Today is a Choose Day, but choose carefully because

I suspect some might think

reading my poems

will enable you to know me – that if I choose

to engage you with the aerial ebb and flow of gregarious starlings in murmuration,

synchronous across stark headland, or secluded glades perfumed

with fecund mossy-ness, as backdrop to the sweaty fervour of lovers intertwined

in hot-mess – you would think me some slightly sex-starved romantic.

 

If I choose to rant all political about the world’s injustices – railed

to empathise with women’s continuing struggle to achieve parity

of opportunity, or anguished about seas of plastic waste,

chemical impact on our food chain and the planet’s likely ecological demise –

that you would fast-file me under green social-consciousness feminist – and perhaps

I am all of these

or none

or much more?

Perhaps, I am just taking my imagination for a walk,

not writing overtly about me at all?

 

Maybe, today, I choose to wield pen or tap keys,

using life experience and creativity as human WD40,

to lubricate all the thoughts and ideas spinning continuously

in my head like a demented washing machine with a faulty on/off switch –

to sink subtle hooks into my words

to pierce your skin

prod your conscience

make you think?

 

But it’s a Choose Day –

so, you also get to choose – what you make of these words.

But please remember, assumptions that underestimate, or pigeonhole,

from what you perceive on the page may say more about you, than me,

could be dangerous

could suck you in

soften you up

before taking you unawares when the words acquire sharp incisors and rending claws.

Because some days I choose to write of dark, soul-devouring matters,

and sometimes – I bite.