Spaces.

Looking for something else, my partner unearthed an old clipboard of mine with an A4 writing pad and several loose sheets of paper clipped to it. It was one of those things that gets used and then one day it’s put aside, and it slips out of consciousness and doesn’t turn-up again for many years.

The sheets of paper attached to the clipboard all bore my handwriting, some in ink, some in pencil, all of it poetry or rather bits of proto-poetry looking for a poem to inhabit. I read through what I had written some time before, when exactly isn’t recorded although one of the sheets of paper did have the date 25.8.88 written at the top so I’m guessing that it’s all over thirty years old…

Anyway, reading through what I’d written, I thought to myself that some of it wasn’t too bad, almost good – though I say so myself.

So, I picked one, spread across two sheets and put it together in the way that I thought that maybe I would have thirty odd years ago.

I’ve corrected some spelling mistakes that I’d made at the time, I’d originally used “prehaps” instead of “perhaps” – and as I typed that just now it was automatically corrected! How things have moved on, eh? I’ve also provided an alternative ending, was I asking a question or making a statement?

From what I’d written it wasn’t immediately clear to me. Then again, given that the last four lines both scan and rhyme, maybe they aren’t even meant to be there at the end of that poem, perhaps they were meant for another, I’ll have to read everything through again and see if there is somewhere else that they might fit into.

Spaces.

There are spaces,
where we don’t touch.
Areas between us,
uninhabited. Unrequited?
Designed that way I think.
Perhaps not.
Spaces between our wants,
like questions with no prepositions,
no predilections.

There are spaces between us,
where we don’t touch.
Areas just inside us,
that never come to much.
Uninvited?
Spaces between our words.
Unspoken areas in search of reaction.
Unrequited devotion,
wasted emotion.

Spaces between where we don’t touch.
Unspoken verses,
Is it too much?

We can’t touch the spaces.
Unbroken verses,
between us.

Is there always hope in reason?
Sometimes it’s not enough.
Should I blame it on the season?
Relinquish it, be tough?

Alternate ending.

Is there always hope in reason?
Sometimes it’s not enough.
Should I blame it on the season?
Relinquish it, be tough.