Breast Diaries 4

Why is she going for counselling?
Anger
Grief
Moving on
Permission to let it go
Waiting for the clog to drop
Waiting for a meltdown.
To freefall
To turn herself inside out.
And then will she stop being afraid?

She have a hole in me that she has obsessively and compulsively filled with chocolate, alcohol, smoking, God, working, making my life so full she can’t think, food, keep fit, dancing, dieting, running, writing, making art, not in that order and some consecutively and some at the same time.

She is gurning and grinding and consuming life like a great cement mixer.

Stop being afraid? No that plague rat is her friend.
Like an old sock in the basket, she has been turned and turned again.
Theseus has visited her and tied his red string around her little finger, there will be no free-falling.
Chemically induced menopause is sizzling her softly but melting is for butter in a pan.
That clog has been dropped down a shaft, it is not ever going to hit the coal face.
Letting go – not her style she is a gripper, a hanger on and mussel on a rope.
Moving on? It is all locked away, in her box which also contains child birth, divorce, loss and cancer.
Grief is a black boot drawn in a black book, lost in a damp mouldering cellar.
As for anger, it is her prime motivator in all things, it’s the fire that gnaws, ember red.
It is her helper, her creativity, it keeps her doing, fighting, raring to go.
I Don't think she needs that counselling after all  
not today.



images by Frances Norton


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