No One There At All

Nor is there: anyone there at all. When you open the curtains, in the dead of summer still-night, not only are there no bodies but there is no movement or light there, in the undark hours of lightly blacked day we have in this polar part of the world. No-one stands there with open arms, to say that you exist and they love you for it; or that they need you; or that they want you - in every single case, without exception, you are just a body. Your body is needed, or it is wanted, or it is not: you are frankly a hindrance to their getting the best use out of your torso & bollocks. Who are they? They are the sexual paymasters, the bodies you want: they are the dreams you once had and they are the shame: the endless sense of unfulfilled desire, the outpouring of life. You thought that actually life was about how much you could drain yourself into someone else and you were wrong: it was about how much you could stop yourself hanging off the strongest oak bough you could find. What a good bough it was, 200 years old, it had seen, even absorbed many like you, and carried such hearts in its still veins. Only you were too weak for the oak. You would have brought it crashing to the sodden autumn forest floor. Indeed, you thought that I would never really be, having left you in the middle of a young estate. Actually there you grow, stronger, thicker, with ever more space and presence, ever more command over light, while I just fade into your branches, then roots. I always want to be roots. Then I am a quadratic. Two roots, both rational. Or even irrational. I don't really mind, as my carbon leaches into the acid soil.