Telomeres
The Tips of Time
Listen Here- Author Read
At the ends of our chromosomes are protective caps called telomeres. Telomeres prevent our DNA from fraying. Every time a cell divides, telomeres get shorter. These are the biological clocks of aging. When they get too short…
Lungs swallow colour til I can taste the air in eyes that grow wide
with the marrow of memory.
They all stare back at me.
Faces dripping down the window of a storm.
Gaping mouths and frantic eyes
blending into a pelting stream of images.
Clawing at the glass to come inside.
We become what we attend to.
The tips of our questions the telomeres of existence.
Tying things together or unraveling the same.
Shortening or lengthening the truncation of time.
Does life happen from the ground up? It’s own seed.
Does it cover over top of what came before? A collective.
Like a painting. Covering its tracks.
Is life more like language? Writing us from left to right.
Creating us from right to left. Circling us.
Life never asks to be explained. Just to be listened too. If only to give it a voice. The old man lays down and awaits the light of dawn. Not bound by the trappings of a darkness. Living raw at its edges. The same way a blessing is not a prayer.
My eyes lick the bitten corners of silence and fire. Tongue clinging to the slippery tips of time. Something whispers. Here am I.
Telomeres
The plot thickens.
The world we are born into
doesn’t stay the same.
We must pass through the ghosts.
Giving our self away
to touch the tips of what ties us together.
Fingers cut a hole in time.
To unravel.
Every crack. Trace. Scratch.
Every curve. Taste. Sound.
The questions search.
The bites. Hard. Soft. The scars.
The breaks.
Caressing. Clawing. Cradling.
To any other hands this flesh
would merely be skin.
A cover.
To any other lips. The words.
Mere scraps of language.
Endings.
Yet in between we begin
in the middle - we bend,
expanding and contracting,
stretching and contorting.
To blend
myth into moment,
like an envelope
held up to the bones of light.
Swallowed naked by the broken wind.
A tongue’s wet line
looking into the world
as it looks back out.
Tasting the salt in the creases
of gaping pages
that slowly sip me
in the wine of an opening book.
© Jamie Millard
Here- Am I. Here - Am I.
Our community of words grieves the loss of Joshua Bond. I want to say just how beautiful Josh’s presence was in his poetry. In his creativity. In his Being. To have never met somebody yet to feel the tips of their kindness and compassion is a special gift. In gratitude to Josh whose presence here made it easier for me to be vulnerable, I can only say - Thank You. You made and still make it better.
To Veronika Bond I send the sweetness of what carries these words into the light. Please know just how inspiring you are and how your energy and resonance ripples into that spirit of oneness where we all live into these questions.
Into the now of here.
May March bring the sun to the North and may she quietly dazzle into all of her colours in the South. Thanks for Being -Here. A small community of writers whose presence continues to help me to grow into the poetry of Being.
Lots of Love,
Jamie
It’s a beautiful crisp fresh morning here in Scotland. Recently I’ve been pondering on the workings of the universe, the connectedness of things. How things both run up and run down at the same time. At some point they must pass each other. A beautiful and timely piece, Jamie. Beautiful in depth and in tribute.
How things come Together
How things peel away as they come together.
The picking up the putting away
I’m having a moment.
I may be having a month.
Dear Poet, your beautiful and tender tribute to Josh is so deeply felt. The way you write about telomeres … what frays, what holds, what lengthens … feels like a soul-meditation on the very threads that bind us to one another. Josh wrote with such kindness and truthfulness, and your own words gather the traces of that so gently.
As I read, I felt La Loba stirring … the old bone collector who honours what’s been lost by singing it back into being. For there’s something of Her in the way you hold memory, allow the questions to breathe, and keep the stories alive. Your tribute to Josh carries that same power … an act of deep remembering that keeps his voice moving among us.
Your meditation on telomeres, those “tips of time” land differently now. It reminds me that the questions we live into ... the ones Josh lived into himself ... are part of what keeps the fabric from unravelling. His work, his Being, touched so many of us, and that doesn’t disappear. It stretches on, quietly, in the ways poetry allows.
I’m thinking, too, of Veronika … of the love and courage it takes to hold someone’s words, someone’s truth, through both the light and the unravelling. The tenderness of Josh’s presence is inseparable from hers. Your offering here today, under this radiant Full Moon, honours them both.
And your own offering makes me want to honour Josh through the work he loved … through the fierce, unfiltered truth that poetry can hold. Thank you so much, Jamie, for opening that door again, and for reminding us how words can carry each other forward, even after someone has gone.
I'm reaching for my pen as an old, old poem calls for the light today. 🙏💖✒️💫