Brooke Forbes

There’s a beauty in banality, they say. 

A shared experience, 

A definition of fem,

A labour of love and loss, simultaneously. 

In conversations with a religious outcast,

I’m taught of the luring message of repetition in monasteries,

Of how they attempt to cure your mind of all wanderings and rebellions,

Cure you of quirks of nature,

And oppress onto you instead the regiment of bare routines, 

A mindless ritual,

Sans the love of anything – 

Never-lone moonlight.  

It’s something my friend has cast away,

After the horrors of having this doctrine systemically implanted on their daily life,

After experiencing the indoctrination of shame on trauma,

And a fracturing that pontificates regression into oneself – 

like a wild animal stuck in bared wire,

like a sea creatures stuck in its shell. 

So how can I, quite knowingly, adopt a doctrine of order and banal repetition?

How can you stand still with time running so fast?

How can you dedicate space in your life created for chaos and beauty for something so regimented? 

How did I misplace the ethereal gene of cleanliness with an unrelenting urge for adventure?

How can this chore go away without doing it?

There’s answer, they say, in a measured approach. 

However;

There’s a lunar eclipse in Europe tonight,

A passing of one solar entity over another. 

And I’m wondering,

When to do the washing.