Tag: language
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The Second Before
There’s a second,just one,when the lights go downand the theatre tenses.The chatter folds,the velvet breathes,and I sit in the darknot as a person,but as a pause. Alone,not lonely;just suspended,like a held notebefore the overture dares to begin. In that second,I am every audiencethat ever waitedto be moved. Then the music starts,and the worldremembers how to…
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Poetry is Taught Wrong
They teach us metrics like a checklist,syllables counted like coins, rhythm weighed and filed away.We learn to admire the beast from a glass box: dissected, annotated, politely dead.They hand us diagrams of feeling and expect tidy answers. We are asked to tame metaphors into essays, to translate thunder into bullet points.We paste sticky notes over…
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Watching Hands
They speak without sound: the small grammar of fingers,nouns folded into palms, verbs scored along knuckles.A thumb hesitates like a question; a wrist flick is punctuation.Hands remember how to mend; they know the route to a bandage. I watch the map of someone’s day traced in flour and ink and keys,the quiet economy of a…
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A Sorry Habit
I say sorry for the weather, sorry for my shoes, sorry for the way silence sits heavy between us.My mouth is a coin purse and the word jingles out whenever the room tilts a degree I don’t like.I apologise like a habit. I apologise for walking into a room with too much thought, for folding…
Weather In My Ribs 