Stuck in the Moment

Someone once said, be in the moment otherwise you will miss your life.

I don’t know about that.

Once I was stuck in the moment.

It was like being stuck in a lift.

I was going nowhere.

Not even up and down.

There was no way out.

No alarm button to press.

No side passages to explore like in a labyrinth.

I was stuck. In the moment.

That moment when at three in the morning

the phone shrieked at us

from the hallway.

I could hear the old Minotaur lurching down the tunnels

of my brain.

I tried not to panic.

Tried smoking a cigarette

Humming a tune

Studying a fly on the wall

Studying me

Reciting my nine times tables

the alphabet back to front —

do you know how difficult that is? —

And then suddenly SNAP

I was out of it.

I don’t know how long I was in the moment.

But I did wonder if I’d ever

Get out and join

The flow of life again.

Tower Haiku

trapped in this box

frightened as a fox

staring at the cops

Bars

They gave me a number to phone

And when I phoned that number —

When I eventually got through —

They gave me two more numbers

With even longer waiting times,

 

But they all said the same thing,

tone deaf to reason and compassion,

the Shylocks of bureaucracy.

 

Whichever way you turned

You got the same answer.

They had it all sewn up.

You were already in prison

Behind bars intransigent as iron.

 

• photo by Damir Spanic on Unsplash