The Friday Poem: ‘Middle’ by Devon Webb

A new poem by two-time Wellington Slam Champion Devon Webb.

Middle

I thought it was a beginning, but it felt more like an ending, or not an ending cos I have nowhere to go but forward but more a messy collapsing middle where both beginning & ending feel so far away, & you really would like one or the other. At what point does a poem have a middle, become the incomplete centre of itself? In the depths & processes of its own creation? I am in the depths & processes of my own creation. The universe has yanked me out of bed & displaced me on the cricked-neck edge of an unfamiliar couch. I have metaphorically rolled off the edge of said couch like enjambment like an unfinished sentence like

I pick up my undone form & reform into something the same but better & new or it would be new if the past didn’t cling to my heels & the future shift ever so slightly backwards every time I advance like a lover scared of love it looks away & coyly shoots me a tentative gaze like an invitation to keep coming, I keep coming. I have grazed knees from the gutter. I have dust allergies. I haven’t done my laundry – tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow

tomorrow. All the tomorrows are lined up in this chaotic linearity of alternating sanities. Today, I am crazy, the next, I return to myself, I cannot say I come home to myself cos home is a formless non-entity unless I myself am my home am I a formless non-entity? I definitely have substance of some kind I just don’t know what high it’s gonna be today, am I gonna be rolling or tripping or losing my mind is that intoxication or just neurodivergence I don’t know anymore but I’m certainly self-medicating something

I drag myself towards the memory of what it’s like to not be lost. Remember me? Stability? Remember staying still, when you didn’t have to keep leaving places? All the goodbyes have drowned me. I cough them up each time, wishing they were a greeting instead. Wishing I was saying hello. Wishing I’d arrived. Wishing this unknown didn’t swallow me alive. Looking back, as if future’s somewhere behind me. Cos it’s the only thing I can see. The only dream with tangibility, the only other thing. I cling to my flawed history, looking around desperately for something to return me – back to where I know, to a place where I can keep going, to some vague familiarity cos I feel like I’ve been ending, I’ve been ending in the middle middle middle middle middle till both ends of the spectrum seem lost, till the time all passes with such a high cost, but maybe when the present’s passed everything will stop & at the end of something somewhere I’ll find myself back in a

beginning.

The Friday Poem is edited by Chris Tse. Submissions are currently closed.