here for wonder

Yes, let it not be said that I have attempted avoidance that I have attempted. Let it not be said. Let it not be said that I left it left it there to die that I did not touch it with my toe dislodge it watch it fall Let it not be said that I overdid it didn’t do enough let it go without even trying let it not be said let it not be said that we will not do anything in response to this because we failed to notice Let it not be said that there was nothing to say at all nothing t

It is possible To lie beneath The bed Of your beloved Amid the mites And dust and dark Straining to watch The stillness Of the bedsprings Chewing thoughtfully On biltong* Dried and Salted Drenched in coriander As settlers did in wagon Circles curved Against the African night It is possible to wait Interminably For sounds Beyond cicadas Of bare feet On bare wood For this face you love With such a Desperate first love To appear as planned And yet suddenly Looking, seeing This s

The restaurant is small, easy to miss, tucked down a side street in the Latin Quarter. It has been decades since we were last in the city of lovers and Paris wears the silk sheen of spring rain. It is our last night and we’ve had more than enough time to fall in love with this place again. We are no longer 23 and we certainly aren’t backpacking this time. We have a room with slim French doors opening on a partial view of the Pantheon in a stylish little place within walking d

Is there time for this she asks hands pressed together like the wing of a prayer really, is there time -- for this? And you can’t see her eyes behind lids and lashes. Does she really want to communicate? If so, why the hair curl where the shoulders curve upwards like a smile or a shrug. Not to care says her posture. Not really, you see. You can’t reach me because quite frankly I’m not in here. More fool you-- for thinking that I was. Art: Mario Almos | Flickr #love #rejection

Sometimes you fall in love with Something quite Irreconcilable Something with a nose Too big A paunch Too far Something inside So dark That when you see it It blurs And swallows you up Quite thoroughly Something challenging That coincidentally You can’t explain Despite your best efforts To those You love Who armed with no imagination quite like your previous self fail to comprehend and thus lend inexplicably a certain thrill to the union oh yes. Art: Relationship | Dia Al-azz

Imagine reaching up and closing your hands around a sunbeam, wringing the radiance from it, splashing dark ink across the stars, silencing the light. Such a thing, such a thing one would never do, right? But we do, regularly, often many times a day. Moments struggling under foot, pinned by our largely unconscious drive to control the living, beating, freshness of our everyday lives. We are stained by past disappointments, generations of suffering, yet this is our preferred ar

I have been scratching around in the dirt with my gnarly sharp claws and my ugly clumps of feathers sticking up around bald pink patches of scaly skin snapping at you with my sharp bitter beak — because you won’t hold me like I am luscious. You seem repelled by this furious needy thing, you step back and away and I walk round in circles utterly self absorbed but never enough to scoop my own self up and nurse me, only enough to get tired and fretful and ever more needy. So it

I thought I could do nuance. I love the word. And there are so many other, quite necessary things I lack, so I was grateful that at least I had that, I had nuance. I fibrillate, I know the spaces between things, therefore I can appreciate nuance. But it turns out that my uncharacteristic confidence in this elusive, shimmering thing has led me down the garden path. Now I have to add this to my very long list of things I need to fix about my personality. I thought my list was l

At least once a day our marriage needs solving, if we stop working on it for a moment it devolves into something insoluble that can make us choke and die, at least in the relationship sense. So today we hit one of those sticking points which, as I said, pretty much comes up if we are awake. The air around us got heavy with disappointment and hot with irritation because the glib phrase 'opposites attract' should be a longer one that includes the word 'sometimes', and these one

I was enjoying a leisurely bath, reclining in the warm wet, staring out the window at the innocent green of the Ash tree. This time last year a sudden storm froze out the gentle letting go of fall and rolled in a premature shock of winter. In one icy day everything fell, no yellow, no gold, no falling one by one, just one day untouched by autumn and the next all green was gone. Fall. We all fervently hope it won’t do that again. We want time to relish the ache of goodbye, the

I sat next to heartbreak at the coffee shop this afternoon. I didn’t mean to. I could feel the energy before I sat down, I just didn’t believe myself. It was the most civil of breakups. What is pain when it’s dressed in such gentility? Does it make less of a tearing sound? She is slim and undulating like the stem of a new poppy; someone unused to sitting still. Young, so young and beautiful, not a mark on her, tawny long hair wound and wrapped, in and over itself, down her ba

Why? Because it goes against the grain, or seems to. Because we’re worried that, if we do, we’ll turn into mush, and everyone else will. We think of tenderness as having a very limited application. We certainly don’t think of it as a potential solution to the world’s ills, or our own. But I’ve been thrown into tenderness, kicking and screaming. I’ve found it comforting and utterly ruthless. It spares nothing, loves everything. Transcends all my careful boundaries. Without ten