Mistress Pieces

In every moment, words arrive – written on the flaps of cigarette packets, receipts from endless bottles of wine, walls of the house, along the curve of my thigh, in the corners of torn photographs – whatever comes to hand. They are my passion, my relentless lover, controlling space and time, demanding to be present. I call them my ‘mistress pieces’.

First Movement:  Crazing – the body breaks

Ask of me no sequence, a pleasing chronology, a beginning, middle and end. It is not a story. As I have no shape, no watch to mark the direction of time but only these pieces, drawing on past and present at will, a maelstrom – I invite you to release conventional anchors, hold to nothing, move with or against the words, stop searching for clues. Experience the chaos.

1.⁠ ⁠Broken

He kicks open the bedroom door. It’s two twenty in the morning. Our four-year old daughter screams in my arms. Half-naked and afraid, I craze. The body breaks first, limbs float free. I watch a hand roll under the bed, a foot tap out its anxiety at the end of a severed leg. I must protect my child, but how when bone and muscle have lost their nerve? 

The mind follows. No longer in control of the body, neurons turn in on themselves, fight, compete, race around circuits in search of an identity. If I could find my head, it would contain the conflict, but it’s lying in a corner, eyes averted. 

Bare of form and thought, the spirit hovers in shocked exposure, before evaporating. Poof. I was there, now I’m gone. His boot has left the door and me unhinged. We swing loose, fallen from the frame, removed of purpose.

The Unholy Trinity of body, mind, and soul disconnect. Three becomes my marker. A metronomic tick beneath the surface, surfacing in triads of people and objects, reminding me to find the threads, weave them together, find wholeness.