I

There is a bowl on the shelf, chipped

at the rim where my thumb finds

its resting place each morning,

and I have stopped apologising

for the chip, stopped seeing

it as a failure worth throwing away.

Breakfast tastes no different

for the imperfection.

 

II

We are taught to sand ourselves smooth,

to lessen the grain of who we are,

as if asymmetry were deviant,

as if the gnarled places in us

did not hold the strongest wood.

But I am learning the grace

of the odd, the beauty

of mended things that do not hide

their flaws.

I am learning to read

the text of weathered surfaces,

and the poem written in rust.

 

III

What if contentment lives

in the partly unravelled,

in the precarious thread that pulls

but does not sever?

What if peace is not the still pond

but the ripple acknowledging

its own unique becoming and dissolving,

both at once, neither tragedy

nor triumph but simply

the shape water takes

when a little disturbed?

 

IV

I have been so many failed versions

of someone else’s perfect dreams.

Now I practise the art

of the off-centre, the slightly askew,

the proud strangeness of this being,

with this body and its creaks

and ill-shape from age,

of this mind with its dense fog

and sudden clearings.

The odd is not opposite to the beautiful.

The transient is not lesser than

the long-lasting.

 

V

There is an weird plant growing in a pot

by my back door, green with

strange leaves,

not much other colour, unremarkable,

and I have stopped waiting

for something grander to arrive,

perhaps an explosion of art,

for it stays as it is-itself,

and like me,

it’s stopped rehearsing for a show

more dazzling than its own.

Here, in the worn groove

of ordinary days,

as I eat my breakfast from

the chipped bowl,

in the impermanent light

just before dawn,

I find myself, finding myself

enough.

 

27/11/2025