Where I Belong

When ever I am advised 
that I 'should update my life',
or repent of my past - the better
to absorb the latest version of virtue -
I don't know how to respond.

I know my past, it's rights and wrongs,
and what of it that I should not repeat
-most of my childhood/being parented
the conditions of which I am now glad
were unique to those times anyway. 

So why should I change what I say 
about myself and my past, when change
becomes one cheap lie after another
to fit around the latest in consumerism

I am who I am whether I want to lump it,
like it, or live in a past where I know I belong.    

The Present Is A Country That Will Pass

How to misread the past;
apply today's clichés
to pasts where there was
no such idea or language,
where the people that lived there
had different ways of working out
their present tense lives.

Even if back then
they did what we do now,
they would have wanted
the future to be different. 

 

The Point Of Therapy

is to push our difficulties past their sell-by date,
which is long gone for our friends who have to listen to us,
but not yet there for those who don't hear ourselves.
The better to put those difficulties in the past tense,
and get ourselves in the present.
This is done for us to replace the old problems
with something fresher and more creative.




.

Ageing Is About Life,

life is about change,  aging is about entropy.
When offspring depart nests will empty.

The departed always hope that time will leave intact
what they leave behind, learning only later
how time alters them, and where they have left.

Departed or left behind,
with age the horizon levels,
and draws us near, embraces
us in the stillness of acceptance.

Partnerships-

a means of accessorizing
ourselves and others
by assigning each other roles
that fit around one another.
The better to aspire to some new,
as yet unadjusted to, 'authenticity'.