Cold conversations
I am a hoarder of hurts
It hides in the folds of my flabby body
The devil is really in the detail;
Dark attics, my tiny hand forced around hard and warm
Rewarded by orange Chiclets when it was light.
My back shrinking into spasms on the cold metal
Even as shiny sterilised metal readied me for life ahead.
Joy flies away
It is always perched on the tip of my nose
I wish it was on my fingers
Then I could freeze it into word cubes.
Do I seek actively one and ignore the other?
Is fun anathema to me?
The human body is made up thirty trillion units
Is it all really the cellular composition?
And the juices that lubricate its functioning
Or is it menopause?
I crave a conversation
Outside of my own head.
I speak to be heard
To ask for understanding is unwise
In this raucous world.
We all need space.
Increasingly so.
We are growing wider occupying more space, elbowing ourselves aggressively into corners which are not ours.
Our minds are shrinking to fit into coloured crevices; the shop windows are always dressed in a single colour.
I seek the company of women
The attention of men is passe
There is no need to woo them or anyone anymore
The only one who needs my attention and affection is the woman in me
I demand quiet
I have not the energy to judge anyone
I am only looking to realise all of myself
There are fewer days ahead of me than those I have left behind.
Cold Conversations arrived with the gentle hush of a truth long withheld. It read like a slow exhalation. I found myself reading it as one might read a letter smuggled out of the self, a correspondence between the woman you are and the woman you are still becoming.
From, I am a hoarder of hurts, you conjure a metaphor of extraordinary force. I could almost see the life-long attics where memories, like dust-laden trunks, lie half-catalogued and wholly alive. By locating these hurts in the folds of my flabby body, you collapse memory and flesh with a starkness that reminded me of Sylvia Plath, that rare talent for making the body both archive and battleground, both evidence and witness.
And then your feminist introspection emerges, not as protest, not as sorrow, but as reclamation. The attention of men is passeā¦ The only one who needs my attention and affection is the woman in me.
There is such restraint, such clarity, such earned solitude in these lines. I thought, fleetingly, of Woolf, but unlike her, your room is not external. It is built inward, carved out of long years of tending to others while postponing the self.
Your closing sentiment, that there are fewer days ahead than behind, is delivered with a sort of British understatement, touched by the gentlest melancholy. Yet it does not mourn; it balances. It feels like an honest accounting at the end of a long and eventful fiscal year of living.
In its entirety, Cold Conversations is a poem that refuses ornament and yet radiates a quiet, piercing elegance. You make vulnerability luminous. You make age feel like a lantern. The poem lingers, like the residue of a difficult truth spoken softly, a cold conversation that somehow left me warmed.
Queen mode: activated!!
Stunning!
Itās beautiful writing Charu