Bridge of shit – by Woodsy

It’s like

wanting the streetlight outside my window to speak.

It’s like hiding myself,

here in the dark,

and hoping the orange glow will warm me out of rent arrears

and

scary conversations

and

having to walk through a world I don’t fit.

The orange is orange.

The grapefruit is grapefruit.

The dark is the dark.

But as for the silence…

As for the things I desperately need to speak about,

to say somehow,

so that this mean-hearted silence might listen…

might grow enough to wear its orange

and speak the words hidden there…

It really is, you know –

it’s just like the streetlight outside my window.

It’s just like the sea

that’s nothing but sea.

Nothing but water tricks,

acrobat surf.

Nothing that touches the essence of me.

And yet…

This tumbling that catches the essence of me –

that fills me

and thrills me…

echoes me wide through the textures of night.

I’ve known it to do that,

time after time.

I’ve felt the tide save me.

I’ve heard the tide speak.

I’ve shadowed its heartbeat,

close to my own.

So, if a thing that’s “not” can still be that…

what’s with you?

Thing of the silence that waits in my heart…

what’s with you?

Were you in mum, too?  Were you there when she stood in that dismal place, that place the special things couldn’t, wouldn’t reach…

and shone anyway?

When she smiled like a heart spinning out of space, like an asteroid crashing, and shattered all my skies…

were you there, too?

I miss her so much right now, because she was the one person who could always explain me.

It’s a bridge I still think of, sometimes, when looking at how things are now.

The silence…

The disconnection…

The empty ache of a road unmade…

So what now?

Perhaps the only meaningful way I can build my bridge into your presence…

whoever, whatever, wherever you are…

is by building it out of broken, nasty, jagged, twisted, scarred, peeling things –

shit, basically…

which means, I guess, that I’ll have to see it, know it and feel it as the shit it truly is.

Only then I can stitch the poetry through it,

and perhaps weave it together into something that stars and mountains and oceans can recognise as a brother… a sister… a kindred shining, shitty little thing.

But if I can build it into something your heart can recognise, half lost and fragile as that heart seems behind this mist of silence…

maybe then it might please you,

this bridge of mine…

this bridge of shit…

woven from all the stuff you didn’t want me to miss.