same pot, Felt the indentation Where your fingernail had gouged the grease from the centre, Knowing that same sensation, still feeling indignation at the way your fingernails touched my skin, gouged my heart, even now a decade later. I loaded my fingertips with clear grease And touched my lips to yours, two steps, ten years, a lifetime ...
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01.01.03TimeI cannot imagine you in this, my world, now. Time has stolen you from me and you cannot belong. I set off this morning to walk in the rain and by the door suddenly, pulling on boots, I forgot how to breathe. These simple rituals, involuntary survival; because; in spite; whichever. Lungs pump rhythmically, keeping time, for me, regardless, relentless, a clock. Meg, 8/97. For Hilary, who died young and far away.
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01.01.03Your SouvenirBecause of you, I have new rules. I don't wear jeans. I don't drink whisky. This is the legacy you left me. I don't dance. Don't laugh at parties. Don't sleep until three. Don't share my bed. This is my least cherished souvenir. Such nonsensical phobia. Should I harbour fear of men? Perhaps. But I had been teaching that day, and now, I can't bear to smell chalk because its dust caked beneath my fingernails as you held me down and rudely slashed my innocence. When I returned from my travels as well as bright colourful socks and pan-pipes, photographs, exotic tales, I returned with your lasting souvenir. A dull memory of a cold Andean night; music and laughter behind a closed door; the ...
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01.01.03Small ThingsSmall things make my heart miss a beat, my stomach rise into my chest I'm looking at the package you sent, bound with sellotape I notice that the edges are ragged, as if bitten off and then I stop and imagine your mouth on mine.
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12.08.02Midnight FeastSuch a wide yawn. You have stars caught between your teeth. I ache to pick them out with searching, hungry lips like pips from fresh-peeled fruit sweet and cool in midnight air. And the moon is tangled in your hair © 4/99, Meg Pickard
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12.08.02Loving Me Not - the StoryOne night in mid-February 1992, when I sat in Pagliacci's restaurant at the heart of downtown Victoria, waiting for someone to show up, and hurting. We were friends, good friends, and I had an eighteen-year-old-girl crush on him, which never amounted to anything. We'd made an arrangement the night before, or at least, I thought we had. Over coffee on the balcony of the common room, over looking the sea, he'd mentioned going into the city the next night, and I'd murmered that I had similar plans. He said something about maybe getting some food, and I, being eighteen and ...
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