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Teetering

Earlier in the week Sally posted a video on Facebook of the result of my repair job on her beloved (but frankly disturbing) dancing Rudolf. It is now 19 years old and after so many years of frantic gyrations some of its plastic bits inside had broken off and its wiring had frayed. Against my better judgement and with no real knowledge of what I was doing I set about it with a screwdriver, modeling knife, soldering iron double sided sticky tape and (inevitably) gaffer tape. And the result was the posted video of restored reindeer dancing across the dining table and throwing itself off the edge at me, much to many people's amusement.

The irony was that the next day I felt that I too was about to teeter off the edge... and it wasn't funny. 

I have my own version of perished plastic and frayed wires... but as of yet I have found no permanent fix... no means of soldering the connections and hoovering out the errant fragments that keep jamming up the works. But I do have the psychological equivalents of gaffer tape for running repairs. That includes, as I said in preface to my personal contribution to my #AdventPoetry videos this week,  playing with words in poems and monologues. And today and tomorrow I'm posting another pair of poems produced in what was a particularly bleak day, which, as always included the fear that it wouldn't just be one day. 

Tomorrow's is more explicitly in tune with the season of advent but today's reflects my mindset when creating them. I nearly introduced it by saying that it isn't an advent poem... but the more I read it the less I am sure about that... because there is an advent quality to it... the unrealised eschatology of advent and the need to live in the present whilst readying ourselves for the future, whatever form that future will take. 


Teetering,
On the threshold of possibility or peril;
The crepuscular time
Before a bright new dawn,
Or the final nightfall;
The aching void
Of being present
In the present,
Rather than either seeking solace
In the supersaturated cine films
and posed black and white stills
of nostalgia;
Or rehearsing the unrealistic,
Or at least unrealised,
Dreams and dread
Of an unsculpted future.

Shalom
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