Familiar Feeling

I walked from Fitzroy to Ascot Vale to pick up my bike today. Half way there the wind blustered and the skies opened up.

I love times like that, especially when there is nowhere to run; when you have to experience it and there is nothing to do but smile. For some reason, I feel akin to that kind of weather. I love the feeling that your skin is being bitten by the rain and ripped off by the wind and it turns pink and begins to itch in the chill.

Once, around the time when I came out, I was visiting some beach near Adelaide with my uncle ands my cousin. As the storm approached I was taken by a mood and ran off. They all thought I was rushing off to kill myself (cheery) but I was just enthralled by the enormity of it all. It was a powerful moment in my life and I felt much the same today.

This is what I wrote back then in 1996.

The Walk
This place is strange, it throbs with indifferent power.
Underfoot the rounded pebbles raised by the storm,
Passive in the brooding world.
The waters snatch and seethe to pull the pebbles home.
The sky now inked with ever deeper greys.

And into this I come, into cold, into rain, into power.
Forces pulling towards freedom, to think, to feel, to belong.
The rain comes in marble sheets across the wind and feeds to sea,
I feel the bite against my naked arms and the pulling of my soul.
I can be a part of this now.

I can feel now the hope of a future,
I dare to dream of happiness.
I feel truth in the wind that rushes through me, the pounding in my mind.
Everywhere the roar of existence, the destiny that beckons me.

I run, everything around me demands it,
The pebbles grind underfoot just as they have before,
Thunder erupts as the waves retreat across their silence.
The wind bellows whispers in my ears,
I am no longer defined by the skin that the rain has peeled away.

I run into life as it has been granted me.

It is nice to feel that optimism and opportunity again.

Tags: poetry, recovery, coming out