Discovering your shape
December 4, 2010 at 6:18AM Discovering your shape
You know you are not spiralled
as a snail is spiralled, do not add coil
on deliberate coil with every painful season.
You think, but are not sure, that cuboid
is incorrect, though there are corners,
darkly musty, best left alone.
You may be round,
forever rolling forward and back,
unable to find a surface on which
to settle - sometimes you twitch
into a dimple, like relativity’s sun
rolls into the dip of space-time, your own gravity
pulling the surroundings. There you are
incapable of escape until the next tilt
flicks you free and sends you, slap
by ricochet, off into the hazy future.
Mostly you fear you are a plane,
unable to stand without leaning on another,
almost invisible if found edge on.
This poem won second prize in Sheffield Hallam University's Words on the Wall competition and can be seen gracing the wall of the cafe in the Adsetts Centre. It has also been published in the journal Obsessed with Pipework (No 52).
Reader Comments (6)
Rosemary, this reaches me in a timely time. Thank you.
Me too. Yes.
Thank you! I know I haven't been around much, but I was very pleased to see this as an editor's feature. Been a bit swamped with stuff recently, but I'll try to post a bit more.
Rosemary
Not to worry, m'dear; it seems that we're all of us swamped with our assorted endeavours at this juncture. Not my best sentence ever. One thing I've allus desired is for none of us to feel pressure to post here. This place doesn't have to move at the speed of the internet!
And I really really do appreciate Discovering your shape.
This is tender and tart. Lovely. D