You’ll have noticed

You gave me a book about trauma for my birthday

I am older now

Here on the edge of really old

Not just the old age ascribed to me by younger people of an age I once thought old when I was young

I am older now

My memory arcs back

An iron bridge over the raging waters

The last six minutes gone

Over sixty years between the steep banks

That carried so much down

To a dark ocean where stinging, tearing creatures of my own manufacture churn the surface.

Back across the rusting bridge THE DAY awaits

Snippets and visions have followed me forward; jig-saw pieces in my pocket fingered absentmindedly

And more often now intrude

Back across the rusting bridge THE DAY awaits

Any surrender to the temptation to focus

Will reassemble the picture

The events experienced

The events imagined

The circle of hurt

The unlooked for lives lived thereafter

There the snippets go again and I am stopped

I have no time for this

I must cook the pizzas

You set my life and the damage I have done in context for my birthday