It’s too early to go anywhere, 4 am and its my birthday.

Reading Shuntaro Tanikawa has made me smile and my eyes sting.

He smooths me.

But for sure my birthday is not for me, it is for the person who bore me.

A time to thank her  and my dad and all my ancestors for conspiring

to bring me forth. To thank them for setting me on my journey.

 

53 years counted.

 

My stomach boils in the porridge I have just eaten. Too early to digest.

I drink more luke warm water, but the bubbling remains.

 

I  feel so old and frail when my back goes out of joint,

when my hips seize up again, when I walk again like a duck.

 

To be woken by pain in my pelvis and my groin,  is no worse or better

than to arise to the trill of my alarm clock, or to the plaintive calls of the gulls

on the roof.  It is just another categorising thought another blurred sorting out

In the randomness of life.

 

And yet it feels much much worse than that.

 

I drink more pre-boiled water and ask it to tell me the names of

the other people it has passed through.

 

If I laid a book at your table  and if  it comprised entirely

of untouched, unblemished paper, would  that give you

enough space to pause and ponder the  inexpressible.

 

Or would you dismiss this as a gimmick?

I have a book upstairs whose cover is made of rough tree bark,

whose pages are finely sliced cork. Each page exposes the uniqueness of grain

and organic blemish of that cork cut, that’s all.

 

I can sit and read these pages and become content.

I can feel touched in the touching of their wonder within.

And yet

When I am tired the very same book dissolves into jus another

sales persons clever gimmick.

 

I  am tired and I do need to need to stop.

To stop and  sink into the growing light.

To let go into the spaciousness

of

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

no-thing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

in

 

 

 

 

 

particular.