Not Yet

I went to a meeting on Saturday
and shared that I am haunted
by the sight of little blonde girls
who look just like my own.

Everyone knows I haven’t seen them
for two and a half years,
and while I’m well aware
that some might think
there are dark reasons for my exile
I’m almost past caring,
but not quite.

We’re entitled to our views,
however skewed by our own truths,
or battered by our own lies,
and there are those
I know
whose words sizzle
with the oily gas of a lawgiver,
whose eyes tell me
that they seek
only to weaken my spirit.

So I shared my torment,
of how my eyes glaze over
and then slowly close
when I hear the word ‘dada’
in a shop
on a street
in a café,
and how when I see little girls
with blonde wavy hair,
my thoughts are cast
to wonderment
as I hallucinate
the image of my girls.

And as I stare
into pseudo-reincarnation,
the world reels me back in
as I imagine people
watching me
as I trip over beauty,
caged in longing.

Sometimes,
when I can’t see the faces
of the little blonde girls,
I stay in the zone
comforted by anonymity,
teasing myself that it’s them,
that they’ll turn around
and see me
and hold up their hands
and run towards me
and then I’ll see a car coming
and I won’t want to hurt their feelings
by screaming to them
to stay right where they are,
but in my mind
I always scream.

Apparently I’m grieving,
but I still wake up
and wonder what I’ll do
when the world goes mad
and I don’t even know
where my girls are
so I can rescue them
from the living dead.

This morning
I read ‘Twenty Four Hours A Day’
and it said that
‘Except ye become as little children,
ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven’
and I realised that I never tired
of being a child when I was one,
but now I’m an adult
I can safely say
I’m sick to the back teeth
of being a grown-up,
not least because I trust absolutely
nobody at all.

And as I search for my children
on high streets and through windows
I know that I must first set free
the one I locked away
behind conscience
through necessity
all those years ago,
the one I held within
to protect me from my own,
and that I must also let go
my little blonde girls
if they are to return to me.

Once I have become desperate enough
and prayed they know I love them
and cried in front of useless movies
I will know what I must do.

As much as I miss my children,
I know I will never find them
until I release the little blond boy
in me.

After the meeting
I told the guy next to me,
who assures me
his children love my book,
that I offer free school readings
and that I could visit their school
if they liked,
but he looked straight through me.

I didn’t wait for the bent smiles of pity
and the hearty pats of bonhomie.

I just can’t let them go yet.

Soon, I hope,
but not yet.