reaching out

I realise I have not written
in a while.
Fingers have hopped, skimmed, limped over the keyboard:
creative and mundane emails;
but I have not written
a shape on a sheet,
dipped into worlds of words
randomly spread in my head,
and coming from body
and interface with beyond.

I am frayed and murky,
a boggy pond, where is the edge?
There is no edge.

How are we us? The I?
Knowing only my own way of being,
my own centre of the universe,
there is no way out of it.
No side step I can make to look in at it,
to make sense of it.
There is no way out,
that’s the way it is until I’m dead.
In one breath I’ll have to give it
all up
and not be.
Sometimes that makes me roar with life.
Sometimes I am solidified with the cold horror of it.
Sometimes it makes me shrug my shoulders in a teenager way: ‘whadever’.

I take my extra large, bargain price, barbeque protection gloves off
slowly
and still slowly
reach my hand out.

Even though it is not wanted by the one who tempted me to reach out a year ago, even though the surface smarts with the burning it has received. What else can I do?