Car Park

Car Park

There are aliens out there.
Out there in the real world
of the car park.
Pushing pushchairs full of baby,
talking,
laughing,
connecting fragmented words
into living.

I do not now understand
or remember
how to be part of all that.
I.
I, who sit trapped
and time-wasting
in a blue box full of black plastic,
waiting.

Behind the slanted grey glass
all the alien world
can see me.
See me weeping
slow salty snail-track tears.
But they choose to walk on past,
chattering inanity,
blindly ignorant and ignoring,
living their alien lives
amongst the usual noise notes
of the everyday.

I.
I, sitting here, am no-one
and nothing to them,
invisible and alone
in an inescapable place
whose edges are frayed and skewed;
sandpaper scraped
against the insane inside
shapes of my brain.
There is no peace in here,
but only scratchy copper synapses
failing to fire.

Today, poetry is the best way for me to make sense of the world and how it feels to me right now. Sometimes stringing words together in some sort of ordered way is the only rope I can cling onto to keep me from disappearing entirely. It is at these times that I am particularly thankful to be a writer, to have this creative tool at my disposal. Whether or not what I write at these times makes sense to others is another thing entirely...but I'd like to think it does.