Words and Lines

All Roads Lead

(The artist to his old love)

by Tris Kerslake

There are days when choice of distance and of place seems proper, when mundane objects are accepted for the likely messages they are, when time ticks by the little clocks and I am almost here.

And there are days when effort coats my every turn with leaden scales and nothing moves me from the fog or from the suffocated, when apathy and gin are both excuses that conform.

And there are times, when the crossroad where I left you burns with wasted wanting, blind directions in my deeper mind, where journeys never taken, never savoured strike me speechless.

And with the choice of distance, when your unchanged voice still calls me home, the petty hours are weightless and proper things inane. I count the time in terms of hollow years and your absence.

And with the nights, when I am ineffective and fiercely incomplete, I press unmeasured ruins in my art, my love, my breath is offered on a canvas fit for sightless eyes, discover that which moved me has not changed.

And now each day I am alone beside the road where you may walk and see the new as old, the old as never lost, a world apart from you in only distance, merest miles of transit from the place we had and I would have again.