I stay awake all night thinking about holes. `I sleep all day dreaming of holes.

A hole is a thing I recognise myself in. I write myself out of a hole.

A hole the place I bury my self-regard. I found the seed of my self-regard at the bottom of a hole.

A hole is something unrequited. Longing is the dark love of a hole.

A hole can be so full of emotional quicksand that is eats whatever enters. At the reservoir, that man-made hole, I swim myself into a long rope then throw it to my drowning-self.

Holes are the things we leave undone. Stars are tiny holes in the fabric of God’s skirt.

Holes, the children I didn’t have. They made an incision in my flesh to pull the child from the hole.

A hole is what I find when I try to locate who I am. I am falling, falling, falling through a hole.

A hole preceded me, and a hole will follow. If there is no holding, there is only falling.

Holes enhance the cheese. The cheese enhances the moon.

Holes appear in my memory. I bury them quickly only to fall back into them. A nightmare is a repeating hole.

Holes of omission and exaggeration – our family stories. The fabric tore when we pulled at the hole.

Ageing is a hole that grows deeper and wider with each passing year, until we’re left with a 6ft hole.

I buried my first love in a hole of immaturity and indecision. I buried my inexperience in a hole for hungry beetles.

Moths ate holes in my favourite woollen jumper. Moths’ flight, holy innocent.

Moths made a lunar landscape of the Persian rug. Moths chewed a secret map into my flying carpet.

A tic made a hole in my flesh. The leech and march fly too. A tic, a leech and a march fly walked into a pub …

The navel is a decommissioned hole with the entrance sealed shut. My baby’s belly button is the first mark on his body. It reads ‘I’.

At the school formal a blonde boy with braces kissed me and said, ‘I don’t just like girls for their holes you know’. Like a ferret hunting for rabbits, the fingers on my fourteen-year-old boyfriend’s hand, were only interested in holes.

You show me your hole, I’ll show you mine. Three of us children played doctors with pencils and Kirsten’s holes.

Holes are remarkable when symmetrical. Morse code is a series of audible holes.

Some holes are deliberate, some accidental. … 4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire …

I dig a hole to plant the seed. I was planted in the garden of my mother, pulled from a hole when sufficiently ripened. My mother liked slashing and weeding. I was the garden bed from which she flowered.

Thought can dig you into to one, but also pull you out. Thought, like a needle, pulls inspiration through holes.

Rumination is the drill that carves a hole in your attention. Meditation is an empty hole waiting for rain.

Mental illness, a sinkhole that collapses the centre of your life. Sinkholes appear when they change the natural course of a river.

Anger can be a hole or a bridge. Don’t let the sun go down on the hole of an argument.

Love is full of holes that require mending. A stitch in time saves nine.

Holes allow light and air in, they are opportunities. Failure is the humblest hole.

Creatures take up residence in holes, vie for the best one. If you’re quiet, a rainbow lorikeet will appear from a hole.

Minuscule mites live on our faces. They bury their mouths into us. Sip our nutrients through little holes of non-consensual opportunism. Legislate for consenting holes!

The body is full of necessary holes. Without them there would be no permeable interface between the body and this world. Holes provide succour, birth, expulsion, breath, union.
We have forgotten the necessity of holes. Plants and people breathe each other in and out of existence through holes. Holes are the communion through which we live.

There are holes for drainage, holes for upwellings. Volcanic explosions cause holes.

A drop of water repeated makes a cavern. Song is a stream of air, modulated by controlled contractions of membrane around the hole of the larynx. Songs tend to the deepest holes.

Pain is a hole that swallows me daily. I try to dig my way out with a battered spoon of will. But I just make the hole deeper. Illness is a portal to another universe. We know this place but we prefer to build rockets to the moon.

Pain is a hole that becomes shallower with an infill of soft breath.

Sometimes I imagine my mother might have preferred a hole to bury her treasures in than a daughter. I was the clay she made, but so hard to dig. She excavated so much of my substance that I caved into her will. Much of my life has been erosion control. When my mother left she tore out the garden of my being. Eden became a wasteland, a forever hole.

Life is the vast and wondrous hole I am currently privy to. I turn and turn to look, and it is everywhere. When a hole appears, the future begins.

An unborn chick must birth itself from the egg by first breaking the shell.

For this purpose, it has an egg tooth, a sharp point on the beak for making a hole.

When the business of hatching is done, the egg tooth is lost.

Published: Confessions Vol 9: Constellations. Boston USA 2019