Ready, not so steady, go.
EIGHT more sleeps.
Sleeps? Not with these butterflies igniting a nerve highway to a burning adrenaline rush.
Life’s blood. It throbs.
The scales are unsteady. Heaven or hell?
You balance on the dream of typing in 20kg of words on paper while occasionally rising to blink at the Aegean.
It almost forgets to nudge the shores of Lesbos, so reluctant is it in its summer stupour.
You swat away a fly. It nestles on your hat.
The words were scribbled and crafted on all sorts of bits and pieces of whatever that responded to the scratch of a pen.
They represent more than 40 years of your life.
There are some stories, complete and incomplete. There are lots of other words, one after the other.
Two boxes of this stuff are on their way to Eressos. In your suitcase, the one that goes in the hold, you put four A4 packets full of the most exquisite love letters to you, mind you, and poem-notes you wrote or scrawled on the impulse of haste.
In bleaker, more drunken moments, words lurch into the dark to light the way.
The outpourings of a blind boozer, the pitiful squeaks of sad sorrow, fumbling for freedom.
You travel, not only to relocate your physical body.
You travel to grow, to learn. More and more.
About yourself.
The long love. The love of self.
You say goodbye. Dislodge. Eject.
There is a lot of casting off and throwing away.
Your carapace of complacency, it melts to fuel movement.
You go from Johannesburg to Eressos.
You open your eyes. But your heart is locked.
It’s scary. Travelling promises nothing.
Travelling promises everything.
it also has beginning and an end.
Butterflies. They flutter.
Tickle and taunt.
Your stomach stutters, in a flap
Anticipation bleeds from pulsing cells
Panting
Your heart flounders.
It thunders, roars, locked in its cage.
(ends)