Maja

From here to there

[poezijamaji]

When it's heavy on me When all feels lost, pointless When the air presses down upon the body When all is distraction with no substance When you are not clever, or wise, or purposeful When there is no purpose There you must remember tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow Remember that the sum of existence does not fall only in the next hour That sunshine returns after rain And rain after drought That some are lakes That some are rivers And some the turbulent ocean But all are water And all return to water The sea will claim us in the end

[poezijamaji]

There is nothing inevitable about what we do I was not made to love you I was not made for anything at all There is no story, no higher purpose No threads designed to weave us together Nothing ordains my path It does not stretch in front of me, only behind But you do stretch in front of me, And sleeping, your face creases where it meets the pillow A multiplicity of tiny lines That have led to this brief slow moment And brought you, gentle, to my bed. 

[poezijamaji]

The Afternoon

[poezijamaji]

Time to tickle the old brain cells Let your writing sense come back Your mind has grown flabby You've let yourself grow slack Those words that once delighted Linger now behind Lost in the background of your thoughts And now not easily defined Vauge, nebulous, inchoate Waiting now to grow To find their purpose Find their place Just like you, and so Can you build yourself from words Outline your shape in text? Be so much more than paper thin Write in ink what's next.

[poezijamaji]

You touched me once, a careful glance A barely passing blow And there, at once, I saw a chance In someone that I didn't know It wasn't easy, wasn't fast I laboured hard and long Yet now that time is through and past And everything gone wrong . I try to think how it would feel If we had never met And I not caught within that reel Not trapped within your net - Not gasping now upon the shore But free from hurt and pain . Yet one light touch of your dear hand And I am bruised again.

[poezijamaji]

When we were dividing up items - A sock here, a t-shit there Whose books are whose - I was lassiez faire, I don't care much for possessions Learnt not to be attached to physical things . But I never realised you'd get to keep the river . So that every time I walk by it you rise like the tide in my heart Wavelets on the banks lapping at my ear Tower Bridge is yours The mudlarks too Picking over the detritus of London Of love Trains passing over Blackfriars, momentarily belong to you And me, inside them too, encased within your possession . You own every step of the Southbank And my London is intersected, torn through North and South, irreperably divided The boats passing by memories With seagulls wheeling above Transporting little parts of you to every inch of this city Crying loudly from on high, so that it echoes in my soul . I love every inch of this river that I do not own

[poezijamaji]

Are you my blameless Eurydice? Drifting behind me Inching closer and closer Seduced by my solid shape ahead of you Until I blow it Can't resist looking back When everyone tells me I have to look ahead.

[poezijamaji]

I'm on the fast train as it flashes past all the places I know so well Brightly lit platforms where I have sat and waited Had arguments, fallen in love Let time wash over me But now I'm on the fast train Which has no time for all of that A blink and they are all gone, those memories . I am going somewhere further down the line.

[poezijamaji]

Everything I lay my eyes upon Someone has designed Surrounded by a living museum of human ingenuity Painstakingly considered, measured, thought over, built Built by machines that in their turn had to be built, considered, measured, thought over Am I designed? The way I think, act, consider? Do I fit neatly in some greater scene? An if so, where does my love for you fit? Broken, as it has, out of the box that was never the right shape This world seems as if it wasn't designed for our love It made you in the wrong shapes So that my love hurt you Caused you pain, when it should only ever have caused you joy And yet I find my love is stronger than the neat boxes the world offers up You are my Euridyce, and I keep looking back.

[poezijamaji]

I am learning the outline of other things New shapes, new spaces Different people, different places But the hardest lesson of all is to teach myself London anew To make it my city, and not just ours My heart throbs as I cross the river because for me it is still our river The Victoria line leads me to you What other purpose could it serve? My cello waiting for the notes of your songs in all the places we used to play But slowly but surely, I must trace new ways, learn new notes Find new places and people Paint my own picture of this city Not simply fill in the outline of yours I am not skillful yet - yours was more beautiful Mine a child's drawing, lacking depth and detail But the longer I work at it, perhaps the better it will become, until it is just as ornate, as full, as pleasing as ever yours was And perhaps the more satisfying for having been rendered by my own hand.

[poezijamaji]

What control do we have over the heart? What feat of mental flexibility needed to alter blood flow? Re-direct veins Knit together flesh and muscle Heal that which is broken.

[poezijamaji]

Nobody owns words They are passed around from mouth to mouth Swiftly, softly, slowly and with force Scattered across pages, Across minds Across hearts My heart is full or words that I am only just learning

[poezijamaji]

The Afternoon

There is a carpet, rolled up and attached to the ceiling of this small shaded space in a garden full of the ephemera of many curious people. It feels full of life Opposite poems throw up beautiful words - kindling, dabble, naught, lo, benignant, and as I explain my voice feels soft and warm. This is English as I love it, soft and caressing, describing the sweep of the world, of the heart, of quiet afternoons spent in sunny gardens, sweet and calm. If a hug were the shape of an afternoon, this would be it. It is enveloping, like light fingers trailed across skin.

[poezijamaji]

Here sunshine, music, people. Warm sunlight that caresses then burns Write a song for the air, the water, the ground. For the heat, for the noise For the overwhelming confusion of it For connections made and broken For the pain of it, and the joy For those moments of silence, and those of noise. For the irritable catch within my chest that pulls me back from the brink Or maybe attracts me to it, I can't tell For all the humans, sweet and sour.

[poezijamaji]

He fills the spaces in my mind

And my mind is the city. If contentedness is the Ghibli field of grass, shimmering in the wind, then my mind is full of noise, pollution, sights to recoil from, but with no room to run, no green spaces. The Metropolis, awaiting the flood. Lofty heights with shakey foundations.

[poezijamaji]

I smoke because I long to fill myself with you, only I can’t I want to breath you in, feel you inside me, only I can't So instead I revel in the sharp smoke, the long full stop Perhaps you are an addiction, but the sweetest one, so delicate.

[poezijamaji]

Tracks

I pass your house on the train A special kind of melancholic pain That calls me toward you, only to be rebuffed - And anyway, this service doesn't stop here, it's hard to exit a moving carriage And so on I pass, though in some ways I linger by your door, at your window I pass many houses, and many a window I could linger at, or none at all. There is nohing so special about yours, or so I'm told Only the invisible threads, anchored deep within me I don't know where they stop - at your window? Or do they go further, gossamer fine, through the glass, to weave around you, a delicate tug to pull you towards me That you might look outside and dream of being on this train, though it doesn't stop there, though it is only passing through.