Your Favourite Life
Poetry
Your first life is the simplest.
If you are lucky.
You are loved, nurtured, sheltered
Riding a wave of possibility and potential.
These moments can be captured, frozen in time.
In celluloid or lines of code
pictures transmuted into pixelated ghosts
Smiles and friends, a snapshot of the past.
This life is easy.
If you are lucky.
Your next life is complicated.
Words like ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’
Take on new dimensions and triggers.
Dormant desires and insecurities
that can overwhelm.
And somehow all the love and praise
That once soothed you, cannot kill the doubt.
Not-quite-child, not-quite-adult,
You cling to a life-raft of your own making
filled with the flotsam of existence.
You toy with new possibilities.
Mistakes are made, people get hurt,
But not that badly.
You hope.
You will always remember this life.
In your next life, you can be anything, and anyone.
Words like ‘lovers’ and ‘adventure’ are your default
To make sense of a world that feels exciting
But sometimes sad,
and always difficult.
You make new memories, new companions
More digital phantoms to haunt you.
People get hurt, sometimes you hurt them.
‘I didn’t mean it’,
‘I will always love you’.
The more they say it, the less sense it makes.
You take your first few steps.
To step away from your past.
Delete.
Start again.
Your next life will be better, you decide.
In a new place, a new time,
Put on a fresh face,
a new mask.
You exorcise those spectres of your past.
Deleted. Delete. Gone.
An absence of guilt feels refreshing now,
You are ready to take on the world,
holding tightly to its shoulders.
Even when it continues to shake you off.
This will be your favourite life,
You are sure of it now.
Someone hurt you, but now you’re back
You don’t owe the world anything.
you don’t owe anyone.
You’re going to do it your way.
Your digital life is now a graveyard
Of friends, lovers, could-have-been’s
And never-were’s.
ghosts in the machine.
You have worn so many masks now
That you cannot find your face.
You are frightened that if you find it again
It will be someone that you no longer recognise.
Someone you do not love.
You have forgotten how many lives came before.
Can a life be a life
if it is being observed?
New purpose and optimism
Are your best friends now.
I am strong. I am the master of my destiny
And the phantoms and ghouls of lives past
Sit in a cemetery of my own making.
This is my favourite life.
The one I will always remember.
Delete.
Start again.
