memoirs of a poet

You and me making our way across a contraption designed for school children. There lies, tree bark made of plastic and sticky residue from kids’ fingers left to dwell on brightly coloured pipes, left to linger like a story untold. Our footing is unsteady. I clutch you with my left hand. My right burning from the rope I’m clinging to.  I had been holding on too hard. 

You look at me, flickering with false ardour in your eyes, and ask if We,

‘Can we be like this forever?’ 

‘A couple of kids?’ 

I said yes. 

A little girl, heart too heavy for her chest, is giggling behind me. Her cackle builds up in my throat like bile. She runs and skips and leaps. Almost mockingly. Prancing, as if she is omnific. Hands and knees writhing in dirt. Worms, her friends and spiders – her fear.  The wind bows to her and the grass paves her way and the spots of sunlight reaching through the trees are a mere game of hopscotch beneath her tarnished little shoes. Striped tights flailing towards the heavens on the swing set. She does not know she will inevitably plummet to the ground. She does not know how bloody ridiculous she looks. She does not mind either. She pays no regard to you. She knows I care too greatly. She can sense it. She knows her happy-go-lucky no-sense-of-care-for-anything laughter scratches at me, digs at me and the pit I am stuck in, telling me to stay stagnant. Even though, I should too, be running, running, selfishly prancing. She simply persists and it brings harm to nobody but me.

Hence, I said yes.

Now I sit with this recollection, a memory if you will, foolishly hardened by age and circumstance. Our pact played out. We remained children forever. I now sit in front of my typewriter and fabricate moments like this one, like a patchwork quilt sewn by a mother’s tender touch. I do not know if this is coping, idealism.  I am not too certain of the facts. I do not care either. 

I simply persist.