I Explained To My Children

I explained to my children
as they were broaching adolescence
not that a feral interlude was upon them,
in which they would inexorably want and do
wayward things like Max on his wild island,
but that new information was incoming,
a destabilising glut,
and that all the charming self-possession
of late childhood - the completeness in herself
of an eleven-year-old sat with a reading book –
would be put in jeopardy
most unfairly
by the newly-necessitated
building out and knocking-through.

—–

I doubt it helped. I wasn’t satisfied
myself. Doesn’t the thing that looms up
wallowingly in one’s bedroom need a better name?
Mystery-blisters erupt; there is simply too much
dread for the world to contain it.
I started taking odd routes home from school
to loosen the grip of habit, or setting off
into the countryside to get just lost enough.
Mystery! I wanted to be maddeningly
intimate with it. I wanted to know what it
wanted with me - which may not have been much.

—–

And it still happens, in later life, that
sometimes you want to give the ceiling-high
pile of books a sharp kick at the base,
or for the rug to gulp you down into
a textured netherworld, house of the sackcloth
spirits who drily pick apart and weave
their fetishes in tucked-away dimensions.
Imagine thinking that the world’s a plain
assortment of objects laid out on a tray
to be enumerated. Aren’t we strange,
inside?

—–

Hard not to picture the amygdala
as an alert spider, a twitchy web-developer,
slipping down the wet sides of a bathtub
(you feel you could, but actually cannot,
crawl out of your own skin).
Alert thresholds are tunable, it turns out.
The ears ring with the after-song of sirens.
Calm settles. It may even be your own.