Kate Reilly James

It’s #WorldPoetryDay and who doesn’t love an opportunity to pour their heart out on the page?

I Cannot Sit

Soaring, I love you and want to consume your every fibre, soak it up like sun rays on Sundays on the water front. Swallows darting overhead, carefree and playful.

Rock bottom it’ll never last, two worlds collide but the gravitational pull loses momentum and we drift apart on different trajectories, narrated by that professor off the telly.

Opportunities rise like Spring flowers through the dirt. A sense of worth and renewed vigour to achieve and thrive. Feeling good, confident, ready.

The cracks appear and they’re not filled with roses but sharp stabbing pains of self doubt and anxiety. What do I contribute? Why does it even matter?

My legacy grows, fed on knowledge from the four corners of the earth, pixelated, vibrant, loud. Morning, noon and night, plugged in, switched on.

As it’s eyes turn square and it no longer responds to human touch, I dream a preview of the 2D future to come. What use are hands if all we grasp is a cold, plastic controller and not each other?

I instil love, compassion and creativity yet do not practise what I preach. Empty words, spoken with tenacity and vibrancy, but mean nothing. Sure, yes, of course. Nothing.

I have performed miracles. I have changed, adapted and shifted to accommodate life, death and everything in between. I have lived.

The shell and the burden I carry is scarred and heavy. Scrawled with my stories and minute details, my contours, shapes and angles are not what I see in the mirror. I see hurried conversations, chances missed and regrets.

I am a legacy. Repeating history, following suit. If three is the magic number, I want 4. If 4, then I want five.

It is time to sit. To take a seat and bathe in all that went before me. It will suffocate and choke. It will pour deep into my lungs and draw every last breath from my chest.

If I hold on, just hold on, grip the seat, I will make it to the shore and I will sit and look out at a new horizon, full of promise, integrity and meaning.

‘Washed up’ they’ll say. Cleansed, I will correct them.