Can you write through worry
and tunnel out with words?
Can you sing yourself to sleep
with your fingers in your ears?
I have questions that should
not be asked or answered,
rhetorical and theoretical.
That way madness lies
and all the signs point there.
You say it might never happen,
encourage me to ride it out,
say it’ll be alright. But it isn’t.
Blue skies and seas, clean sand,
cannot make up for what ten years
of stress has done. Broken tongue
and broken mind, disappearing ink.
Rupert Loydell is a Senior Lecturer at Falmouth University, a poet, editor and artist. He has run Stride magazine since 1982 and is a contributing editor to International Times. Shearsman recently published Dear Mary, a book of poems about art, colour, annunication and Italy.
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