What Comes After? -- Tracey Morrison

That search most difficult – the getting to know
Someone, collecting the pieces of
Them, finding shelves on which
To house them, energy with which to dust them off.

Only to wipe the shelf clean, sweeping the collected, not
Always collectable or desired fragments aside –
Until you’ve got what you started with
A bare slate –
The surface of the human soul
That is.
That world unknown –
Whose boundaries are unmarked
Unseen.

Sex is not intimacy
Lust is not love
And possibly none of the above
Will produce the territory we seek
So what are we all doing then?

It has been said that to read is to know that we are not alone.
Slessor thought poetry a pleasure out of hell;
Lorde the skeletal architecture of our lives.
Whiteley professed that mid creation we should see
Something before unseen –
And that life lives
The key to oneself, and the beginning
Of difficult pleasures.

Source: Unknown