football in the dark

the sun

f

a

l

l

s

on the windowpane;
the shattering glass
glistens.

sphere bouncing off
again and again
in the replay of that time:
the thump
thump thump
of children’s beating hearts.

we don’t wait for the shout,
we run, paling,
into the leafy dark
where we collide with silence
and each other.

breath escapes,
fear subsides, feet find the ground:

we learn to play football in the dark.

108. flesh and blood

intrinsically, we are all the same: flesh and blood, bones and dust. and when we are born, the world flutters under the weight of us. we are the oxygen of life.

as a woman, it is hard not to feel the nautical beat of potential life swimming somewhere deep down inside, the taut knot tied tight. and only the tide of red flushing the possibility out is a concession of peace, a book falling shut with a gust of wind, oyster shell clamming up. we learn to breathe only for ourselves again.
we are liberated, we are free. from responsibility, from fear, from life, yet unborn, screaming to break out with a pair of lungs not yet formed.

and yet, on the other side of a coin, we are told that once formed, the foreign clump has rights? jeremy hunt and patriarchy. it’s men’s world, just as it ever was. we strive for humanity but religion clouds the eyes. are statistics not enough? what’s humane about bringing an unwanted child into the grim ouskirts of this world?

i grew up in ukraine. the newly independent, drained ukraine of the nineties, worse even than it is today. i was a hotly unticipated child, the following story is not about me. the story is about a friend of my mum’s who said something i will never forget. at christmas, i take my kids to visit an orphanage to see how lucky they are to growing up in a family.
there’s in excess of 100,000 orphans in ukraine even now. 90% of them still have living parents, parents who don’t want to or can’t look after them. at 16, when they leave orphanages, they, more often than not, take to the streets to live the life of crime.

now, i’m not saying abortion is right but if ever i was in a bad position, i’d want to have that second chance, the opportunity to do what’s right and not throw a part of me away onto the scrapheap of life. pro-choice was never just about women, it’s also about the suffering of children born only to be abandoned.

then again, what would you know about that, mr. jeremy hunt,  educated at oxford, born to a sir?

107. in the rain

sometimes i think i only live inside your blood because i haven’t learnt to live in seperation.

you’ve been saving me so long, you know. and now, how do i tell you that it wasn’t worth it, my love? death will come and get me in the end and it will transpire to you that i was always closer to plath than to anais.
the death instinct shakes the salt out of me, it’s the pearlescent blue of the vein branches;  it will reach the heart eventually, it’s always there, diffused in the blood.

i’m always going somewhere, bumping into hurts, renewing my lease on life. and we all know life doesn’t come cheap and death doesn’t come fast for plain janes like us. sometimes i wish to break the mould like sylvia plath, but for now you love me and i’m still tough and sharp like a piece of shattered glass.

i see vendors of big issue on the streets and i wish i could take them all in. as a child, i planned to set up a house where homeless would sleep until they got back on their feet. now, all grown up, i can only smile at such grand dreams and buy the magazine from the kind face smiling at me in the rain.

the world is full of pain.