The Commute & Ways to Love by Megan J Riedl
The Commute
Before the sun is even up
When home is just a dark cave
To sneak out of
We go to work
We make each other sick
Sniffling and snuffling
Too close to strangers
Morning breath
But we're all in the same boat
Making ourselves sick
We go to work or else
And in the afternoon
the stress and bother
Comes home with us
Along those parallel tracks
A red pearl necklace
Snakes its way west
Glimmering like the setting sun
Still imprinted behind our eyelids
As we curl into bed
A little less ourselves
We say we won't go tomorrow
But we set our alarms all the same
Ways To Love
I was talking to my sister about love.
She said she couldn’t understand me.
She said we were like two different balls of wool.
She was wound so neatly,
So tightly bound, for safety.
The loose ends tucked right into the centre.
She could never be unraveled.
And I was like a mess of thrums.
One part of me stitched into my lover’s too-heavy doona,
One part of me caught on that random hook-up’s jacket.
Another part still tied around my ex-husband’s thumb.
And I thought
Damn,
I keep trying NSA but I’m all strings,
I leave a trail,
A Hansel-Gretel path to my inconvenient truth.
How else do you find your way home to yourself
After you’ve prised someone else’s heart out of your chest
And crushed it?
How else do I know where I don’t want to go back to?
I was talking to my friend about love.
He said he was lonely.
He said he just wanted someone to love him unconditionally,
And I thought
Damn,
That sounds dangerous.
Your head in the sand like a climate change denier.
You keep sewing seeds knowing full well there’ll be no rain,
But you tell everyone there’ll be rain
Until you believe it.
You carry on loving someone
Even when they don’t deserve it.
And I thought,
Damn,
Where's Al Gore when you need him
With no-strings-attached and unconditional on each end of a spectrum graphic
In a TEDtalk entitled ‘Ways To Love’.
Hard-science facts about how much love sucks
But how good are boundaries.
And I thought
Damn,
Maybe I’ll just die alone
Executive Producers
Elliot Cameron
Sue White
Daniel Henson
Karolina Ristevski
