Things that I am afraid of

Is our fear of the Dark really a fear of that unknown disease lurking within, the unforeseen malevolent attacker, the unguessable moment of our own death?

What wakes you in the night in a cold sweat? Are adult fears just extensions of those childhood worries – is that a vampire, a witch, a lecherous neighbour? Does that translate into - will I amount to anything? Will I be found deficient in social graces and die alone? Will I achieve a significant something? Will I ever escape the daily threat of poverty?

Studying our human fears displays the underbelly of society, which most of us prefer remains hidden. And yet within the nugget of what torments us most is a core that hints at our best qualities – kindness to overcome fears, gentility in the face of man’s inhumanity, optimism that our best will be good enough if we believe it to be so.

Just a thought. Aren't we all supposed to face our own fears?

From womb to room

After they exit the parasitical inhabitance of your body, they take up residence upstairs. At night you think about them, in a way that is not possible when they are awake; demanding, provoking, embellishing your own existence with extraneous de-railing thoughts and feelings.

They are.... CHILDREN.

Progeny you have spawned, often started from a moments inattention to detail, like that pill, that condom, that retraction you meant to make... Now expanding the global domination of the planet by raucous humanity, they define your every waking moment differently - no longer a solo adventurer tip-toeing a fragile way. Instead, your family spread around you like wanton proof of illicit urges you didn't curb. This seething mass of growing flesh mutates its six arms, three heads, three mouths into three angelic expressions of delight unconfined. Who would not wish to share in the anarchy of irrepressible glee that is a pillowfight fuelled by late night rations of jammy toast?

Beware. Thats how they get you.

Legoland
The freshly beaten ragrug shucks up from her mini trainers.

Light from the tall window
illuminates sides of yellow bricks, red squares, green cubes
on the cobbled base board.
She places toys that don’t fit
- a horse, lopsided Tigger, a lions head with open jaws
his plastic orange chin resting on the purely rational board -
using her three years of experience.

The outsize bricks would hurt my hand.
It’s insistence on exact longitudes and latitudes would irk.
But in my garden
I would revel in unmatched colours
and sprouting tessellations of Gaudiesque proportions
that bloom forever unwatered.

I peer through her shielded eyes
- from optic nerve along neural pathways to the brain where I must be refused entry -
with my eyes, some thirty nine summers older
my hands craggy beside her vitality of thigh, her buoyancy of cheek
her darkly penetrating gaze under fringe.

Cats can’t do lego, as she removes the tower from a pit of fur,
but I can.

July 2006 with Tabitha