Don’t Hold your Breath 

    Two small gnomes camped last night, one in each of my lungs. All night long they played their squeeze-box, wheeze-box concertinas, never quite in unison. Sometimes they stamped their feet and my body rattled with their dance. Their wild night music caught in my throat and I coughed unmusical songs that spluttered and choked, while I lay awake counting sheep and window panes and struggling with my future and my past.

    An east wind rattled my window whistling a sad song as it herded flocks of stars from one constellation to another. Wind and stars followed the westering moon’s slim finger nail as it scratched at the sky. The planets danced to the rhythms of the accordion music playing in my chest, and the sky’s planetarium folded and unfolded its poker hands of silent cards marked with my fate.

    Black jack, bright jack, one-eyed jack: what do I care when fate’s cards tumble onto the table and I count their spots. Forty card baraja, fifty-two card standard, Tarot, or any of the many others, what do we believe and why? I pluck runes from a velvet bag and shuffle and cut multi-colored cards. I survey the skies, cast dice and I Ching pennies … The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings, I mutter, not believing a word of what I say.

    I look in the mirror and see myself as I am. Grey, ageing, diminished, withering … yet proud of who I am and where I’ve been. Upright, in spite of all my failures. Proud because of all the small things that I have achieved. Who am I? What have I done? Where am I going? The eternal questions thrust at the shadows in my silvered morning mirror. Silent, it grins grimly back.