My name is of no importance

as I sit here quietly breathing in dust from the beaten up

old chair you provided me with.

My clothes as crumpled as my un-digestable heart

in this crowded room, where you sit

comfortably and with an air of seething malice wait

for me

to admit that

all you need to know is that I am a poetry addict

and that it has been that way ever thus.

 

The intervention should be hailed a success

for I have gone at least a couple of hours since I

last put my pencil upon a scrap of loose paper with a half formed,

half baked insane idea in which to prise open a memory.

You perhaps the catalyst in the shrouded past,

you the insanity that resides in my head, screaming

to be let out and allowed to breath, gulping incessantly

at the rancid air I have protected you from and always wished

to expose you to with the harshness of letting you wander round

Three Mile Island or Hiroshima after the accident and the dropped sun

without the aid of a single Geiger counter.

 

In amongst this crowd of people I long to stay,

not the ones that point the finger of ineptitude

but the ones that nurture and criticise with proper evaluation,

not based on inadequacies, on the disagreeable actions of bitter rage

but on wanting more than we are supposed to cope with.

I am an addict, I have an addiction and perhaps an obsessive

need to remain infatuated  with the filling of white, empty space,

not with things that being clumsy can break,

but with the written word, a unremitting, restless craving

with the perpetual inevitable.

 

Ian D. Hall 2015