Butterfly

On By Richmond Road7 Comments

I have heard the word ‘butterfly’ used as a descriptor for people who struggle to make strong emotional connections – people who float from one romance to another.

I think it has something to do with the image of a butterfly going from one beautiful flower to another without ever landing – hovering over beauty as one might over a black hole – aware of the danger of being consumed by gravity.

I certainly don’t interpret the term negatively. I love butterflies.

Anyway …. Cyranny wrote a piece with her usual insight and delicacy but instead of focussing on the content of her post I became, instead, obsessed with the image that accompanied it. I wrote her a poem. It doesn’t mean much.

This is it.

***

I don’t really know you
But I recognise your style
I don’t really like you
And I’m not flattered by your smile
Don’t think that I am looking
When I see you everyday
Please don’t think that I am listening
If I hear you, anyway

I’ve never really talked to you
I’ve not heard a word you’ve said
Please don’t think that thoughts about you
Interrupt my time in bed
Don’t imagine that I think of you
When taking off my jeans
Don’t think that I can’t sleep at night
Or that you interrupt my dreams

But what is this thing about you?
What is this strange appeal?
I’ve never really touched you
So I don’t know how you feel
But you’re feeling free and floating
Flying faultless, free from sin
There’s a butterfly within you
And it’s painted on your skin

***

The truth is that I really do like Cyranny. We all do.

Insomnia

On By Richmond Road15 Comments

Anyone who knows me well will confirm that insomnia is a non-stop affliction that I deal with so much that I even forget that I am dealing with it (I don’t deal with it well, for the record). But it’s not nice. Or healthy.

Something arrived in my inbox today, quite coincidentally, making mention of the issue via Maria Popova at Brainpickings and detailing a technique that Patti Smith uses to cope with it. I have mixed feelings about Ms Smith. She is a very creative and talented individual, to be sure, but I find her to be what I can only describe as ‘attractively repulsive’. I don’t even know what I really mean by that.

Be that as it may, I did like the little story she uses to get to sleep. I am willing to give it a go …..

“I imagine myself a sailor in the time of the great whaling ships on a lengthy voyage. We are in the center of a violent storm and the captain’s inexperienced son catches his foot in a length of rope and is pulled overboard. Unflinching, the sailor leaps into the storm-tossed seas after him. The men throw down massive lengths of rope and the lad is brought to deck in the arms of the sailor and carried below.

The sailor is summoned to the quarterdeck and led to the captain’s inner sanctum. Wet and shivering, he eyes his surroundings with wonder. The captain, in a rare show of emotion, embraces him. You saved my son’s life, he says. Tell me how I can best serve you. The sailor, embarrassed, asks for a full measure of rum for each of the men. Done, says the captain, but what of you? After some hesitation the sailor answers, I have slept on galley floors, bunks and hammocks since a lad, it has been a long time since I have slept in a proper bed.

The captain, moved by the sailor’s humility, offers his own bed, then retires to the room of his son. The sailor stands before the captain’s empty bed. It has down pillows and a light coverlet. There is a massive leather trunk at its foot. He crosses himself, blows out the candles and succumbs to a rare and wholly enveloping sleep.”

This is the game I sometimes play when sleep is elusive, one that evolved from reading Melville, that takes me from the mat on the bathroom floor to my own bed, affording grateful slumber.”

I doubt that it will help. But it will be something to think about whilst I’m not sleeping