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Steven Sivell   Poems  
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Steven Sivell 2h
Too Much Not Enough
He’s appalled that aliens can learn all about humanity from one night of television.
He’s fascinated that bees appear and try to land on the chainsaw.
She cannot bear to be on the wrong side of the towel.
That flat cotton is nowhere near as comforting as the loop-pile.
She sometimes wakes with a pre-war hum in her head.
Then waltzes down the stairs like a valve radio.
She likes to change her mind mid-season.
Her turning circle is as wide as an oil tanker.
She looks as if she’s counting how many rifles are trained on her.
She worries that her future will fit into a plastic bag.
She made him promise not to take the course which’ll turn you into the master of your own destiny.
Far better to become the fool of your own foot-falls.
To have holes in your pockets where the things of value can drain away.
She would like to reset broken bones.
At one time he’d wanted to weld oil rigs to the ocean floor
Why couldn’t they stop being in this show about themselves?
Why couldn’t they stop pretending to be who they actually were?
She gulped coffee as if they were having a flying-squad breakfast.
Pyramids of meaning followed her through the door.
She wondered if it was possible to be complicit with time and space.
The world makes her want to close her eyes and wake up somewhere else.
She dreams of actors overacting.
He dreams of footballers falling, claiming damage to million-dollar ankles.
These were the open floodgates of the way the world talks to itself.
The sick-up that is this twenty-first century’s fox.
These days just walking the dog will take you way behind enemy lines.
A while back organised crime would put you in prison.
Now it is a lifetime achievement.
Even if you’ve been piling bodies into steps and climbing to the top.
You will have set a shining example.
There'll be a pardon in the post.
A mention in the honours.
She says she feels like those free-divers who go deep on one breath.
They reach the sea bed and find it no different from the surface.
He swore he believed in the magic of the world.
But then said it was called money.
For years he’d pulled nights in the dogma factories.
Engineering permissions.
Legalising absolutions.
He was a fat cat in the city who would only take a call if it was from himself.
Then all of a sudden he lost a lot of weight.
Now he keeps wicket for the county.
She says she was born upside-down and back-to-front.
She says this explains why she has cart wheeled through her life.
All that hope they had in the joint account.
Non-deductable.
Too much not enough.
Now all she wanted was to live in a walled garden in a walled city.
She wanted to lie down in the autumn grass and wait for ripe pears to fall.
He came home early and found her in the corner holding on to both sides.
She was sliding slowly to the floor.
He asked what part of her was hurting?
She said the 1970’s or maybe the 1980’s.
He took her in his arms.
Lifted her back to her feet.
They had taken all the world could give.
They had screamed and shouted and Morris-danced at the foot of the maypole.
They had carried their children around until they became way too heavy.
They wanted to wage a kind of medal-less war on the world by doing the most unlikely thing they could think of.  
They wanted to stand at ease from the life they were living.
They wanted to let themselves be.
To let all the Gods love them.
The wanted to surrender.  
They wanted to shine.
They watched poplar trees harping to the west, long-bows losing gold-leaf.
Let’s not be greedy.
Let’s take just enough, leave the surplus.
Avoid manifestos.
Avoid Venn diagrams.
Return to the fork in the road and go the other way this time.
Become the soil in which love grows.
Hold everyone else's hand.

Steven Sivell (C)

Written by
Steven Sivell
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