Skintimacy
When you visit Angkor Wat
you see tree roots snaking through the temple
twisting around each other
like our legs and arms clinging.
Our bones meet suddenly
With force like magnets released hard
not softly like fingers
pointing to a nose, an ear, a nipple
a stretch of stomach or length of leg.
Her skin is softer than my fingers
which are attracted to the wonder of skin
covering bones and twisting tendons.
It’s not just the feel of touching
but the seeing of my fingers
hovering over and approaching skin
and the seeing of the finger sliding
along and across the skin,
as smooth as glass.
My father shaves still
Lately I have been seeing my father
Shaving at the bathroom mirror
I am about eight or nine
Watching in wonder
Brush slapping on cream
Razor slicing along stretched neck
Scraping cream and black bristles
Clapping his cheeks, face reddening
I am watching him like an alien.
He said that I would shave like him,
When I became a man.
I hoped that I never would.
Deer Girlfriend
She is long and lithe
like a deer
lifting her head
tilting slightly sideways
as if there is danger
in the breeze.
She leans towards me
one hand framing her jaw
with the finest elegance
as if she’s pondering
like Rodin’s thinker
how she can escape.
Out of Focus
If you look at someone you love,
which you tend to — being in love.
Notice that your lover’s face
goes out of focus at a distance
about a hand’s width from your eyes.
The face blurs, becoming so perfect,
you can’t see creases or wrinkles.
One reason for being so close.
Travelling Solo
People ask me
Are you alone?
I try to be proud
Of my solo-ness
As if it was better
Than being with
a loving woman
They find it hard
To comprehend
Why I or anyone
Would travel alone
Or be alone
And sometimes or often
I agree with them
With my whole heart.
Talking to myself
I must be insane now
because I talk to myself incessantly.
and you know what they say
(or somebody said at some point
and it sounded smart)
“Talking to yourself is the first sign of insanity”
And people nodded in agreement
because they don’t talk to themselves
and they knew they were definitely sane.
But they could not have been
like me, alone in a plague.
with no other option:
not to talk at all;
be firmly shut silent;
shut up, not utter words at all;
just think thoughts.
Now I find relief in hearing at least one voice.
It soothes me to hear human sounds.
I suppose I could listen to radio or podcast
but I know I make more sense than them
and my voice is speaking to me,
someone to speak to me.
Sometimes I am critical of me
“Why did you leave the keys in the door?“
That’s okay because my voice
sometimes congratulates me.
“John, you did well! The omelette was very tasty“.
Talking to myself doesn’t harm me.
It balances me. It protects me
because talking deals with the thought
which unsaid would fester.
My mind is cleansed for a while.
Clinging no more
Before we held together
But today she goes home
Her house, not mine
Last night we agreed
Our lack of connection
Our needs battling
She wants stability
And stability equals
Money and a house
I need love and sex
Not separated for me
Touch is love to me
Two people who love each other
But I’m the wrong man for her
She’s the wrong woman for me
I will take her to the train
Send her clothes later.
We will be alone tonight
Last night
If I don’t wake
in the morning,
or tomorrow morning,
or the next morning,
or any morning,
I would like to think
now, not then,
(it would be too late to think)
that I spent tonight well,
the last night well.
The trouble is that
I have no idea
how to spend it;
apart from watching
a French movie on TV,
which made me weep.
Too late for regrets
What will I regret on my deathbed?
Probably nothing if I am nowhere near a bed.
Imagine you’re in an aeroplane and it’s about to crash. You would be concentrating on the impact. You’d be too scared to regret. Of course, if the crash is a long time coming, perhaps the plane is running out of fuel in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, you might have time to consider your past life.
Okay let’s not dramatise like the movies. Old people usually die in hospitals in a bed-like platform. They are plugged into various monitoring devices which indicate to medical staff the patient’s state of being. There are people around, maybe friends, maybe family. The patient may not welcome certain family members but he or she is usually drained of will and energy because morphine blocks out pain and panic.
This human being is soon not to be. Then this former person will simply be a corpse. It will be cleaned and taken away from the hospital by removalists called funeral directors.
However before the medication “kicks in” the pre-corpse may have regrets and those final assessments of an entire lifetime will almost certainly be regrets, not joyful memories. It’s rare to hear of people dying mid laugh or smiling.
There is a book written by Bronnie Ware, an Australian palliative care nurse, about the five biggest regrets of people shortly before death. Her patients, when questioned, had tried to sum up their lives, in effect, to judge themselves. They evaluated the quality of their total existence.
The 5 regrets
- I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
- I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
- I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
- I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
- I wish that I had let myself be happier.
When I’m about to die I hope I do not look back on my life with distaste, as if I shouldn’t really have been born. The five regrets are really character assessments which seems a tad harsh at that point. For example, the one regret most men confessed to is spending too much time working rather than time with the family.
Let’s drill down a little deeper here. Why did Mr X spend too much time working? Explanation 1 is that his family was so poor that they would’ve starved to death unless he devoted his life to work. Explanation 2 is possibly the more likely. He became a workaholic in order to avoid the family. I have noticed this amongst farmers in the Pyrenees region of Victoria who work “seven days a week”.
That way, he can avoid crying and disputatious children, a fractious wife and family responsibilities in general.
Looking at the other four major regrets, it’s obvious that most men and women, if forced, could honestly self-analyse at any stage of their lives and come to the same regrets. However there is usually no inclination to stop and think. We just roll down the hill of our busy life.
The patient in the hospital who knows that the ride is almost over can look back over the whole route. Unfortunately the good parts are mostly invisible and the bad bits are large on the screen.
To me it’s a pity that a full and complex life can be reduced to regrets and often recriminations. After all it’s way too late.
Nevertheless I hope that I will die regret-less.