Try to remain calm (trigger warning for abduction)

The girl who didn’t come home
Did everything right
Exercised
Worked hard
Graduated
Had friends
Kept to a well-lit path
Talking to loved ones
On her phone
Headphones in
Music off
Covered head to toe
In muted, age-appropriate
Weather-suitable
Clothing
It made no difference
Someone snatched her
Took all her well-made
Choices away
For no good reason
Wiping her light
From the face of the earth
Before returning her
To the soil from whence
We all come.
Now what do we
The troubled audience
Make of this story?
Was the snatcher
An aberration?
Can we find some way
To blame the girl
For transforming
From a positive
To a negative
Statistic?
Her victimhood
Plunging property prices
In the area
Where the monster
Did not live or work
But chose to hunt.
The narrative
Of a week-long-wait
Haunts us.
Forensics teams
Combing through
Ill-kept shrubbery
Blocking the usual
Criminal activities.
A small bonus, perhaps.
We bite our nails
Reading tabloid
Speculation.
Hoping for innocent
Explanation
Car crash?  Coma?
Jane Doe?  Dunno.
Checking phones
And feeds
For well-raked muck
Old and new leads.
Hiding our nerves
Measuring risk
Wondering when the
Anti-climatic
But by now
Anticipated
Charge is to be
Read out by
Cringing colleagues
Whose work lives
Just got more complicated:
Having to justify
How one of their own
A bodyguard
Trusted to bear arms
Pissed in the pool
In spite of safeguards
Psych profiling
Developed vetting
In such a public
Press-lined
Arena.
What do we learn
Boys and girls?
How can we reconcile
The role of protector
With predator?
Are they two sides
Of the same coin?
Symptomatic of
Toxic masculinity
Or some sort of
Mid-life crisis
Prompting a
Psychotic break?
Would we be as shocked
To read the story
Coming from overseas
Wearing foreign faces
Living lives that bore
Less resemblance
To our own?
How can we
Protect ourselves
From further selection
By opportunistic
Solipsistic
Middle-aged parents
Abusing the family car?
Was the position
Of authority
Incidental
Or did it go
To the head
Of the perpetrator
Tipping the scale
From potential aggressor
To active threat?
Can we trust that
This was an
Isolated incident
An anomaly?
Or will there be
Further reckoning
Of countless
Cold cases?
Must we walk home
In packs of ten?
Keys clutched in
Sweaty fists
Ready to go
For the eyes?
Armed to the teeth
With pepper spray?
Trained in martial arts
Aiming roundhouse kicks
At fellow commuters
All jumping at shadows?
Avoid crossing the road
Unless covered by
CCTV from all
Possible angles?
Spurn all contact
With strangers?
Take vitamins?
Go vegan?
Eat, love, pray?
The situation
Remains hopeless.
Life continues.
We work, eat, sleep,
Exercise, dress down,
Carry a personal alarm
(Until it causes us
Too many problems),
Practice defensive
Manoeuvres.
Try to remain calm.
Family and friends
Mourn her passing.
Strangers gawk at
Sensational headlines
Turn the page
Scroll to the next story.
The senseless
Will now be
Minutely analysed
By future victims.
A crime has taken place
We all try to understand
How to ensure
It never happens
To us.

Cue to Queue

What is the proper etiquette
For declining to bypass security
Measures by walking through
Perspex barriers two-by-two?
I don’t recall, but forcing the issue
By swiping your card made me
Choose – to hesitate and lock
Us both out, or to cheat
And leave you too little time
To cross the line and make it
To the toilet. In my defence
The cat woke me at 4am
Breaking through the bedroom
Door, my lunch leaked in my
Handbag, forcing me to alter
My commute, omitting the exercise
Portion of the early part of my day
So I was barely awake
And very keen to pee
Somewhere other than the
Carpeted corridor. In short, true
Gallantry’s all very well, but
Don’t do it again.
My bladder may not support
The dilemma.

Musings on a bus

Are the lions drinking or drowning today?
And what sort of whimsy may come into play?
If I skip the long walk and get carried away
By a piper whose horn touts – fat ladies, wahey?!
Do I find inside mercy, or terrible pride?
Am I fearful of friends from whose habits I hide?
Is there just cause to question the ways we go wild?
Or conceal what we feel to keep on in our stride?
With a pace at once terrible, tortuous, slow
We make progress an inch at a time, so we grow
And though others may ask us – do they want to know?
How we got where we’re planning to stay when they go?
I cannot give an answer – my answer is no
Guarantee of it working for anyone, so
Do not plead my response – I don’t do it to show
To the world: mine – the best
Way to reap what you sow.

A sudden sharp blow to the brain

The vice-like grip, at ten a.m. is but a warning, a presage of what is to come. A small twinge, a twitching of muscles, a lightly furrowed brow, then silence. You count the seconds, watch the tumbleweed jump and dance, twisting in the wind as it skips across the hastily vacated brainscape, and you pray for solitude. Eleven o’clock comes and goes, bringing with it a mild headache and a growing sense of foreboding that has nothing to do with the glowering boss lurking behind the advised (and advisable) plate-glass partition. It starts. Twelve thirty sees you staggering toward the cafeteria for a polystyrene cup of boiling monosodiumglutomate and a hunk of stale foam, encased in concrete, and sadistically coated in sesame seeds to provide you with the government-recommended daily requirement of gum-disease. The clouds pass by the window as you pick at your teeth with a ragged fingernail. Your email states that it’s nearly three, but time has little meaning here in the land of artificial light. The phone rings, your ears pop, and suddenly it hits, blinding, terrifying, hideous. You clamber out of the pit and cradle the receiver. Hello? A list of pointless instructions issues forth without provocation. The knife slices vertically through your skull, leaving nothing.

Stream of barely-consciousness

Looking back with the benefit of nostalgia, it is easy to forget the homesickness, the loneliness of that year. I do not look upon it as a wasted opportunity, but rather one I chose to endure in my own fashion. Others partied, northern-style, staying out late, growing up disgracefully. I took a more sober approach. I enjoyed being an enigma to my fellows, and, in a way, I enjoyed wallowing in my own self-pity, overworking myself, setting challenges I would lose sleep needlessly to fulfil. I looked for the real, the genuine experience, rather than living in my own little Erasmus-island. I was there to embrace the local culture, warts and all, and so I did. Suppressing my instinctive withdrawal from any harsh reality I might encounter, I soldiered on, exploring in foreign territory. Craving a wholemeal cheddar-cheese and Dijon-mustard sandwich for nearly ten months. Learning instead to thrive on a diet of crackers, coffee, plain chocolate and oranges. I inserted myself into that world, that time-zone, that lifestyle. I even went to church.

Then, when my time was up, I was expelled from my brave new-found world. Released from the institution. And now I find myself aching to return there. A part of me is missing. I noticed it when I first returned. I craved pizza rather than toast. I pined for the colourful shop-window-displays, bursting with pride and elegance, and found no solace in the unfeeling, haphazard piles to be found gracing the grubby glass fronts of Regent Street.

What can have happened to provoke this shift in personal geography? I no longer belong here, or there, or, in fact, anywhere. I am a displaced person. Having abandoned what passed for ‘my own’ culture to embrace another for so long, I find on returning, that I have lost it. I no longer fit. The world around me jars each time I open my eyes to it, and yet I cannot exist in a bubble. My time there is fast fading, and yet the world here is hardly in focus, but fuzzy, as if viewed through a smudged lens.

Homecoming is never easy. It is in the nature of time, being of a linear persuasion, to march onward, letting those things one drops fall by the wayside. Somewhere along the road, I seem to have lost myself amid the dust and general confusion of growing up. My rock of ages slipped its moorings and drifted out to sea, taking the rest of the Armada along for the ride.

So what do I do now? Try to find out who I really am? Or just choose an identity to borrow? I could so easily become the perfect girlfriend, then wife, and daughter-in-law, even mother. Or do I continue to drift, hoping to bump into something or someone significant enough to run me aground and show me how I am no longer so out of my depth?

My mind is filled with problem-solving paraphernalia, yet no solution fits my puzzle. Logic is overthrown and I dawdle along the path of least resistance, dragging my feet in the mire and snaring my clothing and hair on brambles. I gaze longingly towards the past, using the eyes in the back of my head, ever fixed to the rear, but I refuse to turn. What good would it do to return there? To dwell, to swallow the pill I keep toying with – swirling my tongue around it, and capturing it securely in my teeth before spitting it out again for further inspection…

I am myself, and yet who I used to be is already long-gone. Old friends no longer know me, and I have little use for what new acquaintances I gather, as I now expect them to be transitory, changeable, fleeting.

I work because I must. Not to do so would outrage me, pushing my fragile sense of stability further toward ‘off-balance and out-of-kilter’. I long for time to think, time to sit and wallow, to pinpoint my position, work out how in hell I got here, and where to go next… No time is forthcoming, however, so my questions remain unanswered, although the answers must be within reach. Somewhere in this vast confusion, there is one with my name on it.

Scenery

Treetops in the sunlight, rushing by the window, bearing their burdens proudly, majestically, regally. No meek shall inherit the earth, but long after we are but dust, the trees and plants will march ever onward, holding their standards high, gaily waving green-clad boughs in the cool of the evening, and rustling to give their best to the breeze and receive the whisper of news in return.

Train scribblings half asleep

I raise my weary head and look about me in puzzlement. How did I get here? Shaking the vestiges of much-craved sleep from my fruitful, crowded brain, I try to rouse my intellect, only to be informed that she is still abed, curled up in her red satin pyjama bottoms and black t-shirt, dreaming a foreign landscape; exploring, sighing after long-lost loves, swimming in pools of deep ebony emotion, and leaping ever higher to escape the rising tide of wakefulness that threatens her peaceable drift.

I am an island, spinning in the pacific blue of my own unconscious, washing the sand from my shores with tides of ink. Self-exploration that uncovers freshwater pools, icy-cold and clearer than crystal, more sparkly than rose quartz and twice as gentle; these foray-expeditions within the psyche bring back pearls of wisdom, grey and severely serious, gems of longing, beautiful and dark, and a hidden persona who rarely reigns with a free hand.

Your arms no longer bind me, your feet do not find me, yet still I seek you in my dreams. What is it I am looking for? I fear I no longer know.

If the ceiling were the floor

These were written separately, but I have decided to group them together due to content, so please excuse any repetition of imagery or metaphor.

Lying quietly, facing the ceiling, I contemplate the beauty of this sterile, stucco’d upside-down world. Perfection in uselessness, barren space, wasted tidiness. Grey serenity in the early-evening light, and I am cleansed of the day’s worries. The clutter of my brain seeping out and floating downward to pool around my ankles while I gaze in wonder at the splendour of light playing across a clean surface.

I could be happy up there, living on the ceiling. I’d bathe my hands in the cool basin of the light-shade and sigh at the barren beauty of my upside-down world. The bookshelves would give me ready access to all those hard-to-reach, top-shelf titles, now brought down to my level by happenstance and made accessible to me. I would stretch languorously, revelling in the space about my arms, then sprawl across the ceiling, shaking a dusty tome upwards towards the carpet. I could sigh, long and loud, then spend the day within my mind. Minus the distractions of chores – no hoovering, no dusting, no washing up, and I’d be free.

Dancing around the bedroom in my pyjamas

Dancing around the bedroom in my pyjamas I pause to pirouette, feeling the scrape of the carpet, crumb-covered, beneath the ball of my blister-blighted foot, and I am beautiful. Without makeup, without mirrors, with no one to look at me or to stroke my ever-hungry ego, I breathe in the stale, book-dusty air, hear the tinny music of the radio, spy your socks on the floor, and, tutting to myself, march proudly onward to face the morning.

The daydreamer is brought back down to Earth with a thump

Stolen from my chosen world. Reality arrives with a rush and a whimper. Staring blindly at the hand before me, all faces turned to chart my progress. Wagers placed, the unimaginative betting on the surety of a telling-off. The dreamer castigated for thinking outside the box, outside the hell of thirty sheep, all following one who refuses to lead by example. Do as I say, don’t do as I do. You have to pay attention. Stick with the mundanity of life, it will bring its own rewards. What rewards? What is my motivation not to fly the scene on a broomstick, long hair whipping in the wind and cackling in a self-congratulatory manner? I lack stimulation. I have rarely found the company of sheep to be adequate in this regard. But you must want to conform, fit in, be molded to the cast of social splendour. The government wants more scientists. Well pardon me, please, for having an opinion, but my talents lie elsewhere. I suspect the government really, deep down, desires something far more exciting – more dominatrices, more cheese and mustard sandwiches, more sex, but it’s pointless explaining such things to most adults while one is under the age of ten. They tend to be so shocked that one can think, that the content of any message is lost amid cries of ‘Sacrilege’, as the alarm bells sound and they call in the men in white coats to ask embarrassed questions about your relationship with the world around you in a crude attempt to discover your emotional handle. A label is most helpful to those members of the red-tape brigades who cannot cope without a filing system. It allows them to hide their fear of you in a little box. Somewhere between Arachnophobia and Necrophilia lies a little drawer with my name on it, encircled by a thick chain and multiple padlocks. It is time to break the locks and melt the chain, free the spirit and allow the daydreamers to solve the world’s problems. Protocol will only get us so far, as we keep edging ever-closer to the big red button that could end it all in a heartbeat. No daydreamers would press it for curiosity’s sake, as we have clearly imagined the consequences. Clearly and in technicolour!