Daily missive for Friday the 8th of July.~by Peter Forster

 

 

Daily missive for Friday the 8th of July.

Last night I heard
My mother sing,
It was happy birthday
But my mother was you.
Is this a re-birth
Do I need to learn to walk
With nobody
Left to carry the weight
But me?
It is a lazy thought
To believe I stand alone
But now I am
More or less fully grown
It is easy to see
How much is owed
To the women I love.
We made the person I am
Even now,
When it is not certain how
Things will be
In the near distant future
And I hold my self together
With sticky tape for a suture,
Hiding the scars
Of a bruised past,
Wearing nothing but a smile
As a plaster cast.
Averted eyes, sliding away.
A mind full of words
With nothing to say,
Afraid that people will
Want something
I am too fragile to give,
Is this any way to live?
Sitting alone
In a café
With a laptop,
Waiting for the rain to ease
Or actually stop.
Slipping into the grey,
Looking to escape
Between raindrops.
When this sojourn
Into self-indulgence ends
And birthday blues
Becomes yesterday’s news,
Is that when I understand
I am,
At long last
My very own
Fully grown
Twenty first century
Man.