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A Poem a Day

446 poems April 2020 – March 2021

By Vickie Johnstone

A Poem a Day A collection of 446 poems by Vickie Johnstone. Copyright © Vickie Johnstone, July 2021. All rights reserved.

Smashwords Edition.

Smashwords Licence Statement: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

It would be a breach of copyright to reproduce any of these poems on paper or online without my permission.

Cover illustration: iStockphoto/chuwy.

My other poetry books are Travelling Light (free), Kaleidoscope, Mind-spinning Rainbows and Life’s Rhythms (haiku).

Books by the author

3 Heads & a Tail The Sea Inside (Cerulean Songs, book 1) I Dream of Zombies (book 1) Haven (I Dream of Zombies, book 2)

The Kiwi Series Kiwi in Cat City (book 1) Kiwi and the Missing Magic (book 2) Kiwi and the Living Nightmare (book 3) Kiwi and the Serpent of the Isle (book 4) Kiwi in the Realm of Ra (book 5) Kiwi’s Christmas Tail (book 6)

Smarts & Dewdrop Mysteries Day of the Living Pizza (book 1) Day of the Pesky Shadow (book 2)

Poetry

Kaleidoscope Life’s Rhythms (haiku) Travelling Light Mind-spinning Rainbows A Poem a Day

Others The Gage Project charitable children’s anthology, published by Inknbeans Press A Very Christmas Zombie anthology, published by ATZ

Dedication

For my mum.

Introduction

In April 2020, I decided to try to write a poem a day on my blog, Vixie’s Stories, following prompts on NaPoWriMo.net. The following month I kept going. And I’m still trying to keep it up. This collection was written between April 2020 and March 2021.

Thank you for choosing this book.

April 2020

A numbers game

With a seven the dice is thrown; eleven? It’s cheating me.

Six grins its lucky spots at me; nine tries to take what’s mine.

Three slides things into the diagonal; four comes calling me square.

Eight fights seeking out infinity; five

gives me a helping hand.

Two is restless for its eternal soulmate; then one, for this is who I am.

This is the prompt for the April 1 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net): Write a self-portrait poem in which you make a specific action a metaphor for your life – one that typically isn’t done all that often, or only in specific circumstances. For example, bowling or shopping for socks or shovelling snow or teaching a child to tie its shoes.

Black wings

Notes flying, morning breaks in cadences, sweeping, soft, uplifted, carried on breezes. the red fox bobs his nose up midst long grasses, content to stay hidden as long as his rouse lasts. Another hunts the smallest morsel while he sunbathes. A blackbird winks, orange beak in stark contrast, adding his voice to the layers of birdsong lifting. I pull back the net curtain to see the egg-yellow sun, feel its glance warming my skin, waking my eyes

From a sleep of years. Where we turn, it all turns; where we stop, everything falters to a standstill. We are in-waiting, loitering between exit signs. In corners we spy the ghosts of our distant past, dark and brooding, seeking to rob us of our gifts, rendering us incomplete, incapable of free action. The blackbird reminds us otherwise, the Watcher, sending us more than his song in the emptiest times.

This is the prompt for the April 2 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net): Our (optional) prompt for the asks you to write a poem about a specific place – a particular house or store or school or office. Try to incorporate concrete details, like street names, distances, the types of trees or flowers, the colour of the shirts on the people you there. Little details like this can really help the reader imagine not only the place, but its mood and can take your poem to weird and wild places.

Below sound

Fully fed, the red fox fled the yard of the house, away from the dark man with hands tightly clenched, where the yellow, sown field withered in the heat, its crop almost delivered; it differed to him not.

Below, the gizzard of a lizard rippled at the sight of a swooping buzzard, turned in mid-flight, plunging from the sky to lunge at a mouse startled, his plan revealed, wingspan blocking the light of the sun.

The man’s face set to stone, grew old and weary, and the beat of his feet, without socks, did not balk from the damp grass, rough soil or sharp rock. Grounded, roots spread, he sank in towards the dead.

Long buried, they almost whispered back to him. A bee buzzed its glee to see myriad flowers blown, grown by the man’s spouse, speared on their stalks.

The man had carried her tight-wrapped in a neat sheet, clocking it all, walking his mind away from each shock. Bones in a box. Chalk marked her grave. Now free. She lay sleeping, almost rocking in her bed six feet down.

This is the prompt for the April 3 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net): Make a list of 10 words. For each word, use Rhymezone to identify 2-4 similarsounding or rhyming words. Once you’ve assembled your complete list, work on writing a poem using your new word bank. You don’t have to use every word, but try to play as much with sound as possible, repeating sounds and echoing back to others using your rhyming and similar words.

Paws

Her almond eyes meet mine, Lighting up the dark, seeing into me, through me.

Long whiskers twitch, picking up strange incantations or movements on the wind.

I swear she smiles. Do animals smile?

She comes to tell me I am blameless, her final goodbye was not my fault.

These are the thoughts I read, whether said or not. She nods. Our connection is unbroken.

I miss her already, knowing it’s the last, her only visit. And so she turns, her message delivered in dreamtime.

And I wake.

This is the prompt for the April 4 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net): Write a poem based on an image from a dream. We don’t always our dreams, but images or ideas from them often stick with us for a very long time.

The stone cow of Surley

The lowing cow’s heart is stone, cutting and cold. A scold snorting her approval for another’s ruin. Her glass half-empty, she filled it with black bile, never to drink, but to watch it darken and bubble.

Three on a heath marvelled at her creations.

Over time, the glass cracked in dislike, piece by piece, from edge to edge, until it shattered, pouring its poison in currents to pool around her feet, and she carried it far, like a dog on a leash, seeking any excuse to tease, bitch and bewitch.

The stone cow had nothing else to do.

In her castle she gloried in being her own queen, her friends her subjects, eager not to be cast out. I’ll call her Louise, but that isn’t her name,

I’ll say she lives in Surley, but therein I lie. Does the mirror reflect the spite in her eye?

The postman rapped today with a letter overdue, addressed to a john and smothered in twirls of lilies, perfume sneaking over the edges, stems curling out and all around, offering a safe handshake.

But I have wandered off the point on to paper, where the written word is unclouded by prejudice. I think it might just be a generational balls-up, suffering and loss. Flip them. Dump them. Screw them.

We taste red, hear hot and cold touch, and feel a fox cry. The song dances, curling like a cat in peaceful slumber. Over the hills, the stone cow lows for an audience. C’est la vie. Peut-être.

This is the prompt for the April 5 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net): It’s called the Twenty Little Poetry Projects and was originally developed by Jim Simmerman. The challenge is to use/do all of the following in the same poem. Of course, if you can’t fit all 20 projects into your poem, or a few of them get your

poem going, that is just fine too! -Begin the poem with a metaphor. -Say something specific but utterly preposterous. -Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem. -Use one example of synesthesia (mixing the senses). -Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place. -Change direction or digress from the last thing you said. -Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem. -Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities. -Make the persona or character in the poem do something he or she could not do in “real life.” -Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person. -Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction. -Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective. -Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense. -Use a phrase from a language other than English. -Make a non-human object say or do something human (personification). -Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that “echoes” an image from earlier in the poem.

The hare

Buttoning up my jacket, black as nightshade, I watch the innocent domino-drop in my stride, outnumbered in their fight against the horde. Brown eyes wide, I spy every foolish trip by man, my fluff of a tail concealed beneath my shroud.

Light long fled this place in a glass, sealed jar, myriad creatures twisted into eerie phantasms. My bagpipes play an ode of madness to the fallen, jagged and crazed, a song for the pursued and lost.

The drummer boy sees me coming, carrying my stick of spikes, white dice mounted. Will his throw land lucky? The odds are weighted hard against all of them, yet they play, and always fail, their flesh skewered forever. Mermaids with missing tails circle for the entrails.

The sheer arrogance of man never ceases to amuse me.

Their vanity brags they can beat me, the lowly Hare, walking tall, my furry ears erect, an ode to cuteness. Playing my pipes, I dare the storybooks to rewrite me.

This is the prompt for the April 6 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net): Write a poem from the point of view of one person/animal/thing from Hieronymous Bosch’s famously bizarre triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Whether you take the position of a twelve-legged clam, a narwhal with a cocktail olive speared on its horn, a man using an owl as a pool toy, or a backgammon board being carried through a crowd by a fish wearing a tambourine on its head, I hope that you find the experience deliriously amusing.

Tree

Branches point, stretching bark upwards to be tickled by the waiting sun; dapples of yellow lie in freckles.

The body straightens, this back my rod stabilising me, keeping me from falling into an endless slide I do not need.

Feet stand heavy, sinking downwards, seeking to penetrate the soil beneath but i am still in perfect synchronicity.

My roots spread out like hair, feeling their way – tapered fingers gathering dirt, digging down deeper into this wet earth.

Skulls

Black skull bag glitters neon-green in the night, offering dark a light as you drift off to sleep.

Full moon hangs heavy, a silver cascade lifting the ground upward to meet the sky’s eyes.

Branches swing, creaking, played on by the wind in a rhythmic chorus only audible by the air.

Creeping roots bore down deep into mother earth, shifting senses lower and lower,

to the heart of sound.

A panda’s day off (or Ying Ying gets some)

Today, we finally did it! And on a Monday too – not everyone’s favourite day, but it is for me and you! The day I finally got jiggy with the enigmatic Le Le.

We were introduced back in 2010. Yes, that was 10 years ago. We’re just a little bit slow.

Le Le never showed much interest, preferring to chew bamboo instead. Not to say I don’t, I love it – about 14kg a day, to be precise. Which means I take 38 dumps a day. But Le Le does too – sorry, I mean ladies never pooh.

Maybe all my poohing was her fear, stinking more than the average bear. But I digress. It’s all this bamboo melting my brain. Maybe I just need a nap.

Morning…

Is anybody there? I hope you’re still interested in my tale. It gets more exciting.

So, the keepers have been trying, trying for 10 years to mate us, to get us excited about each other more than bamboo, yams, honey… It was hard. And I never was. They made us watch moving images of giant Pandas mating. And they talked of hiding Viagra in my yams. I’m only stating.

Problem is females ovulate once a year. That’s two or three days in 365. Not much time for me to take action. I was usually asleep and missed it. How was I to tell? As a 12-hour bamboo-munching folivore, I just had no energy for funny stuff. I’d leave my scent and claw the odd tree, but most of the time she didn’t look at me.

Then suddenly everyone just disappeared, no humans or little screaming ones. Most of the keepers didn’t work that day and someone mentioned fear of a v-i-r-u-s?

All I know is we were suddenly alone! Let’s just say all we needed was some privacy, no audience watching our delicate moments (why watch me dumping 38 times daily?). And romance blossomed…

For three minutes. That’s all it took. I hope that was enough – after 10 years! If this lockdown continues, who knows? Maybe we’ll manage it twice!

This is the prompt for the April 7 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net): Today our prompt is another oldie-but-goodie: a poem based on a news article. This is a good opportunity to find some “weird” and poetical news stories for inspiration. I looked for something funny on the BBC News website and found this: ‘Pandas in lockdown mate after 10 years of trying.’ And so, I wrote about pandas…

A poem with a line from Sylvia Plath

White light washes wearing a pink halo, dancing among the stars like a hula girl, without spinning, without dropping.

Clouds engulf her, a fluffy fur boa, comforting and warm. Below, little houses slump, breathing in, snoring out, snug in this chill night.

Orange fox probes bins, seeking throwaways – cast-offs for the outcast. Dressed in his finest coat,

he has a date with fate while I stand agawp at the impeccable moon.

This is the prompt for the April 8 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net): Our prompt for the day asks you to peruse the work of one or more of these twitter bots (for writers) and use a line or two, or a phrase or even a word that stands out to you, as the seed for your poem.

Wastepaper lives

A banana skin adorns the circular rim of my bin, sunshine coat, lemon-squidge nakedness. i pause to wonder where it has been, why I spurned it and left it here to ruin.

Empty moisturiser, an ode to sensitive skin. Sheer sweet wrapper, fruity bit eaten fast. A panty pad stuck upon the curve of the wire in memory of my back and belly’s hot period fire.

Dash of a phone number, bystander of a friend’s last lust. Toilet roll cellophane – proof I salvaged some in Lockdown; who knew the Holy Grail would end up down the loo? Empty box of earplugs, cardboard dented and blue.

Crumpled receipts, all that maths making a fuss, stub of a pencil hiding out in a toothpaste box. On colourful squares, torn plasters tending

scribbles of writing bereft of an ending.

Cotton wool balls and gatherings of dust, hair and spent tissues screwed up and worn. Suspect sock, holed up, with a lost tale no doubt and a pen with no ink, where time just dripped out.

This is the prompt for the April 9 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net): Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a ‘concrete’ poem – a poem in which the lines and words are organised to take a shape that reflects in some way the theme of the poem. Your poem can take a simple shape, like a box or ball, or maybe you’ll have fun trying something more elaborate, like a Christmas tree.

Misogynist

She knows you’re punishing her. It’s the thing you do when the moon turns black and the past trips you up with spectres thin and weary, where the reaper talks in riddles and the stars have lost their eyes.

Hay(na)ku

1

We sleep in pockets of dreams,

wake between stanzas, yawn our dist

departing the platform of fantastic things.

2

Silver stars slumber

under day’s blanket.

Silencing the moon, the sun glares

until nature’s boomerang resurrects the night.

3

We run ragged, chasing our tails

in circles of our own creation,

searching

for answers, but already found.

4

Tree of peridot stones tied down

too early to the Earth plane,

stretches branches up, clenches roots down.

5

Weedy seadragon drifts,

little fins twirling.

Purple neon shimmer, long pipe searching.

Twisting, slow dance betwixt swirling seaweeds.

6

Blackbirds call in the morning – notes

rippling, soaring free on the air.

Red

robin lets loose warbling riposte.

7

Time stalls, flickering, the movie stuck.

Film unravels, stasis, a life unlived.

Actors cast silent have no words.

8

Cat rocks bottom

chasing brown rat,

sniffs it out, delivers crushing blow.

Arranges it neatly, blood pooling gently.

9

Guitar wakes us, wee-eee-eee!

930am! Birds silenced. Zen moment disperses.

Player

halts. Instrument stuck up ass.

This is the prompt for the April 10 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net): Created by the poet Eileen Tabios, the hay(na)ku is a variant on the haiku. A hay(na)ku consists of a three-line stanza, where the first line has one word, the second line has two and the third line has three. You can write just one or chain several together into a longer poem.

The language of flowers

He sent daffodils in the spring light to show his regard, their upturned faces two tones of delicate silken yellow, petals perched on stalks of dark green tied with twine.

Their horns smelt not sweet but of her father’s meadows and the dry, brown earth before the onslaught of rain. the girl returned his favour with water lilies, pureness of heart.

A wooden stile straddled the mid-point of their father’s lands, where the two young people could meet, but it was brief for summer blew the scent of dead leaves across the fields.

Her father died and the farm was sold, her mother tied by a promise to remarry while her widow’s threads were barely two months old, the dismal perfumes of harebell and marigold still fresh upon her.

For the young couple, yellow tulips captured their hopelessness. The distance would prove too great and the girl’s dowry too small,

now the habits of her mother’s new husband poured it all away.

The lad remarried in time to a lady from the neighbouring town. The girl later did the same, burying a husband within three springs, their only child the following summer – a time of blood-red roses.

The woman’s house on the hill came to stink of cypress and mandrake. Thereon she chose to live alone, sharing her life with the fairer sex, her visitors always greeted by a vase of daffodils, faces turned to the sun.

In hope of better luck, she plaited Holly Herb and Enchanter’s Nightshade while curing her heartache with crushed cranberries. so time ed, and gradually she swept the stench of dead leaves off her porch.

In the final quarter of their lives the couple would meet again, he still bearing the hue and marigold of three years in mourning; a wretchedness she understood, having endured its eternal cloak.

Whether they met by enchantment or design, neither would know. This time he would leave a single Gnelder rose on her doorstep. Now the summer of their lives had ed, it held winter’s hope.

This is the prompt for the April 11 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net): The Victorians were particularly ga-ga for giving each other bouquets that were essentially decoder-rings of meaning. For today, I challenge you to write a poem in which one or more flowers take on specific meanings. And if you’re having trouble getting started, why not take a gander at this ‘glossary of flower meanings’ (Language of flowers)?

The meanings of the flowers I chose from Language of flowers: Cranberry – a cure for heartache Daffodils – regard Water lilies – pure of heart Harebell and Marigold – grief Dead leaves – melancholy Gnelder rose – winter/age Yellow tulips – hopelessness Holly Herb and Enchanter’s Nightshade are used for witchcraft/enchantment Cypress – death and mourning Mandrake – horror

Sunday morning

Don’t bring me down, waking me up this early. I can’t hide my irritated frown. Don’t bring me down, your plucky guitar i’d like to drown in a bucket of wine – wow, that’s surly! Don’t bring me down, waking me up this early.

This is the prompt for the April 12 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net): Write a triolet. This is the form: Line 1 Line 2 Line 3 rhymes with 1 Repeat line 1 Line 5 rhymes with 1 Line 6 rhymes with 2 Repeat line 1

Repeat line 2

Mouse Tail

I am the brown scuffling mouse who lives behind the skirting in the kitchen of your house.

I am the one who will eat the savoury samples off your floor at his leisure while you sleep,

Have a little disco dance by night beneath your glittery disco ball – I consider this my rodential right.

I sniff the cupboards for openings, taking care not to leave any droppings or evidence of my midnight feastings.

This is my half-assed apology…

Written in dust upon your table, though you’ll never know of it as i cannot write in Human fable.

Ah, a feline scent scares me – I confess! I have dawdled here far too long and must hide from your furry giantess.

This is the prompt for the April 13 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net): Today, I challenge you to write a non-apology for the things you’ve stolen. Maybe it’s something as small as your sister’s hairbrush (or maybe it was your sister’s boyfriend!).

Sometime tomorrow

When this is over we will meet and it will be as if the weeks did not exist.

It will be like yesterday.

We will fall into place as old friends do, and talk of simple things as we always did.

We’ll be slightly wiser, and place more value on transient things when this is over.

By design

We breathe. we are as we were, melted, dust-like, ever in renewal. With this want we build our own stage, filling it with the rooms of our lives, the players we meet and fine ornaments designed to beautify our lonely walkways. Our cupboards leak the bowels of our lives, our belongings recycled from our wants. we pedal inanely without a destination, only knowing that we breathe. How we breathe.

This is the prompt for the April 14 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net): I challenge you to write a poem that deals with the poems, poets and other people who inspired you to write poems.

Earth song

Music of the desert (so they say), gritty, earthy, bass dripping. Follow the line into the wall of sound; an opening cave lets you stride right in. Cymbals race to carry the drums down deep. It’s a rhythmic incantation jumping back and forth. The richer it goes, the better it rides. From a lack of love it revolves into blues. Baseline humming, drums unfolding, riff rising. Follow the guitar rippling on top of waves. Dance in a blues-rock summer guise spinning around, flaming across this desert of stoner-fuelled ground. Deep honey vocals soar across it all, bringing the story of a woman’s scorn, wandering barefoot in days bereft of music. Slick, spilling, tingling, feeling, notes bouncing, sticks tapping, guitar roaming, drums smashing. Carry me on waves of rock until the end

when all I’ll want is more. If this song was colour it would be midnight purple, rising on waves of watery incandescence rippling out. Pied Piper on an acid trip leads you into the curve, the bend in the song an ocean of notes tingling, I leave my thinking way behind me in the cloakroom. It’s an escapist trip up into the spaces in between; just me and music and nothing else, floating in a dream capsule looking down on this reality, so far below it seems not to exist anymore, and it doesn’t matter; it has no place in the sun; nothing is but the hum, the beat and the dance. Swaying tripping sinking mingling breathing something different in these same days. I’m lifted out above it all.

This is the prompt for the April 15 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net):

I’d like to challenge you to write a poem inspired by your favourite kind of music. Try to recreate the sounds and timing of a pop ballad, a jazz improvisation or a Bach fugue. That could mean incorporating refrains, neologisms and flights of whimsy, or repeating/inverting lines or ideas – whatever your chosen musical form would seem to require! Perhaps a good way to start is to listen to your favourite piece of music and “free-write” for the duration of the piece, and then use what you’ve written as the building blocks for your poem.

This poem has a shape that is impossible to replicate in an ebook. It is viewable on my blog, Vixie’s Stories.

The last word

When the last word is spoken it will have no meaning. There will be no bounce back, no argument, no witty riposte, no empathy, no digression. Only silence.

This is the prompt for the April 16 poem on Writer's Digest: Write a poem about the last blank: the last _.

Tea for typewriter

It’s retro and cool, they say, typing poems on a typewriter. But it’s seen better days, this machine with metal teeth seeking to knacker my fingers with every key i punch down.

Pressing down is the equivalent of a pelvic lunge across the floor. One nail down, nine to go. I feel like a failed bodybuilder, developing only my fingular muscles. Is fingular a word? How singular!

So precise in its imprecision. The letters make little recesses in my pale pink writing paper, like miniature fingerprints,

each stamp individual to the rest, each letter with its own personality.

The I is far too egotistical, I fear, and the O loves to show its surprise, the K likes to kick out now and then, and the D seems to have a double. The F has seen better days; a shame as my battered fingers desire an F word.

Phew, my retro mission is almost over, my too-long letter almost complete... But no! An error in the penultimate line!

Here comes my Tippex hero to the rescue, the lid wedged stuck, but it’ll have to do. I’ll resist a sniff for old time’s sake, and stampede my fingers to the finish.

This is the prompt for the April 17 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net): Our prompt for the day (optional, as always), asks you to move backwards in

time away from such modern contrivances as podcasts. Today, I challenge you to write a poem that features forgotten technology. Maybe it’s a VCR or a rotary phone. A cassette player or even a radio.

Retro kid

I stand here singing my heart out to the back of a nylon hairbrush as my brother tries to capture me on my mother’s flat tape recorder: fingers up, down, stop, pause, up, play.

Dancing in front of the long mirror, humming along to ‘Bend me, shape Me’, it’s my finest moment surely, while the old 45 runs rings around us, needle on the record bouncing in tune.

We try to capture every part of the song as the midday sun calls out to us to head out on our bikes and play. But we need to finish our recording – fame beckons – out there, somewhere!

It’s a world of orangey brown in the 70s, from my mother’s dress to the plastic beakers with white dots perched on kitchen shelves to the shag-pile carpet our cat is splayed on, and summer is never-ending, lasting a year or two.

Our friendly neighbours shake out a green hose like a snake where our two gardens greet. We spin in circles, laughing, leaping the spray, our collie dog barking and stamping his paws as the water cascades in a silvery sundance.

A little life

Light tiptoes in, shy morning greets me with a hello, curled under blankets with a dog-eared book.

This is the quiet time, the great emptying of air, water, earth and tepid fire before the street awakens.

Even the birds haven’t cottoned on yet.

My cup of tea waits steaming. I hug it to my chest, and in these idle moments all is right in my world.

This is the prompt for the April 18 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net): Our optional prompt for the day honours the idea of Saturday (the Saturdays of the soul, perhaps?) by challenging you to write an ode to life’s small pleasures. Perhaps it’s the first sip of your morning coffee. Or finding some money in the pockets of an old jacket. Discovering a bird’s nest in a lilac bush, or just looking up at the sky and watching the clouds go by.

A life in boxes.

Dog-eared, taped up, dusted histories – a waiting chorus line for unpacking.

Items for rediscovery, stories to be reread and outcasts of writing; unfathomable conceits of a youth long dead.

A questionable age of endurance.

Things don’t stick when you’re young. Life’s burns trickle off like water.

Archive of a room

The big gathering begins with a photograph. A bumblebee hovering over pale purple cactuses, their orange horns yearning for his pollen-dusted fuzz.

Rose quartz, blue glass fish, a dog walking his old lady, cat curled in a wooden nap.

Beneath my cup, the cowboy Bill Silhouette rests his guitar against a huge yellow moon, ‘Music city dreaming’.

I reminisce of Nashville lights, its 24/7 rock-blues-country vibe,

settling in at the Station Inn. A blue and white camper van tells me to ‘Go your own way’ and I have, I think, come what may.

Dancing in a yellow sea of notes, girl in a blue dress twirls the stars as two mice giggle, the cat on a scarf hung too far off to pounce.

In a tale of two cushions, the owl Seeks an Eiffel of the Parisian scene, but he is grounded here for life. I wonder what adventure Mr Dahl would write for him?

‘Shine like the sun’ the birds tell me when the dark has sucked out the light and i don’t feel like facing this world.

I take a bee bomb from the closet

to venture into the sun-soaked outside where blackbirds sift the silence, unfurling their song into empty spaces.

And I am back where we started, imagining fuzzy bees when the wildflowers grow.

This is the prompt for the April 19 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net): Write a poem based on a ‘walking archive’. What’s that? Well, it’s when you go on a walk and gather up interesting things – a flower, a strange piece of bark, a rock. This becomes your ‘walking archive’ – the physical instantiation of your walk. If you’re unable to get out of the house (as many of us are), you can wander around your own home and gather knick-knacks, family photos, maybe a strange spice or kitchen gadget you never use. Once you’ve finished your gathering, lay all your materials out on a tray table, like museum specimens. Now, let your group of materials inspire your poem!

Melody of light

‘A little life’ is a poem I wrote for NaPoWriMo, with the light tiptoeing through, a mote.

Yesterday my uncle sent me a song, ‘As the light (tiptoes in)’, taking my words out of their cage, lifting them off the silent page, with a guitar as their companion, personalising it with a revision of his own way of seeing things.

The words were mine and his, the melody his alone, of course, for i don’t have a musical mind and i cannot sing for coffee. Seriously, the cats in your street would all come out to meet

me, and mew along in time.

It seems to me that songs are like little poems for the birds, flying free.

This is the prompt for the April 20 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net): Today, in gratitude for making it to Day 20, our (optional) prompt asks you to write a poem about a handmade or homemade gift that you have received. It could be a friendship bracelet made for you by a grade-school classmate, an itchy sweater from your Aunt Louisa, a plateful of cinnamon toast from your grandmother, a mix-tape from an old girlfriend. And whatever gift you choose, we wish you happy writing!

Sprite

It’s a joke baked and risen. I won’t seek to feel it or poke it back down into the arms of the dark.

I won’t walk to the edge and stare down below it, marvel at misfortune or the baying crowd.

I’ll step away, take a trip into day, a robin my accomplice, dreaming all the way into a sprite’s welcoming, cascading silver blossoms swelling the wildflowers aching to bloom.

I’ll take this age, this trick of time, this unfathomable slide into submergence.

Living library

We wonder when enough is, if we can change anything – our thoughts, our secrets, ourselves.

We see others filed on shelves, dog-eared and dust-moted. shadow beings emptied from the inside out.

Each library card is stamped with a birth, significant borrowers, random dates, late fees, the end game.

Our books lined up look the same, waiting silently for the right reader to find us, feel the lines of our story,

and know.

For Day 21, I didn’t follow the prompt. Sorry!

Holy cow

There’s no cow on the ice, he said, pointing to the angry sky. It will not rain today on high.

I did not trust his line of advice for the cumulonimbus were rolling in, the wind’s rapture building.

I did not want to offend the man, stranger as i was in a strange land, but things seemed to be gathering torment.

A frog in a well doesn’t know the great sea, he said as the trees shook around me. Was I the frog? I suppressed my need to vent.

When I looked up I saw him bent double, chucking with glee at my fear of trouble.

This is the prompt for the April 22 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net): The prompt for the day asks you to engage with different languages and cultures through the lens of proverbs and idiomatic phrases. Many different cultures have proverbs or phrases that have largely the same meaning, but are expressed in different ways. For example, in English we say “his bark is worse than his bite”, but the same idea in Spanish would be stated as “the lion isn’t as fierce as his painting”. Today, I’d like to challenge you to find an idiomatic phrase from a different language or culture and use it as the jumping-off point for your poem.

Meanings of the two phrases I used:

There’s no cow on the ice (Swedish) Meaning: there’s no need to worry

A frog in the well does not know the great sea (Japanese) Meaning: there’s more going on than you know

Here are some other great phrases I found interesting or funny, and almost used:

One afternoon in your next incarnation (Thai) Meaning: it’s never going to happen!

The hen sees the snake’s feet and the snake sees the hen’s boobs (Thai) Meaning: two people know each other’s secrets

Go pick mushrooms! (Latvian) Meaning: go away and leave me alone!

He who doesn’t have a dog hunts with a cat (Portuguese) Meaning: you make the most of what you’ve got

Pay the duck (Portuguese) Meaning: take the blame

The pussy cat will come to the tiny door (Croatian) Meaning: what goes around comes around

Balls of a swan (Croatian) Meaning: impossible

To live with wolves you have to howl like a wolf (Russian) Meaning: to survive in a dangerous situation you need to try to blend in

The cast of the alphabet

The alphabet letters are building blocks we played around with as kids, bright and bold, and well, just blocky, stackable and surprisingly edible.

Now I’m going to let you into a secret: these colourful cubes have personalities!

A is for apple, stood poised like a ladder, B buzzes with life and has big boobage, C is curious, always open to discovery, and D scoffed all the pies drunk in the pub.

The little e looks like Pacman’s baby bro, F is fond of swearing but is holding it back, fun G is always out for a giggle, while H looks uptight like a straight-backed chair.

I is the egotistical one with something to say, J has a groovy style and a tail made for fishing, K is just waiting to give your lazy ass a kick and L is like a giant leg hopping all around.

M is a spidery spider scurrying on the ground, little N is a bridge over the roughest water, O is always surprised by life’s little mysteries, but posh P pokes its nose in your businesses.

Q makes me think of a cuddly panda bear, while R is kind of fiesty and ready to roar. S senses it’s hissing time and so it slithers, T just knows when it’s time to make the tea.

U is a lucky horseshoe or a tunnel to freedom, V has a vendetta so you better watch out! W is squiggly jiggly, made of walking fingers, X can see right through and tell you what’s wrong.

Lastly, Y is full of questions no one can answer,

and Z… Z just wants to sleep forever and ever.

This is the prompt for the April 23 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net): Today’s prompt (optional) asks you to write a poem about a particular letter of the alphabet, or perhaps the letters that form a short word. Doesn’t ‘S’ look sneaky and snakelike? And ‘W’ clearly doesn’t know where it’s going! Think about the shape of the letter(s) and use that as the take-off point for your poem.

Driving me bananas

Hey there, big banana! I like your bendy curves! You’re the easy-going fruit that everyone adores.

Your label says you travelled far, from the lush green of ecuador, home of the scarlet macaw, howler monkey and fierce jaguar.

Now it’s nearly time to undress you and strip off your thick yellow coat to reveal the lemon dress beneath – I could make a banana long boat!

Or should I just eat you straight? Starting with the tip of the crown? I have to hurry up and decide

before you turn a shade of brown.

As a kid I liked you with lashings of custard, thick and very sweet. A favourite among school dinners, I stuffed my face with all I could eat.

“Bananas in pyjamas are coming down the stairs, Bananas in pyjamas are chasing teddy bears!”

This is the song we used to sing. I it vividly – oh, what fun! I picture you bouncing all the way down, your little yellow leg racing your chums.

Mmm, maybe I won’t eat you today. It doesn’t mean you’re not tasty, but you’ve still got three days’ grace and to eat you now might be hasty.

I’ll let you stay on this kitchen hook, watching life go by from your nook.

This is the prompt for the April 24 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net): Today’s prompt is a fairly simple one: to write about a particular fruit – your choice. But I’d like you to describe this fruit as closely as possible… There’s honestly an awful lot you can write about a fruit!

While the world is pressed on pause

Saturday morning I’m propped up in bed, hovering over the news, wondering why i am reading it, this tumble-out of pain, death and suffering. I flick to any images that will make me laugh, hunting them down like a marksman just because I need them to start my day on a positive keel. So I read the things other friends have also read. no one has done much in the outside world; that world is pressed down on pause for now. It has stopped as a clock stops when out of time. Will time begin again? Yes? But when?

We just don’t know. I hear a black crow hawking and visualise him flying free over all our gardens in a way we cannot, ing myriad shy wildlife coming out to explore the places us humans used to go. But I like that: it’s their heritage. We are just the hunter-gatherers of the planet who went

too far in their gathering, leaving a very small space for other creatures to exist, so they’re taking back what’s theirs. What ? Well, we still have our TVs, our phones, our music, our laptops, our gadgets, all the things we created beyond the natural world.

These are the things I’m appreciating more in lockdown: leaves sunlit yellow beneath, bark’s brown rough, the smell of green, flick of a tail feather, whimsy of birds singing, the watery beauty of a grey-blue lake in a perfect frame, baby shoots poking up, branches forming hammocks, leaves taking a dip. This is where I feel reconnected.

On my walks I houses in slumber, no noise rolls out. I can walk an entire street and not see anyone, but the park is still busy. Sitting groups choose to ignore the warnings. Joggers jigger past too close for comfort, coming up your rear like a puffing juggernaut, forcing you into the road to dodge a belting car. some people still walk the pavement two or three abreast and to social distance you’re in that road again.

Make space for someone and you’ll rarely get a thank you. Then there are the cyclists who still cut you up as they hurtle by. Well, thank you, sir – and also to the guy clad in a woolly balaclava, talking loudly on his phone, coming far too close. You could hug him in days gone by. There’s even some traffic jams. Are people still visiting?

So what’s the thing? Do people just not care or is care related to age? It’s the over-40s who offer me space, cross the road, walk around cars in this distancing dance. The under-35s are still coming too near, smiling as they go. Are they misinformed that this is a virus only for the old? Even the swans on the lake get it, swimming along spaced apart – doing social distancing before it became the thing. Same with the honking mallards, the little squeaky coots and anyone on the wing. They give each other room to move.

What’s wrong with humans that we don’t know how to do this? Are we so used to this crowded London that we don’t need to breathe? It’s now so overpopulated that we’re just used to

the big squeeze: travelling the tube stuck up a stranger’s ass, unable to breathe; you’ll never get a seat unless it’s turning midnight. No one can afford to rent a home alone, I could last do that in 2008. We’re forced to share our intimate lives with total strangers, four or six or more chucked in, where landlords write rules like we’re teenagers again: who can stay over, how many times and how much extra that will be. Some people even share a room, taking turns on the bed linen. Here, whole families must exist within the walls of one room.

Is London suffocating? Are its services stretched to breaking? This virus has thrown a spotlight on how cramped we really are. The swans have got it right and we are getting it sorely wrong. The way we live is not quite right; we’ve lost our room to breathe.

This is the prompt for the April 25 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net): Because it’s a Saturday, I have an (optional) prompt for you that takes a little time to work through – although you can certainly take shortcuts through it, if you like! The prompt, which you can find in its entirety here and was developed by the poet and teacher Hoa Nguyen, asks you to use a long poem by James Schuyler as a guidepost for your poem. (You may James Schuyler from our poetry resource for Day 2.) This is a prompt that allows you to sink deeply into another poet’s work, as well as your own.

When I was seven

On the news today they’re talking about Covid-19, article upon article of confusion, death and suffering. I imagine writing a love letter to my younger self, reminding her to live more and worry less. pangs of adulthood and random fears like heights didn’t exist when I was seven and summer blazed.

I dreamt I’d be a ballet dancer, a vet or a painter, a storyteller, fireman or an astronaut even, boldly going where no seven-year-old had gone before. It was the sunshine of our lives. We wandered in an endless daydream through fields of wildflowers, a carpet of purply bluebells, little heads nodding.

My father worked on the railway as a driver and to me that was the best job ever. You got to travel places and see the world – or at least the view from Slade Green to Charing X!

Back then, walls and carriages were emblazoned with graffiti and the words ‘NF’ here and there.

My dad didn’t know how to explain when asked and I was too young to know what racism was. Us kids saw everyone at school as the same with two arms, two legs, a body and a head. What else was there? Neither did I know of politics, poverty or death. They hadn’t come calling yet.

On holiday my nan read me the funny tale of a rubber duck in Toyland who saved the town, and I hoped to do the same if ever a flood came. My favourite animals were cats and dolphins, but our house was like an urban zoo back then so i had far too many favourites to choose from!

My dad bred budgerigars in a garden aviary and they’d eat seed from my outstretched hand, fluttering all around me, their little faces smiling I’d communicate with them all by winking.

I ice cream dripping down my hands, cornets sometimes falling victim to the sand.

There were more birds and dog pooh on the street, long walks to school, blackouts, stretched-out days. The boys once found naked photos in an alleyway and us girls ran away. We’d never heard of porno mags – those things belonged to the realm of adult giants, a serious world we didn’t get and didn’t want to .

In those days we’d be sent to bed for not eating our tea. Friday was fish day with peas and buttered bread. Mondays was egg and chips with Heinz baked beans. Dinner went to town on Sundays with a gigantic roast, my grandparents the guests of honour – my nan with her pies and puds was the dessert queen, a blue-rinse dream.

Those sunshine days of old are made for saving and reviewing, for keeping close to the heart in times like these.

This is the prompt for the April 26 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net):

And now for our prompt (optional, as always). This is one that we’ve used before, but one test of a good prompt is that you can come back to it! For this you will need to fill out, in five minutes or less, the following “Almanac Questionnaire”. Then, use your responses as the basis for a poem.

Green grasses

I wander freely, seeking life’s waking hours

in a small grain, a multi-faceted stone,

orange curve of beak, green poke of grass,

an evergreen stretching, dew drippling,

endless stem spirals, spiky branch waving,

breezy bluebells nodding, wet clod of earth,

sense of rain, a spill of sun,

all in time with no discord.

For Day 27, I didn’t follow the prompt. Sorry!

In sleep’s lure

In sleep’s lure I dream in colour,

weaving corridors of light

where shadows pour cast in a roar,

doors to nowhere, houses without eyes,

voices on the breeze amid spectre trees,

a diamond everglade, a closing room.

I strike my place, lay down my face,

make a pillow for night’s walk.

White noise

Time trickles past three-thirty and all I want to do is sleep.

This hand on my shoulder won’t let me go.

There’s a distant hum.

It isn’t an animal breathing out, but a man-made pulsating thing.

All the birds have nested down, even the sun is slumbering,

the trees have twisted inside, hugging their blankets of foliage.

Restless.

Is this white noise the heartbeat of the world?

It pumps an even, dull tread, walking in and waking silence.

The body reacts to every echo of sound, every magnetic

impulse.

Stuck in eternal night shade, we exist in limbo,

hours and hours and hours.

It cuts a knife through quiet. Hear it breathe in,

Exhale.

This white noise fanning out, until it absorbs everything.

Room within a room

A room within a room, without a face. a series of faint lines lightly charcoal-sketched, shaded with criss-crosses.

Curtains close out the sun, dust balls floating mid-air between labyrinthine books. Papers stretching fingers peek in cobwebbed corners.

We listen out for life: crisp red heat of baking bread, heady sweet grace of tulips, straight-backed figurines who used to dance once.

Blankets hug the bedstead. A whale swims on a towel, speech lost in a dead tongue. Terracotta turtle stares, paws outstretched in aboriginal art.

It leans against a white wall, saying living demands colour.

This is the prompt for the April 28 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net): Today’s (optional) prompt is brought to us by the Emily Dickinson Museum. First, read this brief reminiscence of Emily Dickinson, written by her niece. And here is the prompt the museum suggests: Martha Dickinson Bianchi’s description of her aunt’s cozy room, scented with hyacinths and a crackling stove, warmly recalls the setting decades later. Describe a bedroom from your past in a series of descriptive paragraphs or a poem. It could be your childhood room, your grandmother’s room, a college dormitory or another significant space from your life.

Black cat crossing (for Dev)

Black like nightshade, in panther stealth mode, he strides the garden path to his favourite bush, his pale green eyes lit lanterns in the dark.

Early morning or night are his favourite outings, for if he hears a soul he’s back in like lightning.

Walking one stiff leg from a past encounter, he wags his tail like a dog when in a happy mood.

He likes his nose stroked,

but if you catch him unawares or do it a touch too long, he’ll tell you with a little nip.

This black cat is always starving, making out he’s never been fed. If you walk by his food cupboard, he’ll be there with paws begging, promising to be your best friend if you feed him again and again…

He likes to sit by the window watching the world go by. But if you’d rather watch TV than him he’ll simply block your way.

Seeing things that we cannot, he guards the end of your bed, keeping out ghouls and ghosties and things that go bump in the night.

Head leaning forwards, he nods off in Sphinx pose. Open your eyes, you’ll find him checking you’re okay. When he’s finally dreaming, he snores little hurumphs that soon balloon into elephant-size trumpets.

Bonus poem: Cat bum

My cat’s bum is alive today, it keeps on doing poops. He’s the oochy coochy poopy machine and your winnings come in scoops.

Chance your luck on the fluffy tail, pull it down and watch him go. He’s the oochy coochy poopy machine, making gifts for friend or foe.

This is the prompt for the April 29 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net):

Today, I challenge you to write a paean to the stalwart hero of your household: your pet. Sing high your praises and tell the tale of Kitty McFluffleface’s ascension of Mt. Couch. Let us hear how your intrepid doggo bravely answers the call to adventure whenever the leash jingles.

April (with snakes in her hair)

April breezed in as the seasons turned, carrying a red suitcase in one hand, her face hidden by snake hair curling, dark as her eyes and her humour.

From where she came I never knew. She never said and I never asked. The bruises on her face told a story but it was one I never sought to read.

She treasured a pack of Tarot cards, illustrated with mystical dragons, reading them daily in the mornings sitting cross-legged on my tiled floor.

Loud and brash, her laughter filled the house like water running through, her moods as changeable as the wind,

clashing like her mis-matched clothes.

I knew it was time for her to go before she told me. it was written in the cards, she said, and she had to heed the call. No matter what her heart argued.

It’s been six weeks, my calendar tells me, and summer is drifting into autumn. The trees are changing and the wind is shifting, and i know it’s carrying her back to me.

This is the prompt for the April 30 poem on NaPoWriMo (Napowrimo.net): I’d like to challenge you to write a poem about something that returns. For, just as the swallows come back to Capistrano each year, NaPoWriMo and GloPoWriMo will ride again!

Dropback

In times of quiet we dream a little,

we place action on the backstop and breathe.

Life is too hazardous to face this morning.

Come inside to discover a place within yourself.

Press snooze

Press snooze, don’t stir, linger a while, we can choose.

Leave a review, any comment, look within, but don’t hide.

I sneak a look, I write a word, in this vacuum nothing is heard.

When we wake phoenix style, there’ll be a call

to be true.

Old Bea

She’s just “the crazy old lady” who lives by herself in the oddest-looking hive on Old Folks’ Drive.

A walking skeletal frame, as skinny as its occupant, its windows are wide eyes, dark irises with curtain lashes.

Old Bea has a successful son, but he doesn’t visit anymore. she dotes on two cats instead who purr out love when fed.

Her garden grows by the hour, tended by healing hands. kids say her beanstalk nigh

on reaches the blue sky.

In times of terror

In times of terror skeletons walk – demystified men living uneventfully.

They said things, never did them. just walking lies, reflections of zero.

Recrimination ran high, no one itting anything to the self or each other.

Day became night in their expressions.

This poem is based on something that happened to me as a child. My first pet that I was responsible for by myself was a fish. We went fishing with our nets in a stream and a little stickleback was my first pet. I didn’t realise that overfeeding is just as bad as not feeding. And one day little Pip met his end. Back then we put the fish down the toilet. I’m not sure if I was more upset by that or the fact that he had died. But I felt like it was all my fault. It was like the end of the world!

Funeral for a goldfish

The goldfish splashed out its final journey, an undignified final leap into the toilet bowl.

I watched his orange fins looping the loop, his little black eye saying a final goodbye.

I didn’t tell my dad how I kept feeding him until his tank clouded.

Me, the six-year-old fish killer.

Lockdown

A scream is a small thing but it can billow out, become a massive bellow from the belly up, pulling your insides out.

I had to practice this with hairy spiders and creepy mister fairfox, living at number four when I was barely nine.

A scream is a huge thing if you do it right. It makes hairs stand on end and pierces silences with an order to act.

You had to practice this When The News turned bad, giving out fearful numbers that struck us dumb. No one should have to count bodies.

Three haiku

Meditate your walk – a healthy medication of the earth’s ripe heart.

Birds soar to the sun, breaking this speckled silence, raining down their song.

Take all that you need in this time of reflection, or give what you can.

The whirr (in and out)

It’s waiting as I turn off to sleep, the incessant whirr of the machine, an unplugged living thing

growling, bigger than itself. White noise chuckling, sucking in and out, a chasm of grey pumping

in waves, growing pregnant with repetition. It crawls the walls,

the out closing in, a low vibrating rhythm.

It’s just the sound of the world resetting itself.

The elephants are on the move

The elephants are on the move. They sense the turning, the rise of the oceans, incessant slide of ice.

Our parched earth is thirsty, our dark needs less light, and we are grown too greedy.

The air desires to breathe, clogged by man’s machines. Wildflowers are weeping for our missing bees.

The frogs are ringing the bell, sounding out Earth’s alarm! But no one is listening, except the elephants on the move.

Home from home

I visited my mother today, perched in her nest of pillows.

“I’ve had a good innings, love. I’m ready to go,” she tells me, pointing to her packed bag as if it’s a holiday trip.

“I worry about your father. He could never cope alone. You know that better than I. And you’ll be fine,” she adds. “You’re a big, strong girl.”

Inside, I’m still her little girl.

The clock belts out half-three, signifying it is time for Joan

to come and read to her.

The nurse will replace me and I will leave my mother. I’ll be a stranger once more.

This morning I read that The Forestry Commission is investigating the felling of a bluebell wood in south Devon. About five acres were mysteriously flattened from 22-26 April and residents are asking why. Bluebells are indicators of ancient woodland, often dating back to 1600. And I wrote this.

Death of a bluebell wood

The earth is screaming silently, jaws ripped wide open to reveal a gaping hole.

Where once breathed wood giants and a carpet of living purple where people walked since 1600 is now a stripped battleground of stumps, rocks and waste.

Bees, butterflies and hoverflies float on the breeze with nothing to pollinate in this naked space.

Where once a canopy of leaves shielded us from heavy rain like open umbrella arms, there is an empty vacuum, the moist brown upturned.

These ancient bluebell woodlands have been carved out, centuries of existence bitterly erased.

I look over this wretched land and despair to think who did this. A legacy of one man’s greed? Uprooted, we search for truth amongst red tape and excuses.

The dormice and squirrels, birds, bats and insects have fled, wounded or rendered homeless. Others died in the felling.

Where will the birds be nesting next year? They won’t return. Where will we walk our children?

The trees have taken their own truth, their ancient circles of wisdom, to the grave while nature weeps.

There is a gaping hole here in the landscape. The heart of this Devon valley is breaking and nothing will fill it.

Today I read a news story about artist Rob Arnold sifting plastic from forty bags of litter from his local beach in Cornwall. The items included fifty million plastic beads. He makes artwork to raise awareness of environmental issues. This poem is about that.

Fifty million plastic beads

Fifty million plastic beads crawling in the soft sands. They hitched a lift on the backs of waves and travelled. How far, I do not know.

Fifty million plastic beads could make necklaces for a million faces to wear as a bitter reminder that our seas are suffocating.

Fifty million plastic beads. This junk of man swimming under a clear azure sky is just the tip of the trash heap. Our lives, failing to disintegrate.

Fifty million plastic beads are merely a drip-drop in the ocean compared with what’s already out there, just visiting. Our legacy to the sea.

Word rattle

This isn’t a GAME. It’s her life. So stop PLAYING.

Leave the dice to RATTLE alone, cards to fall.

This stopwatch to STOP measuring a countdown.

Go play elsewhere in this grim urban FOLDING in walls.

You damage for pure fun. To feel BIGGER than your game.

There is no PRIZE to

be won.

Your bitter streak

is SALT coursing through your veins.

Tango in monochrome

He holds out his hand. She takes the leap over the image of herself reflected in still water.

A Tango in mid-air, black skirts twisting, white silk blouse, low-heeled shoes.

Twist back. Black suit, dashing, white shirt, skinny tie, polished black boots.

Moving life mirrored in a motionless puddle.

This black pool of ink conjures a painting in movement, unchronicled and past.

Monochrome ions locked in a moment, sealed on pause. But this isn’t a trap.

The image released becomes more than it is. Myriad moments alive in one photograph.

Breakout blanket

Breaking out of constant rhythm, embarking on a freefall scrawl, can you catch the words tumbling, tripping off into your hands?

Pins and bells and discordant rattles, competing in this spaced-out juncture. Jangle of money – where did it go? Relegated by my silent credit card.

Blankets, birds, pens, notebooks, ornaments, photos, towels, makeup. We are bespoke recordings, jumbled together out of sense.

Forget this greying complacency, discard the ‘follow’ and the ‘must do’. What do you want to do today?

Is the land fallow enough for you?

Cloud catching

A cloud can weigh more than a million pounds.

I read this today, but this fact confounds.

Wouldn’t they just plunge from the sky for us to step on accidentally out walking?

Bam! Just my luck today to be soaked to the skin by a runaway cloud!

It would be a natural hazard far worse than bird shit. Splat! There goes another one.

But enough of theorising.

Clouds don’t fall from the sky because the air below is heavier, so they float.

Which is good to know if you’re walking below. Bam!

There’s a hound in the street

There’s a hound in the street, brown and whimpering. He hasn’t eaten for days and he peers up at you.

There’s a man in the street, shaking, gesticulating. He hasn’t slept in days and he calls out to you.

Did you notice them in your rush to the station?

There’s a girl on the train, sad-eyed and weeping. She hasn’t spoken in days and she won’t look at you.

There’s a boy on the train, wild-eyed and seething. He hasn’t shot up in days and his eyes are pleading.

Did you notice them, or disappear inside yourself?

Ink

I circle patterns on a page. My pen is the dancer. It needs no accomplice.

It brings me a safe solace, a means of sole expression. A balloon, unfettered, free.

Patterns of our own selves, made with our own hands until this pool of ink runs dry.

Man under a bridge

The flood comes beneath noise, creeping beneath anger. Low whistle.

Its rage to nothingness, the great silencing. This stasis of zero.

“I have nothing to eat.”

A hunger so unendurable it screams what it cannot be.

You find him lacking in his nakedness. Disarmed, undignified.

“I have nothing to clothe myself.”

The rattle of a train roar overhead fuels his wretchedness.

This pain spirals, growing as a leaf disintegrating.

“I have nothing.”

Skin pale-drenched, eyes still, lit globes unseeing.

How do you breathe in this stagnant sea? The gut-kick.

“I have.”

Your disgust is real.

We stagger midst the flood, this sapping weight of responsibility.

Have we lost?

“I.”

Sparrows

We have wandered miles, seen no one,

heard no voices, except those of the birds,

watching from rooftops, swaying in treetops,

sensing something is wrong in this off-balance quiet,

as if the ground is breathing and the rain is its tears.

The earth is contemplating a world beyond sound.

Girl on the track

White skirts billowing out like cream curdling, she stands on the track barefoot, spiked by grasses springing up between evenspaced splintering wood.

Fields blow out on every side, a living blanket of wildflowers. Crossing the way to her future, a car sits, the engine silenced, like the heart inside her ribs, still beating but not feeling it.

The driver’s profile waits, smoking a cigar, twisting, playing with it, doesn’t chance a glance her way, knowing she has nowhere to go.

Nimbus clouds gather on high, darkening the sky with anger.

The hot sun scalds in its intensity, lighting the girl’s bare shoulders. She tugs out the broken underwire from her ripped skirt and runs, without a glance back to where the clouds are circling for a fight.

A train is approaching far off, its whistle dying on the wind.

This poem is about the illegal killing of wild birds, mainly in the Mediterranean. In 2015, the number was 25 million.

Wings on the wire

Wings on the wire in tangles, caught by the very things meant to set us free.

We flutter like flies stuck on a silk web or coloured washing flapping in the wind.

Our migration ends here, trapped by man to become sustenance when we die.

Boat

Bobbing in the midst of the endless big blue, we take our journey south in a slumbered freefall of life collected, done.

This streamlined fish of varnished wood cuts unchartered routes in waves. An invisible turquoise line only we can fathom.

Damp rot hugs our bow. This vessel has lived an age and sheds its history now. Starboard, we sight whales curving up into the sky.

We set sail for a freedom unprecedented, unexpected, a slow-burn tribute to our own buoyancy. Our earth anchors pulled up.

Sketch

Charcoal lines take shape amid cross-hatch shading for the parts missing light.

The artist contemplates this still-life composite: Pears in a turquoise bowl.

His imagination drifts to the lure of landscape or the face of a woman smiling as he draws her.

But this bowl is the thing, the task for the morning, and he must find beauty in something so ordinary.

His pencil flicks solitary, seeking an acquaintance with this object without life.

Soon he’ll erase it all, but first he sketches in a pair of eyes to light up this dullness.

Thunder

A crack in the darkening, the nimbus speak in roars rolling to suffocate the skies.

Lightning punches in forks of white, rain cascading, its torrent sweeping dirt scrawls.

This vivid, livid power strike in humid arms. Dank breath, smoking, crashing, water lashing the dust bowl, sparking thunder.

Glide

We glide out on the highs, purple mountainside our guide over rivulets and patchworks of farmland sewn with wildflowers.

We soar as dragons once did in fairytales and folklore, trusting our wings to immortality, steering a distance from the sun.

We float, soar, slide, riding the air without machine or feathers, let loose in the stratus wisps, rising and circling in a freefall.

We choose a life amongst eagles, surfing gusty squalls like waves. our boards are invisible lifelines

carrying us like kites without strings.

Yellow

Ochre egg yolk drips off skinny bread strips, thick flaxen globules, like leaves shedding their green coats.

This bright childish hue, one of the primaries from which all colours birth, flowers in nature.

Daisy discs in florets, gold-dusted meadows, horned daffodils, all waiting the zippy flight of the buff-tailed bumblebee.

As kids we held up tiny

buttercups to our chins for the ultimate test: “Do you like butter?”

Grandmother’s porcelain dish keeps it cold, solid, after the spreading time. with no alarm, streetlights bathe the early morning,

Sharp sting of cut lemons, my acidic wake-up call. Sunflowers turn their heads to chase the new sun

spilling from the sky, cast like golden rain on these bread strips I keep dipping.

Empty

A used-up sensation, faint echo of a mime too alive to be read. Coursing on empty.

Yet nothing was stolen; it was never really there.

An entirety swallowed up, despair inside the hollow bleak rendition of zero. They hang their bitter heads,

Ashamed to feel nothing but numbness, broken down. An ode to misunderstanding, a desire to be understood.

We hear the steel train rolling on its nothing tracks and we quietly query the end of the world.

There, it was never really. Stolen, nothing was yet.

Where we once stood the platform fills up again. Bodies upright like stalks awaiting the final cut.

Ink-black sea

Skeletal rig struts forth on matchstick legs, lines drawn against red sunsets.

The fuel for our engines, our living powerhouse.

Unable to satisfy demand, our world sets itself on fire, using nature to conquer nature.

Slick greed makes the man, sentences other species.

This gelatinous spill fans out, flames igniting the oceans, a leprous intruder in the deep.

Birds flounder in black ink, the full extent unwritten.

This volatile tongue devours, turns the aquatic acidic, a hunger gorging hundreds of nautical miles.

This gift dug out of the Earth, turning up the heat on the dial.

Seaweed

Dark green bubble wrap, sprawling out in the big blue like the hair of mermaids

twisting into tiny recesses. It sunbathes on rock tops, this edible, functional grass.

Scooping sand with slithering fingers, it gathers souvenirs while surfing the waves.

A bobbly carpet drifting out, offering a free ride to shells or barnacles with no true heart.

Bow after rain

A splash of colour in the sky, delicious curve drawn on high. this floating prism calls upon the humidity of rainfall.

Shimmer of yellow, purple, red, keeping hope and nature fed. An imaginative arch, catch-all of our childlike dreaming scrawl.

Freckle

It is but a freckle, a small brown spot.

It’s here to stay, though you see it as a blight ruining this vista, this clear, empty plain.

But it is there by design to highlight, to differ, to offer a uniqueness in contrast to the other.

It is but a small echo of difference.

Fracture

A jagged point lodged in deep, a split in skin. Blood flowers.

This historic bruise buries in deep, seeking to fester. Pain spirals out.

A wound to remind of broken hearts, their spiky roots winding into you.

Fires fan flames, chasing justice. Ashes lost voices

as sirens wail.

It’s just a hum

The city is breathing, they report, yet it isn’t, lying still, like a corpse on a bed of nails.

There is kindness out there, alive, lost in a labyrinth of apathy’s undoing.

Life’s eager engers rock in rhythm, motion, the bald summit too far. We wander blind this path of sleeplessness.

We cut a path beneath dense urban sound to wallow in mud. Senseless. Glut.

It is the lie of the land.

It sits mocking us, this barren idle stage, players rotten to the core.

They steal your privacy, hack your life out dry, rehearsing your lines. This speech is nothing, lost in a heartbeat.

Why?

This is why, And we don’t even need to say Why this is.

Ghosts

When the world wakes up too late, Ashes curl like leaves. Dead voices written on stones.

I took a prompt from NaPoWriMo.net. This was to write a poem in Sketonic verse, also called Tumbling verse. John Skelton, a C15th poet, came up with this. Verses are short and the endings rhyme, but there is no rhyme scheme per se, and the meter is irregular, with two stresses per line. You just keep on rhyming the endings until you get bored with that rhyme and move on to a new one.

Stand in line

You stand in line to take what’s mine all the damn time – to you that’s fine. The cat has nine lives on the line, so I’ll just pine while I dine within this rhyme, not worth a dime. I’ll live with less, sweep up this mess. what you’ll confess I can only guess.

Summer sun

The sky is young. where stars hung and the moon swung now shines the sun, promising fun. You’ll go for a run and i’ll make tea, dreaming of the sea; watch a bumblebee pollinate a rose. He powders his nose fulfilled, I suppose. Secrets he knows mean this rose grows. And off he goes, avoiding his foes.

Your choice

It’s all about choices. How many do you have And are they yours to make? Do you need to ask permission or gain agreement first?

Are you scared to offend by asking for what’s yours?

This paradox of thought: we thought we had the right to choose: your body, your mind, your humanity, your soul, your happiness.

It’s all yours.

Torpor

Apathy over empathy.

And so we stall, bleeding out to our humanity.

An erasure of leaves.

An invisibility so deathlike we fear its reflection.

The bullied boy sits alone with an empty blackboard.

Is this what we teach?

And the bully walks into adulthood, his deeds and words unchecked.

A parasite, shapeshifting into a conscious form

with all the bells and whistles that make a man.

Hey, Mr Critical

Hey, Mr Critical, come and criticise it all, pick lots of tiny holes in everybody’s goals.

You think you’re so brilliant and everyone else is small, that no one has real talent cos you’ve just grabbed it all.

Hey, Mr Critical, come and criticise us all. go and laugh at everyone until you’re feeling done.

Say all their work is crap, how you could easily do that, cos you’ve got balls of steel

and a never-bending will.

Hey, Mr Critical, careful not to trip over your cock cos it’s the biggest stumbling block to you being nice at all.

I-dent

It's the unknown player in the system, the Catcher, waiting with a purpose, looking for a misstep, you're unaware, a silent error in an echo, malware. Seeking a way in, secreting your life, examining things it has no right to.

Sealed doors open with a key, others with a single .

The Big Eye sits contemplating it all, marking you out for the taking. Tomorrow might know your name, but to the Eye it's just another game. It's found your identity on the ground from the breadcrumbs left all around.

What stands

What matters and what lives,

what stands and what grows,

what speaks and has a voice,

what dies and cannot breathe,

what fights and wants change,

what imprisons and must fall,

what sleeps and must wake,

what divides and must go,

what kills and must end,

what lessons we must learn,

what survives we can hope.

Night light

A lamp in the dark perched on pavement. Moonless night, silver dust.

Twisted light, pungent oil. Trapped fireflies seeking an escape.

Wires curve, trap the source, so bright it casts everything else black.

A house squats, eyes darkened out. Only its gate creaks

in the wind’s arms.

Bending tree

It boughs over a road in poignant prayer, hands reaching out,

an unfeathering of aged leaves on quiet air

haunting its shadow scuttling below. It seeks to run,

this heady mass, hair cascading like water sliding,

a natural arch catching light,

leaves yawning wide.

Urban ballet

Dancers stare out over the cityscape, its shapes and scattered lights blended. An urban backdrop eager for a dance.

Feet tapping, they lean out over the rail, tulle tutus bristling in the twisting breeze teasing their hair on this neon-lit rooftop.

Pedestrians cross unaware of the girls. a break in their show, a breathing space before they tiptoe over the waiting stage.

Woman with suitcase

Stone-faced, dark-haired, this woman in a thin dress lifts a suitcase on her shoulders, carries it high, her boy gripping the end of her skirt, skipping.

Her scuffed shoes her only pair, this flowery dress her only one. she leaves the house of marriage and this time she doesn’t care.

An old man watches them trudge the withered yellow grasses from a dark window. This sun bakes like hot condemnation in sympathy with his son.

The woman doesn’t look back

or falter in her stride. Family will greet her at the crossing between this life and her next.

Mist of the sea

Mist of this pensive sea breathes in on the waves. Not a person breaks the sight on this night, slow burn.

Rain swirls on cobblestones, engineering eyes and rivulets. Prisms arch, blink in puddles as the sea flickers, reflective.

Victorian metal lamps loiter on the edge of the promenade like fishermen watching the sea, waiting for their true love to rise.

A lone seagull surfs the air, spiralling like a plane.

The hermit

My house of stone, a pink-walled cave, grooves and spines. This concave vault rolls as I heave it, lug it. Sands shift beneath my ten legs, pinchers steadying, antennae my eyes as I seek seawater.

The scream

Face on a bridge screaming. A wrench of time blown out.

An eyeless skull, unrecognisable maw.

He seeks to perfect in this imperfection.

The red sky bleeds as the wild sea roils.

He carries a half-moon, its shine blackened.

Shaped like a claw, It has forgotten him.

There is no shelter.

He cries out his last thought. Raw and still.

A protest hijacked

Bloodied horses rearing, men stood still like jagged teeth. Bricks and words.

Anger spiralling. Short fuses lit for fireworks soaring into anger under anger.

Clash of bones. Wrangled fear. Peaceful placards bleeding out.

The yawning track

Grasses sprout in open fissures, splitting wood within wood,

compromising the even beams now there is so much of time.

This wooden path wanders far, its reach a vanishing distancing.

We watch dawn’s nervous rise, the first birds attempt a song.

We won’t hear its distant rumble or feel its bass vibration travel

because it signed off its journey several years back down the line.

It’s a trick of the light that brings steam, the roar, the whistling dragon,

for it won’t come calling here. All we have is a solitary silence,

broken by blackbirds and dry twigs snapping beneath our feet.

Double exposure

Words walking on walls, a crystallised cavorting of missing futures.

Have you been penalised in this voiceless scourge? A means to stone people. And erase.

Humanity drips into leaves of ash, this free flutter a kind of freedom. Uncensored.

They say words maketh the man, just as they take away to zero.

Stones wait to be thrown, pressure point exploded.

In a study of a reckoning they add clutter to old stories.

Words bloat til they bleed out into something unrecognisable for the mass to hide behind.

An erasure poem from Double exposure

Words walk, missing futures penalised. voiceless stone, erase, humanity drips ash. Flutter of freedom. Words, man, zero. Stones exploded

clutter an old story, bloat, bleed, unrecognisable.

Man in the Moon

This curved moon kicks and strides in time with a streak of stars glittering on pitch-black shores.

He slumbers still, doesn’t stir, this sprightly Man in the Moon whose sole function is to study humanity, nature, this full globe, nurturing each deserving thing.

He dreams of peace and love, wraps it up in a melancholy song, peeling off hate, pain and cruelty. He annihilates guns and strife, changing them into wildflowers.

He revives each extinct species, and protects the ones remaining.

He halts cancers of the body, pathogens of the glorious mind.

And in this arc of the silvery moon, in wistful slumber he creates a perfected version of it all.

On the radio

I heard it on the radio, Poured out on the waves. A broken signal in white interference.

He announced it, the man who went silent when the transmission cut.

Said it was on its way, but not what it was. Rain plunges outside.

We sit fast by the radio and the soundless television, waiting for a word or a sign of what we should fear.

Vegas

Tree heads tower on stalks, stick-like trunks a-glitter with glowing hula hoops.

This caterpillar of cars crawls almost immobile, seeking to eel its way deep into the valley.

Horns pierce the still air with their own language, monosyllabic and flat.

All else sits still beneath the jellied knowing stars, except for these neon winks of the showtime lights.

A morse code for walkers taking a nighttime stroll.

Rotten apple

Did you even try to find out the person she really is before landing the first punch?

The first bite of the rotten apple you offered on a plate of fake love. Charismatic and alive, ive at first, appearing more than you are.

You buried her alive in her devotion, made her beg for your attention, twisted things so she’d doubt her reality, interrogating her from the inside out.

You didn’t want her to seek shelter. You didn’t want her to speak to anyone beyond the fence of your control.

Her failure to leave was weakness to you, intensifying your disgust of her.

You only wanted to lock her in this box where no one could ever find her, and only you would hold the key.

You wanted her to be afraid so you’d never be alone.

She moved two times to escape you, still stalked by this rotten inside, burying this shame, this guilt, confusion down deep in a place she could not see.

Today you’re just a ghost from her past, a ing figment, a blurred murmur. She lives and breathes and recalls, but you don’t shape her, not at all.

The bridge

These days we try to reinvent ourselves, make mirrors reflect our repetitive days, when the minutes tick like hours stretched and the clock on the wall says nothing at all.

It’s all jammed. No one makes any sense. I think they speak in Latin stilted words. I see you agree in your inability to magnify. They’re opening a bridge between two islands.

They say the will be hard to come by and the birds are climbing higher today. There’s a march of grey where it felt blue. Below, a lost girl wails in the centre street.

Glass cuts loose in dough fresh from the oven. He says he’ll use a hammer to smash it all. I hear the bridge will open up some day.

We feel the silent summer sinking out of tune.

Iris

The watching eye, jaded iris, black hole.

Patterns crawl, coral spiral, asymmetrical,

round upon rebound. Bubble of dreaming.

I see myself reflected in the deepest mirror.

Sight shifters. A repurposed

perspective.

Like an opening rose, it greets day waking.

Inspired by Anna Funder’s book, Stasiland.

Stalk-eye

An echo of a murmur, lost lines read underwater.

We speak into an echo chamber, a connection with a murmur.

You read without permissions, gather others’ conversations

In the belief you have the right, in the shadows out of sight.

But what you do is wrong and it’s been going on too long.

You know the pain you cause.

Just another form of abuse.

We seek an escape route but you smother, dispute.

You can’t read your own skin, even though it’s long lived in.

Here’s where the sky falls for it means nothing at all.

Your skin is empty ground, when you talk there is no sound.

Divided

Small hands draw lines in the dirt with a snapped stick, even and true. The boys together, huddled, focused.

Across the waters, men draw more lines with politics, prejudice and ire. Instead of sticks they vote with guns. They stride singular, but think like sheep.

Dirt eats from the inside out, lurking in buried hearts, crawling locust thoughts, Unseeing the things they once believed. Segregation and separation. Straight lines.

They stride motionless, filed and drilled, blindly leading others to the slaughter ground.

Familial visit

He’s waiting for an apology from his life. The fate he wandered into, didn’t buy. The iron dropped on his head as a kid still shows itself in an uneven scar. The belt marks still whip his hide. The time he took on his dad, not standing it anymore, burns in the welts he hides under sleeves. But it’s himself he sees in the mirror these days, not the hunted animal of old. The clock hits nine, nearly time to take the bus out of town for the prison visitation line.

Seldom

An almost never in forever, words plucked, white silk feathers

floating freely, never at rest. Secrets kept close to your chest.

One visit in a year of same days, crossed in a calendar of “always”.

We wait and listen for daylight, the turn-off to sleep of still night.

An epiphany will always spin, tossing ribbons of colourful sin.

Toes dug down deep in purple sand, we wait for empathy to offer its hand.

Shadow

Colourless, listless, it drifts like rain clouds repentant, tired of watering. This haunted shadow glides inside our walls, closeting itself within, too shy to be seen.

Slip

See the scuffle of the sun let loose upon clifftops of mountains framed with pungent wildflowers, wafts of butterflies oblivious to falling fragments. a side slide. Excruciating. Down drop.

This escape into infinity. A relapse. A space in which to contemplate a life.

Fixed roots fail in the underskirt. This roll in ether, withering fall, and stop. He will plug it all back in, tug back the torrent rushing in, keep the sea in his circular arms.

Beyond sight

He sees beyond the ordinary. This insight pigeoned out of sight, an observation of languid trees, tall in lines of khaki seen.

They slip on words they disallow, not listening as friends speak, shouting for quiet rather than hear their inconvenient truth.

He contemplates the scowl of man. These eyes creep and crawl out, ants in files carrying jellied irises in a hunt for truthful sight.

We seek to bend back joy and preserve it for the forever.

This tunnel of light grows narrow and soon we’ll all be inside this gathering dark.

Fire and elk

The days spin out and I try to catch them in a gateless yawn.

It is the end of summer stumbling into silence. A trip never taken.

I gather up this spillage and sweep the firey ashes. This morning wrestles me,

but it cannot be heard. The herd brays on. A lady charms candles,

her words more powerful than she’ll ever realise;

her gift of destruction.

I yearn for the wandering of the majestic elk and this unbearable temptation of freedom.

Counting unicorns

My imagination runs riot and I see purple in grey, faces in the bark of trees as clouds form creatures floating in a silken mist.

I draw lines across the sky, dance with spiky hedgehogs and dine with unicorns until the seas run dry, but precious little changes.

We take turns in praying and yet we don’t believe. Can you hear what he says? Do the numbers tally? They change their tune daily.

The man in a suit waters tears as his mouth dribbles pounds. He bullies a clear plastic bubble. Things cost far too much today and no one wants to pay.

I hear people dying in thousands but the government rambles on.

Skinny roots

These inquisitive, hungry roots spreading like skinny fingers, unearthing treasures in dirt, a multi-faceted dreaming.

An inquisitive moonlit crawl carries leaves, bugs and worms down into the moist depths, seeking solace in this warm cave, deep down in the dark.

An eager fascination, foliage spilling into gaps in foundations, knowing the time to move on.

Rusted storm

I watch this grey storm gather dust, breath eating leaves of autumn rust.

A machine rolling over spiny gorse, sucking up flies as a second course.

The days take so long to enter now, skies hollow with what they disallow.

We compose a tune of yesterdays devoid of guileless wonder and forays.

Counting stars, they seem to blink at us, seeking a way of communication lost.

And so we enter into our one true head, stand in line to have our fortunes read.

These faces all around us have no names. What they struggle to say is all the same.

He observes a red robin painting murals, conversing easily with a light-haired girl.

But you’re tied. You have no tongue. And what has been said can never be undone.

We wait for morning to crawl over sight, for today’s game will only end with light.

Silver slither

Cat’s claw dangling in the sky, mark of silver set upon high.

It dazzles this far-flung ground, blinking light, echoes sound.

It leaps and dances amongst cloud, majestic, upturned and proud.

It does not need to be named. Neither will it ever be tamed.

It reasons with the fiercest waves, their ebb and flow, they all behave.

The tides shift to the moon’s call, lighting the way so ships never fall.

Once a year the coral reefs take heed. Across the oceans they spill their seed.

And in this way the true faery moon sparkles the earth with its fair fortune.

Jaw

They found a white jawbone half-buried in the hollow earth, played with like a dog’s bone, sticking up like a call for help.

Nothing else remained in the ditch and it could not speak its name. A line of teeth like piano keys, broken, angular, out of chord.

Ellen worked at the Moto diner, they reported on the morning news. Last seen with a man with a cleft chin, maybe six feet tall with a steady grin.

Anyone with information should call, but no one knew anything at all. She sleeps somewhere else this night,

waiting for chance to discover her plight.

Oak and moor

In this uncomfortable dark stands this bowing bark, an echo of itself within, standing in line to deliver the language of leaves. Wind rustling, aged crone.

A stranger trudges this moor, carrying the mist on his back, feet crunching wildflowers.

The sun will not rise today. Dusk will play a lone chord and this oak might straighten in happenstance to recite the ing of this man on this night on this moor.

Melody

She sings the songs of summertime, wrapped in honey and essense of lime. Fresh and unhurried, a hopeful sign of fortune in the skies, no crooked dime.

She writes the words of autumntime, hums and plucks out this simple rhyme. The tale of a boy who could only mime these conversant notes hung on the vine.

She plays the sounds of wintertime, silken song of blackbirds in morning shine. The pine of a girl, an escape from grime, a nine-lives tale from a long-lost time.

She recalls the images of springtime, meadows in bloom, fresh sweet thyme. A snail’s slow climb exits silver slime,

hares’ fighting ire amid sunset’s fire.

Red elephant

Red elephant strides in woven waves, his days laid out the same, year-in.

Immaterial, but stitched in neat lines, he stays right where he’s meant to be.

This patched design imprisons him. Uneven badges of politics and places

say he does not even own his home. Someone else picks him up, carries him,

walks him between signposts of their life. One of their belongings, he just belongs.

Labelled, faded, some stitching runs loose, but he still calls with his bright red trunk.

Neon

Hear its soundless click speaking out to you as it changes gear from sneer to hello.

This sultry, slick speak. Stripes of blinding hue, washing colours so brightly you blink to close off.

Still shudder out of day. Figures vanish inside, concealing their true selves. Slink into a forever glow.

This ash-night watches, disguising its merriment. We wander into neon

and it lights our way.

Today, I learned that the Whiteleaved Oak Tree, near Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire, has been bestroyed in a fire. The tree is important to druids and is visited by people from all over the world. It caught fire on Sunday night and could not be saved by firefighters. The cause of the fire is unknown, but is suspected to be due to people’s actions. The tree was believed to be more than 500 years old.

About a tree / The Whiteleaved Oak

The Whiteleaved Oak rules this space alone, arms upstretched to welcome the sun, grounded in this still, breathing earth.

Red roots reaching to the mystical down, this tree listens to the wide world waking. Its rings speak of five centuries past.

In the fiercest gale this tree will not bow. Blackbirds perch to sing to the rain as magpies hop and bounce and crawk.

This oak has seen streams of strangers who read and write in its visitors’ book, attracted here from curiosity and awe.

But sometimes is it better not to shine? Attracting the hoards, it brought its doom

through the careless disregard of humans.

In the cloak of dark they left their mark. Fire shook its branches to the ground, splayed its limbs and ravaged its bark.

This oak crouches now, a ghost of its past, but we how it ruled so majestic, seeming to whisper the secrets of faery times.

Balance

These are the times we draw upon when we are lost, translucent days we can see through to the end. So clear we think we can walk in.

So true to us we know who we are.

These are the things we don’t hide from, the protectors, the peace we need. This figment of sleep, this page drawn, this finite equilibrium we all seek.

Walls

A living box, red-brick castle. Lead-piping veins pump crystal water.

Red hermits scuttle, creep and crawl, waiting for a shell. Chalk scrawls ‘welcome’,

a ‘come inside’ to all. Walls no longer a prison, walls no longer afraid. This living box.

It fears containment, unwritten blankness, finds comfort in a scrawl

along blank canvas.

Where it slinks and slides, it can’t help but divide, offering a sanctitude in cement, of time.

A vanishing

We are the gathering, a stand in motion, vast expanse of play.

We leave it all behind only to resurrect it all, watching a sepia playback smother the storm.

Spill it out, black + white, all the dates you collected. wrap your calendar in honey, this ritual of not knowing.

You’ll feel it grow inside from the smallest seed until it’s the darkest cloud you’ll walk beneath.

And then you’ll disappear.

Alice and the White Rabbit

These dark corners we reside in. I watch a man drinking solitary, waiting for his life to roll in.

He dreams of a different time, ing pages into a cage of fire.

His past steps in sometimes and he piles up the evidence. it’s a spiral to an underworld, a bear trap underground.

He follows the path of Alice to dance with the Rabbit sometimes. It’s a dres of the age, one he succumbs to in stages.

This wooden board he taps upon,

seeking to shine in his wishes. But he knows his dream was stolen by the one who wants him to fail.

In the shadows he is always there, tripping him up, abusing him for not knowing, not seeing. He ridicules his “paranoid” ways, intruding on his piece of life.

Alice peeks out sometimes, inviting him to take the leap of disbelief and burrow down where the white rabbit holds on to the drip-drop of time.

Feeling fine?

For redemption day we wait and smile and hum, pretending not to care about a legality or a whim, a fig or a politician laughing.

For the right to speak and be listened to fairly, waiting for it to be right. To be able to act freely anywhere under the sun.

For the right to be anyone we want to be. To be able to walk at night, be who we are as women and never be judged.

Dedicated to all the people who haven’t been able to go far, or perhaps anywhere at all in these bizarre times. A walk around the corner, discovering your local streets and parks has been the highlight of the day or week for many people. Imagine you could just ping anywhere, where would you go?

Catapult

You can go places with a catapult. Dispel your fears, focus on lost dreams.

Take a cheap flight over ocean time. Seek out Neptune in a very cheap seat.

Not for the fainthearted or those with vertigo. However you snap it, there’s still far to go.

With a little skip, grab hold, pull back, take a big breath and off you’ll sail.

It’s quite ridiculous, so don’t think about it. Just close your eyes and… DON’T BLINK!

Dedicated to Bob. He ed away in the night before I wrote this, and I didn’t know til later in the day yesterday. This poem is not or anyone in particular, but it’s about the illness he suffered from. He was a lovely man, funny and ive. (July 15)

Forgotten words

I forget where we are sometimes. I suppose it’s a small spill of surprise, this slow drawn-out ebb into forgetting, which everyone tells you of in whispers.

I guess this is the ‘show’ and not the ‘tell’, but I digress in reading your disappointment. You haven’t reached the point of knowing what it is to forget your familiar words, those you held ready for conversationing.

We will take a vacation into emptying silence and I will mime everything across the table. We’ll create our own indifferent language,

so it won’t matter if we forget a line or two.

But if we forget ourselves, what can we do? We’ll recreate anew and mime ourselves too, and be two other people who sensed they were us.

See-through

Like blowing marble, silk bubbles poke, winking in jelly, wallowing outward. Such delicate things hold the world inside.

Stripped colours bleed a living prism. Translucent skin spins on air, leaning on nothing except the breeze.

Like blowing dandelions, heads splitting to spread small seeds in the millions.

This cloud of dust, yellow-white gold, caresses my fingers to whisper to me this journey of life, bringing and leaving. A dance of reflection, lingering on air.

A life of consumption

I sit and dream of dreaming sometimes. A simple thing, slumber in mid-thought, watch a spider spin his daunting task. And I forget to ask the imposing “why?”

Why are there days that linger like this? Why are the years pegged so oddly?

Why track the life of a stranger unknown? Why do people monitor or abuse each other?

Life, unfolding like a book, shouldn’t be read. There are clear signs where and when to stop; a conscience and moral code are signifiers. Enjoyment of torment is not a green light.

And so we dream of cutting ties and running where he can’t follow and he can’t find us,

taking our keys so he can’t try to copy them, hiding ourselves so he can’t slander us more.

It isn’t for public consumption unless we say and it’s childish to assume we know everything; people normally know parts and live with it. Someone’s life is their own – it isn’t yours.

In this time of ing everything, Instead of buying we consume it all online. My generation will be the last collectors. And he is unsure where privacy draws a line.

Even consent is confused: no means no. There is no ambiguity when someone tells you no.

Tailback

We must have hit the warning signs a steep while back on the tailback. This energetic slash of cold cobalt blue cuts thin without smothering us at all. Chinks of glass sprinkle out like salt.

We watched nesting birds below, tight in their night shift, secreted. They fed. And sated, were feathered in while we stood above, waiting it out. A breathless sight on that last night.

This aghast blue, red rusting in its eyes. I heard they sound the entry to the soul. We rested briefly, exchanged our watch, skies black with bats launching a hunt, the bridge imploding in this anarchic blue.

The line

It’s a straight line. You can walk it. One step, then another, this repeated repetition. Just don’t stop. You can walk it.

It’s a curved line. You can cycle it. One peddle, then another, This circular circle. Just don’t stop. You can cycle it.

It’s a never line. You can’t walk it. Stay still, still forever, This invisible nothing.

Just ignore it. You can’t walk it.

Misted minds

I conjure up this supple mist in stages. We write, we draw, we freefall down to collect the things we want to own.

I offer you a glass and you take it, the comfort in the giving of the thing. But you reside with ghosts of this ing, this unreflected penchance for tears.

I follow you down corridors pitch black where your mind hatches creatures of the night, but you don’t recognise one thing you see.

Just know you’re being observed by me. I think you feel I will keep you safe somehow, the ‘somehow’ in this sentence lost in mime.

Silk white feathers draw out a carpet for us,

so light it rises to float in this air we breathe. This forgetting game, can we survive it all? This unreflected penchance for tears.

I see you lose yourself here alone at times, your restless thoughts build more corridors, more than your labyrinthine mind can allow.

We will explore them all before we return. I know you won’t be the same, but there’s hope in the fact you won’t anything bad at all.

Pitter-patter

This pitter-patter of tiny feet, splashes down our cobbled path to stop outside the door and stamp, eager to be let into the warm.

Ignored, small hands drum windows, over and over, in a hard rhythm, then peter out into lightness.

Just a few drops bounce off the glass to scurry in dribbling rivulets. The storm, so brutal, loses its edge.

This summer rain slows, spilling, floods the senses with ripening green, washing, cascading, dripping down, down.

The forked road

Here, where the road forks I feel the rain uncork and this wash of green waking up this horizon.

It calls me and I’ll follow. I’ll let the fields turn fallow while I’m gone for real. I need a story to feel.

You’ll read it sometime, when you see me returning out there on the road. And I’ll be smiling.

And I’ll tell you why. You won’t recognise me and it won’t trouble you.

And I’ll tell you why.

When I feel the seasons turn, I’ll pack up and burn, and trust them to show the places I should go.

I watch the clouds twisting and the rain’s still coming, but I’m not staying for the rain, not repeating this refrain.

And I’ll tell you why. You won’t recognise me and it won’t trouble you. And I’ll tell you why.

Garbage trucks

Individuals fail to stick in the city. spare parts. The stickmen ponder vacuity, nonchalant, counting down the stare of the distant disgraced moon.

Tin garbage trucks scrape their way out of this gaping grey skeleton, the boundaries of stink.

If we our return tickets, we could watch the stickmen collect and destroy the core of our lives, see it crunch down to yoke.

This starving mouth. Idle indifference. These things we think we don’t need, but we’ll dream of missing some day.

Rose and thorn

In the never-ever of this forgetting time we perch on spotted mushrooms, compare translucent wings and speak of faery dust.

Neon dragonflies dip as ivy curves around us, silk roses fight thorn tips, while we inhale this life, listen to time and dream.

Bones

He wanted to bury her alive, watch her disintegrate into pieces because she refused to play. She didn’t notice him in the crowd so he wanted to make her listen to a world repeating his refrain, over and over like a man, trampling all the things she loved.

Her hair spreads out like fingers rooting through dirt’s fine entrails, seeking exposure and light. Everything rots in this dank earth. Her bones call out in the woods, rattle in their soft, unwanted cage. She knew she’d never leave here the moment he invited her in.

He wanted to bury her forever where the sun would never shine and she’d be alone in her suffering, not knowing why he’d done it. But that was part of the game for him, to be the one always in the shadows manipulating, pulling all the strings, laughing while she ran around and around.

Spick-spack

It’s in these days awakening, the inbetween of simple things, a rusted penny flipped on air. It winks, sparkling bronze, never landing. A circle closes itself.

Standing on the penultimate edge of elements suspended in twist, it’s some mistranslated finale. Sink or swim, a livid eternity speckled with living gold dust.

An albatross spins overhead steadfast in its grey endurance. It will last, and it will last.

It’s in the offering of hands, the sanding down of roughness,

a spick-spack rethink and we return to the ether.

It isn’t a word or a familiar, a play composed in one night. We stand on ladders rising, peeking through cirrus wisps.

This is new. It isn’t new. It is. We are here, and we always were. Different names, circumstances, but it is the same bleating sea, the same blue sky staring down.

On the Northern line

This lazy summer of toppling trees, twisted bark, barest lemon leaves. You wear it til the winter sheds its harsh light on your past redress, and you’ll need nothing else but this as the imagination wills and plays, and re-rescues you again and again, like the seasons can’t bear to leave you with nothing but wolves in the hills.

This one is about people who spy on other people. And I got to thinking about ‘Stasiland’ by Anna Funder. A extraordinary book about extraordinary people living at a time when privacy and freedoms were stolen by the state, and people were forced to incriminate their friends, colleagues and relatives or face the consequences for disobedience. They lacked the freedoms and right to a private life that we take for granted. Everything you did was watched. Everything you said was listened to. And people just disappeared.

Microphones

Just press the switch to listen, place your ear to the glass and hear what’s said on air – an announcement to the nation to caress our wand’ring ears.

A bodiless voice spirals out on a stream of endless words. but this is no public accouncement, it’s a conversation between friends and you’re vacuuming it up.

You even hit ‘record’ to replay.

it’s a dimlit reminder of the Stasi, that controlled, frightening state, where people spied on family, paranoia ran rife and people died.

How are you loving every minute? All this listening – an addiction you aren’t even aware of. Everyone’s life is yours, you think, and you can’t stop. You won’t stop.

All these voices, other people’s secrets, regurgitated morsels of another life. meaningless vowels pour out, but you collect and taste them all. These invisible people. This invisible world.

Selfless

If you are selfless Do you offer up the self?

Will it fritter out unused, unfit for purpose?

This ego fighting fire, is it just troublesome

or will it guide you out when you need it most?

And what will it seek, the self, with all its needs,

its arrogance to take, its desire to prove itself?

If you become selfless will it make you happier?

Will you disappear altogether or just be less showy?

Violation

You weep at their regard, turn heads to the wall, hide faces in this old dark, blind your memories dead.

You don’t want them to see, and you don’t want their eyes grown on stalks penetrating your skin, your flesh, your self.

You want them to disappear for all the things they’ve done. You want them to perish and feel no shame in wishing.

These men don’t belong here and yet they still come in. There is no end to their need,

against which you all plead.

You are the canvas, the paper, the object forced to yield. So you turn heads to the wall, try not to feel anything at all.

Life beneath

We wait in line, solitary, slow, not knowing what we wait for. It can’t be the sun or the moon – they only keep an eye on the above.

Is anyone clear on their role? We follow lines to know where, take to ground in changing air, rats scurrying for sustenance.

We know not who we are sometimes in this countdown to realisation under this intricate web of streets. We switch off to hibernate apart,

Dreaming of life above, a fairytale our parents read to us as children. A world of sun and moon and stars.

We ruminate in our burrows,

Stare at this dirt devoid of windows and wonder. Wonder how the world flits between above and below without a blink. These times, they unravel.

This separation can only widen between the haves and have nots. The need of want can only dilate, those on top can only grow fatter.

Dark echo

An echo, a repeat, a minor word plays in jest to reflect what’s real.

Memory spurred runs rings round us, forgets secrets, thunders the obvious, tiptoes like a child through our rooms.

Turn on a light so it won’t lose itself, write it all down lest you forget.

This stealth intruder sits in a web of wires, waits as a spider would, buries itself, twists in deep.

In the dark the tumour grows quietly, stealing words, balance and repose.

Echoes in this chamber speak fainter.

An artist draws thoughts on the walls, a surgeon with a scalpel in the scrawl.

August

The hermit

The hermit cuts silk pearls in his garden, trims back the seaweed conspiring to wander into its own retreat, starlit, starstruck.

He stems the waters seeking to slide out. Life suspended never knocks him offside. Patience is the thing sustaining him these days.

He can wait. The waiting always waits for him. In his mind he’s trudging untravelled roads, living experiences he’s only dreamed of.

His house curves like a crab’s hard shell, all these doors stand ajar, never closed, so the air can breathe and run on through.

He never questions why life is on pause, only endures it in a way it becomes endurable.

Like a bird he waits in his nest for spring.

Powder

It’s a stranger’s walk and talk, a mispelt hello in distanced mode, indifferent hunger in the afternoon.

Taking pleasure in forgotten things, an unravelling of wool, frayed, undone.

Wings take off in this split of thoughts under a raging sun. It has not begun.

Sea bells sound a nuanced beginning and i watch the clouds curl piecemeal, the turning of days into powder.

Missing parts

We set sail where we rebegin, top and tail each day with sleep, speak when we sense a thing is real and trick time on the upward curve. We stare inside endless spaces, watch crackling flames rise and fall.

My touch is like Midas in reverse, contemplating his bad luck in Spades. I can no longer see the idle hands of the dark mist rising around us. Ill omens write themselves in the sand and we hurry to scuff them out.

I ache from my hands down to my feet, but there is no pain to speak of, nothing fixed, physical to report. I watch myself drift away in stages.

Each part grown restless or dismayed creeps off in the hour before dark rises,

And I am left ing each part, its function and its place in my heart. One day I’ll just be a picked-apart head contemplating life from a sturdy shelf in some quasi-comic analogy of life, frozen by the technology of the age.

Planets

Is this our awakening, this fanciful take-off to a new planet we invented while the toast burned and the news reel jammed?

We hearken back to youth, but it doesn’t hold our truth any more. We stack up pages, lived, unlived and cancelled out.

The things we loved we list, the others whimper in the dark. Suits step up bodies to succeed, not glancing back like Oedipus. We regard their steady march for they know not where they go.

Our breakout blasts in colours, ripping this red firework sky. It’s our token totem to the earth, awaiting our return.

Patience holds while we learn and echo our lessons hereafter, floating out on tepid waters, our anchors raised, sails mastered.

The Blue-black Bird

The blue-black bird stared up at a zillion specks of silver, a starstruck night spun so bright, much bigger than he or the oval pond or the leaves of his favourite tree. They flickered lemon to burned gold in the dim light.

Faint breezes over tranquil waters whispered wise words of the earth and the sun’s true love, adventures of pure might on a moonlit night, encapsulating all the dreams of the blue-black bird.

But with age he grew weary, felt too weak to fly chose this spot to reflect and say his last goodbye. Here, where he took his first flight on fragile wings all those moons ago, when the sky seemed too high.

The stars stared down and recognised the blue-black bird and shone their twinkling eyes on him undisturbed. They whispered legends he could not understand,

the world of the stars so much grander than he. In that moment he spread out his blue-black wings and found he could still fly into the endless sky.

Snow flower

Tiniest snow-white petals like freshwater pearls, star-like clusters swaying on a stem so spindly it looked to break in the hearkening wind. Yet it proved so hardy, lone amongst skinny weeds, concealing its brightness so even the bees didn’t see. The man sheltered it with the curve of his hand, pitying its aloneness, its delicate beauty, for it had a right to be.

Planting

This is the patch for planting, the most inhabitable slice of soil, open for green, olive, yellow leaves, stems so delicate, yawning buds.

This is where things will grow. This rebirth. Back to the begin.

And this is where spring will come, this slide-in of tangible roots, marking a place, a small allocation, but all they need: soil, water, sun.

We have such small needs.

The sky knows it daunts, so vast, thunder rolling in with truths.

In this patch we will build a life, shelter it, savour it, keep it warm. Here we know ourselves as we are. In this small life of ours.

Your attitude

Your attitude will not be tolerated they tell us. Stand in line. Hug yourself. Either conform or you’re out. It’s the law.

Around here it expels from the white paint, everything washed the same, stagnant walls.

We frown upon difference. It’s subversive. We’ll burn your words if we don’t approve. Do you have a problem with that, stick man?

History shows our heroes were unconventional. Our freedom of expression is something to wear, not flung in the corner with never-worn shoes.

Like with like, let’s file everything in order, from A to B, head to tail. As it should be. And we won’t stand for slouching.

If we look at ourselves, who do we see? Who are you trying to fool, trying to be?

I see you, but some parts are fading out. I see you shedding stones to carry it all, Fitting on to their narrow walkways, So scared to stand out, so scared to fall.

Murmur

It begins with a murmur, slight, a wake, a softness, birdsong faint beyond the glass, rising into chorus, togetherness, rapt.

We listen as pale morning yawns open.

In the east a murmur of starlings takes flight.

Words painted in the skies,

a pure language written to be rewritten and erased once more.

In their conjuring, complex patterns of open wings.

This poem has a shape that is impossible to replicate in an ebook. It is viewable on my blog, Vixie’s Stories.

Coral hearts

The tanker ran aground on coral reefs, beauty meeting beast on a delicate stage.

It spilled its bowels, metal sliced open like a tin made for sardines, peeled back. I wonder if they were fished near here.

How it floods out, circling, carrying far, turning the sea into an ink-black sink, glutinous hate making its deep-felt mark.

Thousands of animals, birds, amphibians, wetlands, rare species, a whole ecosystem. We watch it drown on TV in a snake of oil.

Our global dependence rips out the heart of nature, these pristine places, our legacy.

At a time when so many reefs are bleaching, destroyed by climate change and man, our insatiable greed, the stamp of progress, machinery, technology, industry. Spent.

A child watching can point out what’s wrong. Why can’t we, in our high chairs and offices?

We quash the world to power our fast lives. Do we need so much? Can’t we let go?

I watch 1,000 tons spill out into the big blue with nowhere to go. It spreads like hair, weaving itself in, damaging for decades, turning the oceans to ink, a pitch-black stink.

And life now hangs in the balance here.

The X word

We call ourselves unique. Are we so divergent?

We try deep footprints, already stamped and used.

Futile are our attempts to be something different.

They’ve seen it all before. Everyone knows.

What can you bring to this spotless table?

Will you do your own thing? Will you stand out?

We clap and cheer you, make you believe.

We want you to win, we want to see you win,

Just so we know someone still can.

Shade out

The hunter lost his sense of humour on a long hike through the glen.

He met a buffalo and an elk sat in the shade of a wounded oak, contemplating time out.

He wondered at the unique smallness of it all. The lack of definition.

And he noticed how the rain swam in a deadly breastsroke. Even keel.

Stones crossing

The stars lay out a path for owls to follow, silver-laced in dripping skies, a helter-skelter patter of lost legends flickering on and off like a TV screen.

I feel the chill stones under fingertips, adrift, between so many sleeping heads, their beds long dissolving, nettled out, weeds seeking to crack, find a way in.

Only me and these names converse as if life and death blur somehow, and you can’t leave one or the other, or so the stars point out to me.

Random eight

All these random numbers, notes plucked out of thin air,

nothing solid to lay your head upon, just openings into the void.

Played out on invisible keys, suspended on transparent wires,

walk this tightrope over open waters, rushing in discordant sound.

All these six-sided dice rattling, Guess how they will fall?

Do you feel lucky in your choice – Is it the infinite number?

Played on invisible roulette tables, the ball spins, red to black,

but this ghost wheel can’t turn itself. It can’t tell your destiny at all.

Paths

Is this your contribution, offered up to the skies, this small thing, this penchant for dreaming a life unlived?

These paths sink, unchosen, the stream keeps churning and you’ll keep on forgiving, but it’s burgeoning, this small bud, waiting to shout out a call to arms.

We watch the cirrus tiptoe in, stretching their fingers. form and reform, cradling the light

after the dawn.

Space and the peacock

It seems a small degree of space we seek to carve out for ourselves,

a camp for destress, a holding pattern, a place to recharge our bodies

in this ever-moving unravelling pace, but whatever we need most conflicts.

Someone else needs your space. Someone else needs your time,

Your self, your plans, your piece. Draining your energy levels down.

The ego doing its best to stand tall, a strutting peacock shouting its will

in order to satisfy its own wants without consideration for scale.

It is a lonesome selfish gene and it billows out and out.

Paws

He has such tiny paws, jet pads rough, soft,

show no damage at all, no wearing down

through the years, his intrepid escapades.

Why don’t we make shoes That last half as long?

Little slipper-like hooves. He’s built to last.

My own jaded feet, skin and bone,

unbuilt for running bare, designed for injury.

I imagine crowds of human-size paws.

Surreal collections of mismatched ends.

Stones and moss

Stepping stones, a fragrancy of moss,

stench of moulten earth,

bees, honey, refuel,

an existentialist dearth.

We plough the fallow,

come to the crunch

of ice, depth, sound.

Stripped, dust-moted dew,

rain cascades, bled brick-red.

We smother and we capture

scars across this earth.

Riplines racing, burning breath.

This poem has a shape that is impossible to replicate in an ebook. It is viewable on my blog, Vixie’s Stories.

The old man of Far

Is this what we dare without seeing, without being, our bare hands held up in a sunshine salutation, a gratitude?

Smoke twists and curls in languid strokes in the garden below where the old man smokes. He plays backgammon as he exhales

An enigmatic life strewn across continents. Some say he is waiting, but not what for, inventing him a story because he won’t let on.

The creases in his face laugh with the bait. White hair, cracked smile, skinny gait. He lives alone with his wiry, half-deaf mutt;

some say the hound makes all the decisions. His stumpy tail, thinner than my ring finger,

wags for England when he claps eyes on me.

He loves us all in his simple canine way, but the old man barely acknowledges us today. I watch his gnarled hands push the pieces,

grey smoke carving a sacred sort of lullaby, and I want to ask him if he still has dreams. Instead I take him another cup of mint tea.

This land

We stand on ground our ancestors found, labelling it theirs in their enthusiasm,

forgetting the land had always been there, unowned, centuries before they were born.

They pointed and took without asking. The land didn’t argue, simply contemplated.

Before men came the land breathed easy, unworked, untrodden, untoiled. Free.

It couldn’t condemn man, acting by nature, want and the need to own, make shelter.

Man renamed the land and ploughed it out. The original name once known, now lost

is only spoken by the blue mountains, which gazed on, pleased to be out of reach.

Precious things

Precious things, birds on the wing, waters that sing, colours rainbows bring.

The final fling that meant nothing, wanting to be king of anything.

An invisible ring, a certain spring, this unravelling to find pure meaning.

These precious things on the wing.

Pre-light

These things lie half-finished in the spot where they began,

where they jumpstarted, imagined something unique, dreamed anew.

We build a stage for our modestness, our claims to be something greater.

We watch the stairs climb backwards into the green days of youth.

These humble reflections drawn on air. Can you peel the shades back that far?

We can walk where the moon swirls equidistant to her stars, pre-light,

flickering in circles of memories. We can’t hide ourselves away forever.

Our feelings lay stripped out and bare, our bodies there for the crossing.

We stare into the light of the horizon, daring the world to swallow us whole.

September

Visions

We crowd in, crowd out. Wake soundless, dream-rapt.

Pure morning builds itself out while we wish to gaze inside

within the walls of our mind, crazy corridors of fantastic hue,

blighted bridges ripped to fall, semi-realised portraits of our past,

faces we only half recognise in episodes we’ve co-written

with our imagination, our host who designs the scenes, the stage,

the actors without our knowledge. It’s lost to us how this all forms

and why our invisible plays dance on without our say.

we know not where they go, or how we craft them so,

living paintings of our minds, stealing us away in dreams,

reshaping an alternative vista to escape the cold outside.

Small buds

We place a marker for our grief, a tree spreading out its arms wide to embrace the widest of worlds and everything within them, rooting ourselves in who we are, who they were and mean to us, collecting water to evolve and replenish what has gone, what we’ve lost and will not find again. Memories are what we have, these small buds we will treasure when we feel alone in this widest of worlds, all those days without words. There is a bird watching me and she’s flying.

Out of motion

I’m not asking or looking or thinking to take anything, this reflection of dust, these flickers of survival. We trust in nothing these days, it’s just a removal.

The men wait for the bins, eager to take it all away, the junk, the discarded, the small. These days I am cardboard, folded, emptied out, invisible. a packaging with nothing inside.

We watch dirt blow in balls, crossing the street back and forth in circles neverending, rewinding day into night into day.

I forget the moon sometimes. The evenings turn to grit.

Iron key

I’d let you in through an open door if I could find it, get a handle on it, rescue the iron key that seems to be lost.

Maybe it’s just resting, tired from knowing the things beyond doors residing in rooms without the right words.

The dry echoes tell of families and friends, footsteps fading out, but never forgotten, eager to rebegin.

I draw a curtain closed on our watchful lighthouse, its one eye winking where boats never rest in the blackening sound.

I thought I heard you

I thought I heard you as I lay, thought I heard you speak to me.

I thought I saw you walk on by, smelt your perfume in the sky.

I caught you with a quiet smile when no one else could see you.

The cat we had oft followed me, beneath my feet ‘til you went away.

I think he knew before me. I think he came to welcome you.

The sparrows have been silent this month. I cannot tell when they’ll return.

The trays and hooks sit emptied out and the days seem longer still.

Deep blue dart

Light and dark, and the skies burst with something of the other, sedentary and bright in pausing. A pelage of created words. A hollow.

A swallow seeks out its nest, flight straight and true like a deep blue dart. We take heart that it will stop, this vacancy inside.

I hear the dripping rain fall somewhere. Not here today, but out there. Some place apart in this distancing. And it might turn.

Uncover it all

Uncover it all in stages, unwrapping a -the-parcel of missing anecdotes,

forgotten images on rewind record. This curtain closes on pictures past.

Our ancestors silent, the lost gather and sing out songs for them to hear.

He collects stories in his broad arms, wraps up decades,

hands open to heal.

Rose quartz warms and we grow sleepy as the west wind nears the unglown moon.

Nature’s glow

I can touch wood or sand or stone, tell the clouds to fall in a sweep of rain and caress this languid soil in a delicate spiral.

We watch the land grow. It will teach us to be at peace with it, know the things we sow and bring forth flowers no one can eat.

We watch the sparrows feed betwixt the tallest trees within our garden gate, but we cannot fly.

The earth pulls us back to contemplate it all.

Gravel chips

Sound, growling sound, cut gravel chips, a distant howl of wolves in the mix.

Tyres race the rain past crawled-out houses squat and waiting, rust-crusted gates.

You run the gamut to catch morning’s eyes; water’s glitter reflects circles, spins out, dies.

This mesmerising green wakens still and a few await the freshest dip

of ripened dew.

Sue

I would like memory to more clearly every single waking second, every sentence, look, scene and sound. I want to be able to it all and print it out on fine white paper, this whole trip recorded and ordered.

I want to pick out the scenes to watch, see her in every single waking age, travel again our meandering drives down twisting lanes, loiter on shorelines tasting salt, explore luscious gardens, lose ourselves in lanes of starlit stores.

I want to relive it all in the clearest detail because this haziness is all I have. These picture postcards grow blurred, washed over under this raw weight.

Why do memories fade out with time and not grow stronger when we need them?

Zone out

Embrace the zone-out, rewind it all in, this coming out of sleep, a withdrawing or the redrawing of an irreverent end.

Paint curls from the walls and rust seers a fire branding every habitation visited. We watch time turn the world to grey.

It’s a turning, a forgetting. I can’t find the door. At the back of my mind I walk through it, turn a crank and the whole scene disappears.

We take supper with old friends long ed, light a comet under stories to them. Do you feel old? The day is turning around

To look at you, measure you against expectations, read and learn as karma counts your weight.

You grow taller, but you’ll never feel it.

We take pleasure in this space, this quiet, refuel our batteries in this mindful silence. But it is always too short. The walls plunge in.

Our environs suck us dry. Empty cusks. And here we are, gazing at the dripping rain, trying to spy a rainbow leaking an abundance of colour.

Clouds

There are many things we only think of, never giving voice. Invisible struggles faced

in numb fortitude. Cold blue mornings rife with a surprising optimism, streaked out

and diced with clouds of grey by lunchtime. Step inside hands filled to the brim

with listening, chance a second out. They say “get a grip”, I see you slip

away into any shade of wordless right. You make tall between mirrors of hate,

a negative energy unyielding. Position left of field. A meandering river of applause.

The broadness of the oak line distils breath, brings oxygen to your empty fallen places.

Wrappings

Waves and waves of Christmas cheer, wrappings and unwrappings to be devoured by us children in a haphazard spree. Paper birds fly, flutter with our hopes and dreams and faith of a constant be, of nothing changing to flux and reflux. We are of a small unit, thriving alone, unhurried to be out there, exposed, free. Huddled in this warmth we parcels around and around our circle of three.

Ragged

This half-finished sacred thing, an everything, lost and faded, worn ragged, dull to the touch yet bright, fortuitous, strong in its unopposing fight to be. We only half belong to anything, set our sails and drift free, search a straight fix unending til the skies say it’s final, this, our only reckoning.

Planets

The planets are humble tonight, turning eyes to a blood-red moon

and all its superfluous ways. A looping-out of happenstance,

the hills we stride, paths we take, silver-stitched in waves, a blanket

of multi-hue haphazard squares. You can decide to strike it dumb,

this despair dripping out of you, wearing you out from the inside.

Do you feel fettered in your skin? We clear cupboards for pictures strewn

of kith and kin, and every act of sin you pour out on your own small stage,

speak of things turned insular and bare. Kids race marbles that blink in the gutter,

peer into colours twisting as they slide. Fortune will take a turn of the table,

separate silent strength from numbness, under the glare of this struck-silver moon.

Even the moon

We talk of truth with a few select words, Ring the promise of change for a bare fortune, Climb ages of faded out purest light Where escape is just a seconded paradise.

If you play it right you might reap something, But the day is rich in substance born of scorn, Of starlit flesh and a creeping, crawling like You bring upon your back. December’s woes

Sigh under embers amid cracking ice floes, But you’ll walk out upon it, this dead lake. The deep freeze reflects your sympathies, Each dark realm echoes your inner turmoil.

Invitations of empathy turn your heart black. It’s an unresolved lesson, never fully heeded, But I’ve ed the decades walking back

And see how nothing changes. Even the moon.

Bats

Balancing the curve, dark flits of striking wings dip low to fan out, riding the tugging wind.

A quiet bunch, so still, hangs eerily suspended like plastic on elastic, but you can’t pull it back.

Looping under bridges, a group swoops and soars to surf the scooping air on invisible boards.

Their invisible dances exit on a haphazard line of chattering, high-

pitched letters to the moon.

October

Baking with nan

Nan es me the rolling pin, caked again with dollops of creamy mush. Gooey sticking elastic lines circle the stripy bowl’s pink insides, the peeling pastry breathes out, running rings for my warm stubby fingers to trace and avail. I’m too small to reach the wooden table top, so I stand tall on a two-stepped safety stool, smart in my blue bear pinny, sleeves back, rolled as I ought, professional, arms powdered with flour, some flying into my yellow curls, turning me prematurely grey. She laughs loud and it echoes all around, purple rinse bobbing. Some prize seeks the secret bowels of the oven and the malty warmth explodes out, small hands diving around the kitchen, spilling into corners, until this gusty tang of gingerbread cloaks it all.

Map of lights

We’re walking the highest point breathing light like oxygen, rooting memories in the trees til here we sit, composed and still, eyes consuming this easy earth. Our birthright fans out, opening like a map for the waking stars, a blinking grid of neon lines.

Bitter-sweet coffee warms our bones, breathing out clouds like dragons, imagining the moon laughing back. We’re so high humans are invisible as though the whole world lies empty of its scurrilous consuming ants and nature will make a comeback, creeping the return of wolf and deer.

Two skins

He runs between these forbidden ways, veins coursing down narrow train lines, etched in skin, serrated pink ruin, travels in ordinary flesh moulded to him.

Lost summers chase his back, tattooed inks pay homage to his life’s long gathering, drawing his heart line from end to shine.

She treads a pattern of convoluted curves, wood slats precarious on a bridge of discord. Misplaced fools peer into this great grey sea, enrich its bleakness, take it by the hand.

Steel bracelets rattle from wrist to elbow, Whistle a restless tune of artless wandering, drawing her heart line in their shimmering.

Walk, don’t walk

We push at lights blinking on-off in dissolute rhythm, lift our heads in the way of sunflowers in love with the sun. Here, in this urban labyrinth of stone walls and raincoats, we await a colourful blast of neon to rescue us from grey.

Dead-eyed poker

A recognition in the sub-queue, one waiting without the recoil, an angry pointer of a lone hunter.

Wretched. It’s the tool of the shade and he keeps it close, bed companion. These days grow wild, a lurid dance.

They say the end is nigh, a reckoning, shattered skies a sign of days to come. He can’t make it out, spinning cards

in cigar smoke spirals, yellowed stubs. It’s the girl in red who shouts out first. To the shadows caught doves crowd.

The first blood spilled won’t be his own, but it’s due. He can taste it, dry as

the caked dust dead on the windowsills.

Black fog rolls in on the back of the tide, spoils of an unforgiving cursed mind, carries the spectres inside, buried, back.

Strawberry sands

We trace circles, convoluted, listen to the secret songs of shells, this spoken word of the sea whispering. We pick at seaweed, khaki green clumps, crab legs, stinking out this wealth of sand.

I pause on a solitary strawberry, artistic licence perched, saucy red, and wonder who styled it there, this natural drop of litter, challenging all the coastal colours out loud to raise their game.

Consent-ology

The guy isn’t going to hit pause while he hides his face away,

shoots daggers from off-stage, reads stories to the crowd,

rewords history in his way, adjusts the TV to his visor,

listens, takes, reveals & scores. A patchwork quilt of your life.

Your data is his to on with no recoil to the injury.

I’ve been doing some ancestry research over the last couple of weeks and found our family lost a couple of in during WWI. One was killed in action, one died of his injuries. Leonard was 24 and Edward was 19. This poem is for them.

Poppy seeds

We rise as soldiers, taken from our beds as youths, stripped from the warmth of family to lands we’ve never seen, places never heard of before, from conversation and cosy silences to the roar of guns, planes, bombs, scuff of dirt, splintered wood, blind pain, a burn of unending endurance. We suffer it for the greater cause, memories of loved ones we’ve left, hiding in the bowels of the underground and hideaways not built for this. We charge into the face of danger

not knowing if it sees us, not knowing if it will turn its cheek and let us return back home.

It’s your right

It’s your right to write whatever you like, pursue your ions, dispel the night, create a life anew within your space, reconnect yourself with yourself, find a way to be more true to who you are, living together, breathing alone.

Wake up

A freefall, sinking, glitter-wrapped, enticed happenings, unforgiven streaks of memory. Scuffed cards shuffle unplayed. them forward. Time dripped out. White cloud spirals shot to the wind. We curve, recoil. It eats itself out from the inside, no room to turn. A hollow ball bounces against the wall. You missed the second it impacted. Red card. It boils over and over. Cabbage leaves, veined, your organic heart line bloodless. Cavities seeking to be filled, unfilled, always to remain emptied. Faces fade, places get up and move on, brick walls demolish. Watch the light tube flicker pictures, asleep. A conveyor belt of ideas you never had. You fade out,

but you could wake up, turn it off and listen to the wide, wild air.

Split threads

We split threads, break punctuation on the lyre, full played, disarmed.

See shadows dance for us, A knowing escape without pause To slink back inside the sun.

It’s a motion plucked away, Plastered in the everglades, Fragments of dreams imploded.

A song of happy circumstance Drifting out on brook waters, Circling odes, sweet reminisce.

Cobwebbed rooms

Lives linger on, hidden and unwritten, translucent phantoms lost in rooms closed off. Cobwebbed messages seal up ageways with unread notes to the discordant air.

A piano plays without heart, a murmur. The chaste could not find themselves, bare histories clump the rusted air, folded chair. Laid for dinner, the proud table stands lone, empty astride once-polished scarlet stone.

They steam tea, slice watery cucumbers, counting days to the sun and moon, wand’ring ancient pathways so overgrown.

Dank moss and weeping brook blanketed by the willow’s green locks. It all flickers, disarmed, locked away in another time.

Breath

A warm gust in this chill air tells us that we breathe when unsure if we have stopped, but we are here, a little distant, a little worn. Our breath tells us we remain, making an impression on silence.

Sense of order

It’s someone he oft pretends to be, Morning come and morning slung,

Evidence of his neat manner apparent In the order of his everyday things,

Alphabetical, sized, full-coloured, Never at a loss to find what he needs.

In time he will come to understand His self, the world and time outside,

Life and its disordered chaos on speed Dial, the undisputed challenger of order,

For now he’ll let it roil against the wall, Waves churning on a tempestuous sea,

While he sits inside his evergreen lifeboat, Buoyed by his hopes and his innocent love.

Triolet: In communicado

We pause, cut off all transmissions as we’re always on call to someone. They all talk, but no one really listens. We pause, cut off all transmissions, look around for the things that glisten, wishing for some alone time in the sun. We pause, cut off all transmissions so we’re no longer on call to anyone.

Nature’s call

This great responsibility, a personal address

to the sacred being inside, the peaceful thinker

lost to a history of thought. Footsteps in the park,

stories beyond the lake, leaves strewn like tea

telling fortunes to the sky. Oftentimes it pours here,

raining unseen letters, pretty odes to nature

and whispered secrets forgotten in time.

Nature hears it all, gives a silent call

to the speaking world to be less,

tread lighter, and leave nothing behind.

Cotton shields

Into these empty clothes angle your arms, elbows, hands, brimming the torso, feel the warmth flood in, the chill curving outside.

You face the world wrapped, cosied in, your armour of cotton, wool and buttons. This your mighty protection against the invisible threat.

Yet nature walks with you, offering its own shield, waiting for you to notice the bird in the hedgerow cocking its head your way.

You carry your scowl like a scarf, rolled up against the sting of winter, but this raw air could iron it out – if you let it.

Lockdown for your bones

Is it a cage you wish for in the present tense?

Lockdown for your bones? You still have the key

to enter, exit if you please. Not so much a physical prison

as one for your mind, nostalgic for familiar faces

to talk, discuss, comfort in person. Tech steps up,

offers a way to converse or simply check in.

So we’re not as alone as we think. We’re not really alone at all.

Will you?

Will you follow my lead through the wild streets and fields where gold light once spilled, confidence your true shield? Will you dance amongst the barley full grown, heady in still breeze, as the nights draw out with ease and we grow older as you tease? Our hearts, they feel no shame in our fight against Time, the Father we all hope to tame, challenged in the flip of a dime. These waxing candles will blow out when the shorn fields fall fallow and we have no ion left to follow, but for now there is time to borrow.

My poetry course homework this week is to write an anaphora. I’ve been watching a lot of NCSI and NSCI LA this week – a conveyor belt of murder, mayhem and crime. So this one is about that, about a stalker. Watching it, most of the stalkers are male, but then a well-known grit-your-teeth-scene film with a female stalker is Misery. I guess that’s what watching TV with a fan of NCSI, Silent Witness and all those series does to your inspiration! Well, it is the run-up to Halloween.

Anaphora in poetry is the repetition of a word or expression at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, sentences, or verses especially for rhetorical or poetic effect. Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech is a famous example of anaphora.

He won’t stop

He won’t stop until you’re dead, He won’t stop messing with your head, He won’t stop stalking your life, He won’t stop causing you strife, He won’t stop reading your emails, He won’t stop listening to your calls, He won’t stop alienating you, He won’t stop slandering you, He won’t stop enjoying his libel, He won’t stop turning the tables,

He won’t stop wrecking your career, He won’t stop watching your fear. He won’t stop manipulating the crowd Until he knows you’re no longer around.

Rain on the roof

He loves the rain, how it pours, how it shudders on the roof, tiny stampeding hooves.

He stands and breathes it in, this silent green, washing the year away, melting his weary skin.

He won’t open his eyes until the clouds turn away, and he can feel they are finally gone.

Scarves on kings

We paint scarves on kings living in intrepid times, pure feeling in our skins, open doors for all to see, walk through without a key. We trip up the fantastical, scurrying birds to the skies, balancing like clowns on tiptoe, wonder-like, eyes wide for we are children rapt.

I could make a cake

I could make a cake and call it by your name, smother it with candied cream, an assembly of plastic candles.

I could choose not to blow them out on a rush of déjà vu. Trace a finger all around, edges of thick-set chocolate.

Taste it. It all thickens now. You can’t waste what you eat and you can’t take it with you. Sweetness might not last.

I’ll hand you the knife to make the deepest cut. Old memories seep on doubt,

bitter-sweet icing for the cake.

A day of gathered memories, no longer rationed out. Cameras clicked to preserve it all as if night could wipe us out.

Fins

These days we walk on air, translucent drifts of white proposition, suspended in our numb isolation, view the world from distanced heights, ourselves full-drawn upwards. Here we stand with our resolutions like kings surveying territory, but covert neither greed nor power, mere spectators as we are, waiting for life to recover life. If fish could swim through the skies we could reach out and touch fins.

Only breath

I watch you fade out, without words, without action. I fail to ask questions. I fail to hold your hand before it grows cold. I watch you fade out, stunned earth, in a silence beyond silence.

A tranquil space without any context or walls; we exist apart, there is nothing else. There is only breath. I see you out as you saw me in.

I see your face sometimes half-sleeping, half-there, and in my half-imagination you kiss me goodbye, and I am the child again.

November

Pure seconds

This day, this hour, pure seconds dissolving, bubbles of mesmerising colour, undistilled dreamlike swirls, hopes saved and watered, treasured like encrusted gold. We blow memories out to sea, stones tripping grey waters, never sinking, almost flying as though they had wings.

The time twists out

The time twists out. It looks for its tick in the remnants scattered, the pieces, the fragments of glass waged in places torn of yesterday’s glance.

I steal an eager rose because I adore its scent. We send letters on the air, watch them curl and fly, cascading with the birds, messengers of the gods.

We wake and fall. It means nothing at all.

Words play out

in a backwards rhyme, sands running, running. Poppies pale without sunlight. We fetch water, but the world has run dry.

Driftwood

What you see is you and me, we rest against this bark, this sea, misted ocean currents drifting. Are we shells of ourselves?

Where the sea kisses the sand we’ll stand beneath the gulls that surf the air’s sacred currents, dropping to just above our heads.

Their shrill laughter breaks the roar of waves breathing in, breathing out. A short-circuit in the morning’s still, this freedom splitting day.

We are the crabs circling mud trails, building ridges around their travails, not getting so far for all their efforts,

out of sync with the space covered.

The tide tugs us all out, shells et al, pulling us driftwood towards the line, reflections of the sun skewed, this horizontal expanse of eternity.

If autumn leaves

We will count the days down one by one, and you’ll have your fun wishing them done, as if the sun cried dried up, its cup too parched to crack open this token, this pensive wail, and you’ll set sail on wild seas of chance, no backward glance anyone can seize, if you please. It pleasures none to depart, as if you had the heart to restart this karmic debt, unpaid, but you stayed here where the days frayed, and you said when the nights grew long and you finally forgot your song this throng would know you belong with them. The hem of this dress

is slipping, time tripping, the sap dripping from the trees.

Pantoum: our own tune

We stand in memories of light, twisted notes on the harpsichord, repetitions of motions already played, notes within notes within notes.

Hear these songs on the harpsichord, guided by our own hands hither, notes within notes within notes. In the end we compose our own tune,

guided by our own hands hither. The fire still burns for us, but in the end we compose our own tune, play it out to the world alone.

The fire still burns within us, repetitions of motions long played. We play it out to the world alone,

and bathe in memories of light.

Pantoum: in the fog

In the fog hidden we speak in riddles, convoluted frames within frames. Creating circles of thankless things we skip puddles in the starstruck woods.

Convoluted frames within frames, these lanes twist, shrivel by night. We skip puddles in the starstruck woods, A speckled thrush our only guide.

These lanes twist, shrivel by night. We as ghosts, walking backward, A speckled thrush our only guide, When our only option is to go forward.

We as ghosts, travelling backward, Lost in circles of thankless night, When our only option is to go forward.

In the fog, hidden, we speak of riddles.

Pantoum: this house

In this cold we weather it, a storm brewing outside, threatening these sturdy walls, foundations long rooted down.

A storm is brewing inside, the cracks have already begun in foundations long rooted down, like spider webs creeping out.

The cracks have already begun, there is no truce to be had with time, dusty spider webs creeping out. It casts blow after blow.

There is no truce to be had with time, threatening these once sturdy walls. It casts blow after blow,

but in this cold we will weather it.

Notes on wintering

Feel the days in ever-shift, a moving screen, unfiltered

tongue-tied mornings lifting skies that dream eternal.

We tell ourselves so many things, how to be, see, even grow.

Summer es too fast for us and here we are, wintering.

A squirrel still searches for his tree in the garden’s empty spaces,

seeking a god of nature erased. We breathe in patterns unrecorded,

never to be repeated on loop. These days lift, full eyes wise,

birdsong a cacophony of notes we wish we could decipher

only to learn the secrets of flight and the resurfacing of spring.

Pantoum: the language of lost words

We have words when words have courage to say anything, mean something you can take away, letters scattered idly to be found.

Do you lack courage to say anything? We know not who you are, letters falter blindly to the ground as you morph into another mind.

We know not who you are in this brief age of time. As you morph into another mind we wait until you find us again.

In this brief age of time, to mean anything you can take away we wait until you find yourself again,

have new words when old words fail.

The hare

He knows the chase is on, feels the switch-out in the air, tempo change from something tepid. It’s time to run, but he’s done, the hedgerows smother him down, leg bleeding out, blood a full pump in his veins, his chest, his ears. He senses them close in, waiting, rain spilling in a misted wreath, smells this grisly stench of man making its heavy

footed trudge. Twigs snap in circles rounding, leaves fold in on themselves. Crunched underfoot, nature aches in silence, roots peeled, sunk back. Whiskers twitch, eyes alert, limbs prepare to bolt from this blood pool. Minutes hang like days til they depart empty handed. Hunched in the downpour shielding him, smothering his musk, the hare licks his leg, flesh scabbing. He will not limp out til morning wakes,

eyelids heavy, whole body shaking.

This poem is in the shape of a hare, which is impossible to replicate in an ebook. It is viewable on my blog, Vixie’s Stories.

In this house

In this house we build upwards, straight walls, balanced doors,

even brick-n-mortar, living breathing plaster. Imagine spaces,

protect, warm. It all moves as the seasons shift, feel its bones

twitch as the air cools down. Sifting through attic boxes

we listen to the chimney sing as the wind blows to the city.

Trickle

Feel a pause, a glimpse of sky, breadth of sea, expanse of light. Inhale it in, breathe it out, feel the presence of body, open, connected, disconnect. Leave patterns where they fall, our yesterdays where they left. Every little thing will come and go, wash over you as you greet it. Let the water drip to the dirt, let time trickle on through. These are the hands that see, feel, hear, taste and know.

Cotton & grease

He could not begin to begin, perusing the night as it was with its neon fancies and smells, this spoken dark without a face.

Watery streaks on spider-web streets, the map criss-crossing lost causes; drunk men stagger, caress walls, invisible to the suits whistling home.

This railroad smarts, rattling cage, crawls into the bowels of the earth, while solitude sits spun in cotton and grease. He thinks of how to begin.

Songs stuck on wires. Warbler, robin, tit and thrush. Muted migrations.

One hundred

Is one hundred years enough, where it resonates, faint echo? Faces sketched as caricatures pinned over papered walls.

Read the diaries of the ages, hear your lost and your found, scatter seeds and wait for snow, knowing you have much to learn.

We loiter here and barely grow, and so, what words do you own to describe a life in a sentence? Its true worth. This gold dust.

You could try to make it rhyme or you might even leave it blank. Is one hundred lives suffice

to tell us everything you know?

Salutation

This pounding sea, this clutch of wood to set idleness free beyond boundaries and lines drawn between oceans, drip-drop saturation evolving with meaning. We shape this body of water, fill our bodies with its rich yoke and return full-fed in blessing.

Flicker

Switchback waiting. Insouciant curve. Songbirds caught, wrung out on wires taut, hung in the dripping sun to dry out. It comes in waves, stops to check in, tricks you into burning what’s in the stove. Gingerbread takes me back to childhood, a home within a home, spun truly. But this web is finely knit, dew its ornament, diamond sparkles in a cluster-thick splash of yearn. Leaves whisper ragged on breezes, sunlight simpering in and out of sound. These days part and turn to speak again, embracing time on stop. It bends, depends. Stop and start. “Tread wisely as you go.” “Have some thought for others.” This space is. “What pays the bills?” “Lessen your impact.” Earth unveils roots, feels every footstep. Flicker in, flicker out. It will all stop one day.

Procrastination

I haunt pages, stand around, loitering, stare at empty words, an interesting nothing. Lines and lines drawn like parallel gates or solitary paths pointing to a wisdom unwritten here.

I loiter. The word is small but spreads its ending, seeps into the margins where it all hides, these untold stories and spectacular insights waiting to be told

trapped in the fold.

Moon spills shoals of light, silver waking starlight pearls. The Chariot swoops.

Morning curbs the night, throws it a seed, a giving hand to sink into.

Yellow streaks the day, warm yolk seeps, sky dripping sheets of light waking song.

Oceans break in time. Murmurs of memories float into endless blue.

Ebb and flow and ebb, surf on repeat formation, eternal rescue.

Doves start, rustling wings rise to sacred stained windows. White clouds greet blue sky.

Journeying southward, drifts live-buried in lost souls, clutching the good book.

Skate on polished pond. Ice forms rifts of fur clusters, eternal eights spin.

Wintry

The nights are closing in, crisp mornings barely light the way into a semi-lucid winter’s day.

Air hangs limply, shedding mist, suspending rain til it fancies to fall. A silent green permeates it all.

Sinking mud hugs our booted feet, a hard slog through sodden leaves, blackbirds chortling in the trees.

We almost expect a hobbit house to poke through sunken hedgerows, coffee beans tempting the cold nose.

Your close-up

Are you ready for your close-up? I asked if you are ready to be told what to see, hear, to feel, to be, to try not to be, if it isn’t the norm?

Welcome to the storm of glass figments, waves of imagined blue unfolding; the cares and fears you dreamed of yesterday, when we were other people.

You entertain ghosts of your waking, reflections of yourself while you sleep, forgetting you were ever so afraid of being you.

Towers in the rain

Building towers in the rain, brick by brick, splashings of mortar, sinewed muscles to weld skin and bone,

give it strength to rise up from strewn dirt and rubble. Roots grasp the ripe earth to stabilise, rock gently

a lullaby in wild weather. This fresh deluge washes over it all, a new birth. Glass goes in, taped-over

windows to the soul, staring out through giant kisses, rose-tinted. When the hat

goes on it will all be done,

eager for the first date, standing in this downpour streaking sound, eyes shut, waiting for something to start.

Exercise book

Colour triangles, perfect symmetry pose, half-bodies entwined.

Drops

Water seeping green on leaf, skips a beat to fall, swirling colours drawn.

Workmen

Morning light echoes. Drilling leaks a wall of sound amid black-feather song.

Wings

Wings spin, a deep growl permeates, wakes sleeping night. Mechanical bird.

Make space

Less space left for them, sounds of nature dissipate. I miss the moon breathe.

Nut sports

Tree to fence to nuts, grey squirrel runs the gauntlet, nose twitching with glee.

Tents

Into tents of trees, scattered twigs snap, leaf carpet. Follow the yellow.

Twigs

Leaves dust muddy ground, flicker up on branches, hands scooping for gold dust.

Owlets

Eyes stare from trunk holes, blanketed warm, snuggled down, feathers fluffed full out.

Fibonacci

Tender leaf spirals, curls of green foliage scrawls, a handshake twisting.

Black smog

Cities suffocate creativity in noise, black waves tearing holes.

Mindfulness

Breathe in, breathe out, scoop air on tongue, taste life, relish the freedom to be.

Pantoum: precious colour

We talk in shapes of precious colour, twisted about and twisted in. Our curse is that we feel it so, but we can’t bring the darkness out. Twisted out and twisted begin, can you feel how it feels to breathe? Here we won’t bring our darkness out though the moon seeks to serenade us. Can you feel how it feels to breathe, floating in a space outside yourself, while the moon serenades us? She washes skies over in silver lace, floating in a space outside yourself. Is it our curse that we feel it so, the skies washed over in silver lace, as we talk in shapes of precious colour?

Murmurs

Revolving pictures murmurate and separate. A burst of starlings.

Wither

Morning mists curl back, cursing dead skies. Worn-out husks yawn for pure water.

Begin

Bright buds squeeze open, sticky to touch, velvetine perfect small marvels.

Clouding out

When we go we will show how easy it is to run when you know the direction, the colour of the sun. We’ll set sail over the sky, chasing birds up on high, and we’ll never come down. We won’t ever come down.

December

Hold the door

Hold the door momentarily, wait for the opportune moment drawn on air, one you know, one sowed in your yesterdays.

It’s no sweat that you fail to any of your lines; they were never real anyway. Wealth has many rooms:

is it beauty, how full you are, how rich, how powerful? Are you measured by what you build or who you crush?

We write poems on boxes upturned, blown into the gutter. Small homes by the Thames,

scenic view, low energy costs.

How long can you live in a tent while the cold scolds you? We set sail on small dreams, idle them in never wishing more.

Did you leave the door ajar? They’re coming to burn all the boxes today, this river of cardboard desirous of meeting the sky.

Giants

We walk with giants, hunt in packs, feed when we will it, sleep when done.

The forest keeps us safe, gives us all we need, an existence of truth in all its burning colours.

We have a mind to go sometimes, to discover a brilliance that is new, a thing to call our own.

But mostly we wait here, neither looking too far nor peering back.

The forest is where we are.

All we can see is here, in this fleeting moment, at rest upon the hour, where we might shine.

The storm

Puddles writing words, boots splash, coats tight, huddle down. Faces dripping wet.

Strayed

Tied to a shop door, a crouching brown dog whimpers. Leaves whisper comfort.

Rough sleepers

Sleeping in boxes, ice slips its fingers inside, peers through the edges.

Snow

Frosted stars falling, snowflakes dance in figure eights, blanketing the moor.

Winter warmer

Chopping oranges, citrus zests jest, red wine pours, kissing as they mull.

Snow fell, winter hush, Crunch underfoot. Air whispers our damp warm breath back.

Morning drifts askew, secretes through curtains. Nature enters quiet rooms.

A chorus on air, rain-stripped black streaks, yellow beaks rattling lost summers.

Newborn

Where we are born anew we may scorn, we might cry, we might shake the cradle where we lie just to say

a thing, be seen, be heard. We walk a line newly drawn, enter shapes just coloured and away the time peering

into windows, the soul stealers, but waken dew for washing. These nights grow wretched old, scour the dark for a little sense.

Yet we are lacking in what we know, what we sow and borrow, for time is rushing out, and will

not stop to ask us how we are.

The Chariot

Stand over wide oceans to read signs written in water, slight trickles of sense.

Starlight explodes in a silverous stream, reflections of the moon riding backwards

to eat the horizon. We throw stones, watch them trip across this pithy dark,

lost in the squall. Skies empty of birds, songs postponed until the pink of dawn.

We search out the Chariot arching the sky; irredescent sparks let it loose upon us,

charging full throttle, looping each star. It promises something new, unrealised yet,

an echo of the thing you thought you had lost. Horses drag it full circle, hand you the reins.

Morning crisp, white light, chill air, blankets wrapt, quiver of pale goose-bumped skin.

White lace surfs the sky. A bride for the waiting moon, suited in black tie.

Dark pools, mossy stench. Green legs splayed, tongue curled, hops forth his shiny humped hide.

Curvacious, waxen, rubber ovals slice open, ooooooze citrus escape.

Rounded symmetries, puckered rind clenches flesh taut, pressurised to burst.

A missing necklace, remnant of past love’s vision, Wood lizard creeping.

Nocturnal chirpings. Listen with your tympana for Morse Code musings.

Accompaniment: geese, full flight, rough landing, splayed. Nasal thanksgivings.

Wag tail, cold bones shake. Nut-brown eyes plead, lead pulled tight. No release today.

Parcel by the door, no card. Warm lemony wafts. Cold hands bring it in.

We build bridges here, sun-stroked, pigeon-poked, flat ride. Arms across a lake.

Silver snow-clad hills, ice dances glinting like jewels, water rests on pause.

A skylark, pretty, sings to the day it loves so. Tonight it might stray.

Sinking sun drips down. Night rustles in, sprinkles stars, spreads its blanket wide.

Needles slim-eyed stitch in, out, embroider soulless, thread the world backwards.

When life opens up we’ll be chasing boomerangs, tails wagging, tongues looped.

Trees tug at stiff dirt, earth body wintry rigid, bones creaking to wake.

Rain. A magpie croaks, blue-black feathers spread wide as heaven opens.

Leaves turn green, red, grey as the world ages on pause. We wither wintered.

Berries lipstick red. Holly curls, sharp tongue scoffs at red-green prejudice.

Conifers, full stretch, walking sunshine’s evergreen. A blast of old life.

Pantoum: misted morning

In the morning misted we are thankful of the days turning in and out, soaking our vision with sunshine’s renewal, helping us forget what we wish to lose.

Here, the nights turn in and out, and we start the day with renewed heart, helping us forget what we choose to lose. Draw back the curtains and let life in.

We start each new day with renewed heart, breathe in the openness of transparent air, draw back the curtains to welcome life in. It fills this skeletal house we exist in alone.

Breathe in the openness of transparent air, soak your vision with sunshine’s renewal. It fills this skeletal house we exist in alone.

In the morning misted we are grateful.

Aquarius

We’re in the Age of Aquarius, I couldn’t say. Fish swim backwards, the Earth seeks its feet. We could go wading if the skies clear, count starfish in the sun, teach them to walk on land, a five-sided dice.

Can you breathe underwater, beneath it all, the days and the nights, find shelter in the blue? We wait for rainbows to transport us away into storybooks of old, ogres and spinning wheels,

fair maidens unfurling hair.

Do they always follow rain, these half-moon smiles, Crayola colours washing over? We light lanterns, pave with colourful crêpe, cast fluorescent lights echoing their own sound. In this Age of Aquarius are rainbows allowed?

Tiny dragons

Morning sits up and begins with the hum of a small dragon gliding along the skirting board, bumping his nose here and there. Light refracted seeks observance, the opening of drapes, the extinguishing of lamps, but sometimes we just want to read, sip a cup of tea twice slow, eat our breakfast out of tune and ponder hibernation, as bears do this time of year and tiny, fiery dragons possibly did all those centuries ago.

I see

I see what the seeing sees, hear what the hearing hears, say what the saying says, smell what the scented is, touch what hands can touch.

We open our senses to the sun, seeking solace in our own skin, litter our minds with myriad dreams, expectations and new creations – a walk into a light we can draw.

Boat of leaves

A boat made out of leaves, sodden, sinking, red breeze. You didn’t think it through, trying to row across the night to flickering starlit shores, sparkles to be caught like fish. This black expanse holds secrets of time and space interwoven, a lace of dancing lights you will only see this once.

Christmas is off in Tier 4

Christmas is off, the headlines scoff – if you’re living in Tier 4 you’re well & truly ducked.

Family visits are a no-go to protect the old, the infirm and the sick amid this pandemic.

There will be no elves this Christmas time and Santa won’t be chilling down your chimney.

He’s at home isolating cos he’s hit that age and no-one can travel

into the dreaded Tier 4.

Rudolph is on the travelator trying to stay fit and trim, missing the dreaming faces of all the kids sleeping.

But Mrs Claus has the answer! “You’re magic,” she tells Santa, “so no virus can affect you. You’re basically bionic.”

So Santa is revving up the sleigh while Rudolph polishes his nose. Look up at the sky on Christmas Eve cos they’re sneaking into Tier 4. Ho, ho, ho!

Rudolph the red-nosed crooner

‘Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer had a very shiny nose’, so the song goes, as everyone knows, but no one knows how he loved to sing his heart out.

This reindeer knew he could carry a tune, wrap it up and make it special, belting out his hits of the decade as Santa steered the sleigh through the sky.

His songs could be heard in the Milky Way, on earth and on all of the planets, echoing around the entire galaxy. Even the tone-deaf stars could hear him.

Everyone loved Rudolph, he was just so nice, so no-one could tell him what was true, that he couldn’t sing for love or money –

all his songs were well out of tune!

So all of the reindeer wore ear plugs and plastered big grins on their faces cos no-one wanted to hurt poor Rudolph as he led the sleigh crooning through the wispy clouds.

Gifts wrapped, stockings filled, a cheeky glass of champers while the kids sleep tight.

Frosted fingers twist embroidered patterns floating. Silver lace sparkles.

Rudolph polishes his nose, dusts his coat and hooves. It’s the Big Day Out.

Bouncing over clouds, Claus steers the sleigh downwards-sky, chortling. White beard blows.

The turkey takes off, farmer falls face flat. Wings stretch. “You’re not cooking me!”

Five on Christmas Eve

Small laces, straight faces, a father’s thanks to the world, trudging through the thickset snow, happy he is almost home.

Baking tarts, warming hearts, a mother’s thanks to the world, making cakes rise and mince pies, their rich aroma carrying far.

Tail waggy, fur scraggy, a dog’s thanks to the world, following Grandfather into the glen, ensuring no harm comes to him.

Sleepy eyed, hands wide, a child’s thanks to the world, ripping open colourful paper,

giggling at the joy inside.

Christmas Day poem. Merry Christmas!

Santa loves his silver sleigh

Santa comes but once a year, his belt isn’t made of leather, and every time he combs his beard the hairs tumble out like feathers.

Rudolph is his favourite reindeer because he’s just really clever. He’s good at games and tests and stuff, and he’ll go ride in any weather.

Santa’s big love is his silver sleigh. He likes to polish it night and day, and go for joyrides once a week, waving at Earth and the Milky Way.

Mrs Claus cooks the most wondrous pies.

Of this, Santa’s round belly is the proof. She also mulls a wintry clove brew that even Rudolph loves – that’s the truth!

The elves have wrapped all the gifts now, the fairies have bathed them in magic dust, so it’s time for Santa to rev up the sleigh: “Rudolph, come on! It’s the British Isles or bust!”

Sprite

On a morning a dancing sprite in evergreen lights.

Plunge into sun sprays where you find them, dew in ethereal balance, petals heavy with sound.

Strike a pause in a moment, hold it still, so steady it can’t drop.

See it freeze-frame in your viewer, so individual.

Count the stars ever in motion in night’s thicket.

Watch them wander this huge expanse, breathing in the knowledge of planets.

“Dear Santa, I’m good, so where were my gifts this year?” The sighing boy frowns.

Santa speeds over chimney tops, reindeer bemused – he’s kept all the gifts!

Glass ball holds a scene of snowman, hill, tree and ice. Shaken, the snow flakes.

The unopened gift sits beneath the tree, waiting for excited hands.

Clove halls

A wrecking ball in a hall of cloves, shroud sheets, bric-a-brac. Horses stand untethered, gallop the grey corridors, hooves clipping tiled floors.

Spaces blanket careful sound, a repartee tucked into sunset splashed in colour vivid. It’s a ripening of distance, essence of what is loved and left. Streaks of glitter.

Citrus scents of orange peel, spilt cinnamon permeate air, transport knowledge only so far. The horses flick their manes,

watch morning wake up from inside bay windows.

A collection of geese rise, wings open like envelopes, and suddenly the sky is filled with accents of white.

Parcel by the door, no card. Warm lemony wafts. Cold hands bring it in.

Chopping oranges, citrus zests jest, red wine pours, kissing as they mull.

White lace surfs the sky. A bride for the waiting moon, suited in black tie.

Snow fell, winter hush, underfoot crunch. Air whispers our damp warm breath back.

Frosted stars falling, snowflakes dance in figure eights, blanketing the moor.

An orange fox strides, a half-body in snowdrifts. Paws plunge, tail bobbing.

A blackbird carols, perched on a snowman’s stick pipe. He listens and smiles.

Pure pearls twirl to earth, twisting, sink into grey sludge for boots to slosh through.

Huddled in a box, Bob waits for change. She arrives, takes him home to warm.

Slumped, tied to a post, brown spaniel yelps. A boy stops, unties the frayed rope.

Wildflowers

Footsteps echo in this chilled room once so warm.

Missing the sun, a magpie huddles, reluctant to hop.

He recalls summer, the heat on his back ruffling feathers.

It peeks at times, this dripping yolk, holding on to the sky.

And we tread water, rise like wildflowers

squeezed in across fields,

heads swaying in the breeze. Buzzing bees stalk us, iring our pastel colours,

following our scent for miles and miles to feed on us. We are such delicate beauties.

Packed like commuters, we try to maintain distance, but we are rooted here,

not walking or turning. Everything is stationary, our existence so simple.

Stems blow, petals unfurl. We furnish spring and summer with a wealth of colour.

January 2021

I await moonlight; a glimmer in the dark spies echoes in the night.

Snowflakes stream and glow. Sparkling in the light, they fall individual.

Berries lipstick red. Holly curls, sharp tongue scoffs at red-green prejudice.

Silver snow-clad hills, ice dances glinting like jewels, water rests on pause.

Winter evening

The nights are closing in, crisp mornings barely light the way into a semi-lucid winter’s day.

Air hangs limply, shedding mist, suspending rain til it fancies to fall. A silent green permeates it all.

Sinking mud hugs our booted feet, a hard slog through sodden leaves, blackbirds chortling in the trees.

We almost expect a hobbit house to poke through sunken hedgerows, coffee beans welcomed by our noses.

Spin the wheel

Spin the wheel back into the wishing time, see the days run together, crouched in forward kneel. You could wander off-keel, throw breadcrumbs to the wolves, water flowers with words.

These patterns in ever-circles drip time. Seeds blow out. Dandelions lose their heads to view the world on air.

We talk of moving pictures, visions within sensible things, thoughts so wild we freeze. Take a chance on substance, throw a seven-sided dice,

a never-landing split echo of choice, redoubled, rethought.

We watch the morning bend in an explicit rainbow hour, trying to how to shower the earth in colour.

Sky waits

Sky waits expectant, recognises each wandering eye, knowing when tears will spill, clouds yawning wide.

Dark lisps, it cannot jell, silver curls itself twinkling, threads the pitch, embroiders tiny footprints to guide the way for lost souls still wandering, moonlight snaking through the hush.

Snow flower

Tiniest snow-white petals like freshwater pearls, star-like clusters swaying on a stem so spindly it looked to break in the hearkening wind. Yet it proved so hardy, lone amongst skinny weeds, concealing its brightness so even the bees didn’t see. The man sheltered it with the curve of his hand, pitying its aloneness, its delicate beauty, for it had a right to be.

Driller on the road

They’re digging up the road outside, the driller killers tarmac dicing, victim silent in this bloody war, tools splitting, plunging down deep into the subterranean swirl.

The city’s backbone rides on out, transporting feet and vehicles between destinations near and far. Listen to the vibrations hurrying out, carrying their murmur to the city limits.

Needs must

Needs must, so people like to say, but whose needs are the must-worthy?

The majority focus on their wants, compromising only to their own limits, holding their requirements most dear: “We must do what is right for us.”

So where can we find a balance, make a mark of separation in the sand? It will shift with the coming waves, the ebb and flow of daily life.

We could gather shells on either side to ensure the line never moves, that stasis is the measure of ourselves, an inflexible stubborness to give.

The horizon bubbles in the heat of day, the sea full out, glinting silver spray, and where we stand our feet sink in, our toes collecting streams of sand.

There are no dividing lines, no partitions. The one we drew encomes us all.

Stumped

A stump squats on the ground, flat-topped, lines showing an age far greater than ours. This is the marker where a tree once stood, arching its limbs over our heads, an umbrella for our rainy days, protection from the sun’s rays.

They say nature raises our spirits in these lonely lockdown hours, dispersing anxiety, a sense of calm. And so this tree did its job for us, the power of green raining down. We gazed up in awe of this giant when we were small, clambered up

branches to see what the clouds hold, listening to the whistling leaves.

We rested our backs against its bark, almost wishing away our adulthood. Who will be our leafy stand-in doctor now? All I can see is a stump on the ground where a man decided to cut it down.

Morning frosted

Morning finds us all the same as we were the previous day,

wrapped in our own chill skin watching geese take to the sky.

Blankets reminisce of warm slumber, coffee floods the room with earth

and frost whispers on the windowpane. The lake lies still, an open mirror,

gazed into by the birds flying over. Unlike Narcissus, they do not pause.

This serene scene, glistening white. I resist the urge to press ‘Play’.

Daily Special

Your options are on the menu card. Hey, what’s cooking? The tasty scoop. Take your pick on the chopping board, choose strife or an easy life.

Fail to choose, the waiter will serve you the chalkboard’s Meal of the Day. Use your chopsticks wisely in the dessert you fall into.

You might work your way up over decades of hard graft only to lose it all in a day, walk a different road

cos your usual one is closed. Today’s culinary options are limited, the economy constricted,

leaving a shortage of ingredients:

just the one meat course. Hold your nose if you can’t swallow. The other diners want to know how it tastes.

I watched a film the other night called The Bad Batch and this poem was inspired by that.

Desert grit

Scraps of desert tracks, prints etched in white sand;

grit chastened on the wind blows in from the east side.

This no-man’s land holds out a hand spread like a dinner table,

stained with ill-gotten flesh. Say a prayer before supper time.

Wire cuts its barb, severed names curdle sustenance before it’s milked.

An entrance taken only once. Caged animals can never return.

In the mix

In the mix we are invisible, serving nothing on a platter, keeping it to ourselves, private, zero for the anonymous crowd, too busy on their phones to notice us trip around the bright lights of broader places. Myriad faces spill to bring colour to this urban grey. Movement is swift to call us away from our small, brick prisons. The day is lithe, an idle sprite seeking a play thing, a listener, and we are free here, one to one, a part of nature’s lichen green. Where the sea is waking we can breathe and idle an hour just seeing.

Valentine

He sends red roses as an expression of love. The colour of blood.

Morning’s sky, slate grey, dark clouds heavily pregnant. Their waters will break.

Old paper, new life: a green galloping horse bolts; a white swan’s first lake.

Soft snores, feline dreams. He sleeps like the letter E, curled back, tail flickers.

The woodpecker

How wide is the step on which you sit, how square the tile, how far the dial?

We sand down the stars by night, so you can find your way by daylight.

Nothing gives in winter’s cold breast; its heart beats colder these drawn hours.

I saw a woodpecker once, its soft bright scarlet breast, black-and-white markings

in stark contrast to the withered grey tree; a hollow bark that would be pulled down.

It seemed alien, too exotic for the garden, almost shouting out its own standout.

It had flown in less than a half hour. I don’t know if it found a reason to return,

but here it sought a kind of sanctuary. Where will you fly to this morning?

The day rides on your expectations. Is the bark too hollow for your misgivings?

The caretaker

We watch the carriers of the night, darkness roused inside, the crow’s carrion,

life’s raw supper stewed between oceans; a depth unquantified. We lie in stupor.

The bulbs need fixing here. Still glass shapes itself into phantoms dusted out

over walls of empty play. They draw murals, the children, running paint til it slides

into something recognisable, ardent colour. It enriches; a sustenance to enliven grey.

Rain races down this labyrinthine brick, narrow footways twist like knotted hair.

He carries his anxieties tight-wound, a ball of wool, each strand intangible in the pack.

We watch the night steal away each light, switching it off, the last caretaker of the world.

Humbly, he never says a word, false or true. His heart lies heavy, but he never lets it speak.

The tremor

Footsteps wake the tremor, the obsequious hum, the filament,

this breath of fire eluding us, electric mayhem on the wire.

A switchback. We all feel it. We pour water on our ions,

rehearse a million excuses for no. Run in stasis; see how far you get.

A peer into the future rides us back, returning to our childhood dreams,

these sparks of light we held so dear, the pirouetting ballerina, the acorn tree.

Open house

Armed streets, a dissolute wash, nuances we failed to keep,

motion evades in a sweep of red. Feet march, they don’t saunter

or stop to watch & learn, to dawdle. Eyes watch, cameras ever focused.

There is no private world for you. Your life is theirs. The keys know it.

We grew up in ordinary anonymity, untraced, unpictured, non-existent.

This exposure so expected, normal now. You can stare into your only reflection here,

where the breeze blows your face in ripples. Framed by branches, you’re unfreezable.

Timekeepers

You would not think it was morning, so dark to seem like 4am. The sky,

a strange dark blue, hangs cloudless, perched over houses like a night bird,

heavy tempered, a somewhat scowl. Square eyes light up across town,

stare out with an eager expectancy. A stranger has travelled in from far,

time greater than the seconds he set. No one sees him, these glass voyeurs,

too enrapt by the still dark heavens. He lays this blanket everywhere he calls,

silencing speech before it thinks to rouse. Even the magpies choose their words carefully.

He places the timer on his battered case, judges as the sand begins to between.

These two worlds, he seeks to link them before the sky has a chance to call itself day.

The world before your birth

The world before your birth; your mother existing before you,

loving a life eternally young in the post-war years of hope,

before working, cleaning, birthing, responsibilities, the grown-up mum.

She loves horses, perches a-top, rides giggling like a river flows.

Loves dancing, her dresses long, barefoot, a carefree wonderful.

She loves talking, whimsical, dres and acting the clown.

Summering in Uncle Stan’s caravan, where Len drives his motor over cliff

and steps out without a scratch. Mill Sands with its little plots & fences,

the sea brushing sandy feet away while kids dig between sunbathers.

I shake a snowstorm and she laughs, standing inside, hugging a smile.

In charcoal

We are drawn sideways, sketched with ease, charcoal-matched, discordant lines our frayed edges, stories etched in clumsy limbs, foretold. Shading criss-crosses our breadth, builds layers of soft semblance, our expressions curious in this echo. In the final details a new beginning.

Circular pools

Morning, as we know it, numbers shunted in a circle,

a merry-go-round spun on tides. Day comes too swiftly to it,

opens with a rain of song, light, feathered, lithe play.

Our way is lit with promise. Yellow splits the sky wide open,

splashes the world with colour dripping from the bluest sky.

We could catch it in our hands. Our footsteps echo on stone,

avoid the saturated mud pools, sodden leaves our carpet strewn

through this glimpse of park life. Swans glide, eyes full on us,

expectant, but we are empty handed. The lake blows, circular pools

mimic our expression and vanish into waters clear as conscience.

A body in a jar

A body in a jar – sunlight glints glass, reflects expression, exposes flesh complexity, lullabies of the newborn, for the curious perusal of strangers. Liquids pickle onions in the same way; just add salt to taste. A Victorian oddity, tragic or enlightening, stacked high on shelves housed in dark obscurity until the museum doors open and the flood begins.

Cotton-wool snow

Snow bunches like cotton wool, dotted tails crossing the lake,

a frozen, speckled photograph, ivory dusted upon white;

reflections of greyless pearl, water’s circles pure scratches,

bubble silent, captured now. The mallards have flown

to where the water still blows, beaks spading the soft dirt shore.

This cloud-free no-colour sky casts the scene in black & white,

frosting the green, crisp serene, silver glitters on holly like sugar.

Trees walk like shadow men, dip to touch the fresh ground

with straggly stick-thin limbs, leaving scratched striations.

Listen to their hollow crunch echo around the forest walls.

Snow blown, dark wind biting, the trees bough before they sleep.

The accused

We stall, we count packages against the wall. Humble play, but these are not things. Here are people wrapped in brown paper, fastened with string. They have no faces, anonymous and indistinguishable. Yet they breathe quietly, as if too much sound is another offence. Each one bears a stamp, a label handwritten, an address we don’t recognise. And none

of them move at all. Who decided they were guilty? Did they do anything really, or just be? We wait now for the postman. He’s overdue, and brown paper won’t last. All the edges might come unglued. And we’d have to piece them all back together. Again.

Coming home

The dark doesn’t reveal anything, everything concealed, forsaken.

A wounded fox leans on stilted legs, but he won’t break, he won’t fall;

he doesn’t know the meaning of it. This grey urban won’t kill him yet.

The labyrinth welcomes him, draws him into its scattered neon heart.

He misses the fields his ancestors knew, played in, raised young and hunted.

Nowadays, he scuffs around for scraps, looks for bowls donated by humans.

It’s their land, their rules, their way, the animals come second, ever lower.

A car honks as it drives by, rain rushing, just to see him flinch, hunch back down.

The mist yawns, opens to a stilted cry. He follows her scent. Something known.

Paper horses

This page is sliding, feel the numbers run, words congealing into one. Invisible lines. Unglued, paper horses break through the pauses. No margins. This writ won’t quit; the wild spirit leaps off the page.

We are what we know: shelves stuffed with books, chapters spent, and life creeping in.

Silence hums. We sit reading other people’s lives, ours on pause for now.

She tuts if we speak, taps the ‘Silence’ sign. Freedom waits for us outside.

Planting

We step inside pictures, sketches of our outer selves, lived in and eaten whole. We count ourselves unworthy of the things we need. It’s not a question of want; in knowing who we are, we’ve calculated what we have. Life doesn’t live behind closed doors. And we can’t breathe sorrow. These potted plants cannot grow without water, love and sun.

Are we ordinary?

Are we ordinary – is this an ordinary life? Who calls the shots on ordinary? It isn’t you or me, or them; we’re just sitting in the kitchen eating breakfast, drinking tea, waiting for the day to begin & serve us something wonderful, lift us out of our complacent stasis.

We talk of ordinary things – conversations we’ll forget later, washing dishes so thoroughly as if someone’s marking us. It’s blue-bright, and this in itself is something remarkable to me. A robin is singing to the sun and already the day becomes

something extraordinary.

The only song

The only song is one you sung in time before meaning in accents wrung.

You knew the words before they could wound, letters unwritten, unspoken sound.

So came the sea, rushing to confound; surging blue waves to be rewound.

February

The bee

Paper curls, a lime-green hand unfurling fragile flowers, brushed by breezes sending petal scents afar.

A bee lands, writes a letter in pollen stolen, relishing the taste of it all. And leaves the flower empty.

Daughter

She will open our door in the morning when the clock chimes the nineth hour and a taxi will wait at the end-path, the beginning of her drift away.

She will kiss my cheek at eight o’clock, hug me as I make toast and tea, squeeze fresh orange and tease our dog, tell me things I’ll misunderstand.

She will tell me how she’ll miss us all as she carries her case out the doorway and walks her lifeline to the car, following her own heart as she must.

She will wave as my morning caves in and I will force a smile and wave back. I will close the door and stand quite still,

and then will begin my great unravelling.

The unclearing

We wash a childlike glee out of our hair, out of our day, filling the blanks with lists of things we need to do.

Endless tasks, pigeon holes, tanked-up ideas newly flown, and trivial are our dreams held up against the real world.

We live in caves without walls beside oceans bereft of waves, lit by a sun gone AWOL in a sky no longer seeking blue.

We stand. We sit. We sleep. We talk of things in double prose, hunting words we long forgot,

fixing them into sentences too small.

Everyone waits for the wind to blow from the east, the great unclearing of dust and rag and bone, rattling this cage of sameness

to breathe in a life unworn. It rushes in with an open door, born of thought, bearing truth, smoking what we lost along the way.

The gaslighter’s hobby

It’s a kind of deer trap, a freeze-frame. Control . No place to step out of line. There is no room for error. You have to be perfect if you’re born female. Clearly, you’re lucky to be tracked, stalked, harassed. You’re not meant to complain if they tear you to pieces bit by bit in distain. Watched, listened or read, but hey, it’s all in your head. If you’re the gaslighter’s hobby, he won’t show his hand, guarding his privacy so hard while ensuring you have none.

Fruit skins

We grow older, contemplative, like fruit, its skin ageing; not withering but toughening from the inside out.

We know our pressure points, the lines drawn deeper; what we do not like, what we used to love.

We are as the sky turns from dawn to striking dusk, yellow-red-orange shine. Starlight lends us sight.

Our memories grow so full we forget names & nouns; time begins to run together,

thoughts a patchwork quilt.

We take a bite of the apple and it still tastes just the same.

London trees

Here, they chop at trees before 8am. Someone forgot the eulogy in their hurry with cutter and scythe. We bail out, take a trip beyond concrete & grit to fields of towering oaks, untouched by man. No one says they’ve grown too big, too wide, too anything. Resplendent in their bark costumes, they loosen hair, stretch in yoga poses, whispering songs they know.

Willows

We hang solitary over trickling brook, salient voice of water without a purpose; record days backwards, journeying to the womb where speech is dumb, words unformed, innocence unspilled, protected. We talk to the trees, our neighbours here, as we bough our heads in silent suggestion of a common prayer.

Summer unwinds

Summer unwinds, fledglings flown, our insides pile up in cardboard, myriad shapes battered & sealed, dusted over in the recesses. We make notes of contents, relive each thread of memory, somewhat frayed & greyed. We sit in boxes, peering out of holes we drilled ourselves, even and round. There are no missing pages or pictures; we gathered every single one. Here we are, waiting to be taken somewhere new. Waiting to be home.

Gustless sky

All is quiet this night, all breezes spent, gustless sky full still, the world frozen now, so out of tune we pluck new notes to describe it. The somnambulant brigade outwalks the darkness, throws it breadcrumbs of starlight, switching on to light the night like fireworks crackling, but all heat is lost and the sky will fill soon with a breath of snow, fresh blown to fall free in shapes so unbelievable we forget we are ice.

Dew frozen

Morning glitters, dew frozen, droplets fall like earrings suspended on grasses submerged. Tree stumps haunt in black suits this pearl-white silent drift washed over the forest scape. These shapes walk like hollow men, their insides scraped out, limbs stretched jagged to a sky so cold the blue is wrung out. Dirt crunches underfoot, newly hardened, concrete earth; insects navigate a harder cell, birds peck a frozen dinner table.

The hunting party

With time he recreates it, reshapes the order of things,

the sell-out, the hunting party, first shots & the fallout.

Responsibility is too big a word. He ties his actions into a ball,

strands to deep to unravel, sticks them to the post.

Along this pitch-black road, he cares not how he came to it.

He spreads the word far, this one-sided filament,

poison leaking from his hands. The gloves no longer fit.

It’s in his breath now, pours wherever he goes.

Parch

Night flows, a river crossing years meandering; rose petals ride

the yawn out, this eternal splicing of rain, flood, tears of a child alone.

We wait in line, patient, enduring day upon day upon day. The driest months

settle in, sand tongue, scolds food & might; a non-moving current

without ambition.

Pine for the curve of rain. We wait. The land stricken holds out its hands.

Mapped out

Are you lost? Asking for a friend. It sure looks that way. Stood still, surveying the map until it bleeds. It may as well be emptied, blank, waiting to be drawn upon.

The roads twist out without you. Shadows can’t bend. You have yours. Some leak into the pavement gaps, fill the spaces people left behind. He carries eyes in a pickle jar.

Light flickers, even in darkness. It has an edge. Stealing bright. They said you danced in laughing; they said your body grew heavy – now you’re lighter without it.

Do you take sugar in your tea? Clouds gather, look fit to break. Count on rain, someone said. I see a lone caribou outside, walking the long road eastward.

We know not where he goes. Is he lost? Do you think he’s lost?

Judder

Is this a rip in time where we judder on repeat, anchors set midway, never up, never down?

We count stories backwards instead of reading the lines, watch birds walk on water and whales mount the skies.

We float in discrete bubbles, apart, not feeling true, wrapped inside cotton clouds, looking for a voice.

With the world we are done, only waiting on the freeway while neon signs on-off wink

to a twisted track of sunlight

carried in on the ebb and flow. Drill your toes into wet sand, and feel the sun creep inside your skin, watering emotions

you thought were comatose until the rough sea subsides, creeping out, creeping in. We are tepid. We are found.

The round dance

He brings honey, the bee man, collector of yellow gold, curled for tasting on a spoon, an endless drip from heaven.

His smile is like sunshine waking, low laughter a mindful buzz, fair hair as fine as little wings, and we find ourselves addicted.

At the fayre, we form a circle of obedient bees softly humming, newly sprung from our hives, strung together by his honey spell.

Delusions

Delusions may scatter like stars, breaking in and hurtling out, grinding themselves into dust, no longer sparkling, now quite still, leaving no mark upon the sky.

We squint to perceive their echoes in vain; no red halos, unglowing. The dark is blind without starlight, without a flicker of movement.

Is it something we should worry about, now that they’ve closed their eyes? In waiting for dawn, we cross fingers that this is only the night refuelling and the stars will return tomorrow.

Burning red

Burning leaves crackle out, crimson-red to sienna flaking, tears disintegrating mid-air. We borrow, but we can’t find.

Tender is the tinder blossom, not waiting for spring to flower. Words greet the sky mutely, only read and never spoken.

An impermanent statement flames into a broken promise. It’s nothing now. It floats free. Scant memories taken by the wind.

Here are some of the poetry course prompts for this week: circles or straight lines, delusions, freedom, permanence/impermanence. The ‘body electric’ is from Walt Whitman.

Wrong frequency

Hear the hum, the whirr, bleating on a higher frequency, a pulsation on all points. Repeat on. Repeat off. Breathe and collect a new language without words. Welcome insomnia’s waves of myriad colours conversing. A quickened beat of heart hammers the rib cage out, the ‘body electric’ on alert. They coloured outside the lines, watered a fixation over til the soil, fully saturated, could never a planting.

The written word will never sell, locked in the deep freeze. A subtle blacklisting hums.

Slumber

We are as time flies, leaking out, creating new muscle from old sinews. Walk in slumber, talk divine, leave decisions to another. A man on the kerb murmurs he wants to be left alone. One door slams closed where another one opened. We gather olive-moss shoes under our feet, stasis shaping the glued skies, a web for the birds serenaded by the gods. We watch daffodils open; a split-second moment, golden horns spilling. We don’t want to miss it,

this little ode to spring, slow in its approach, buttoned-up, hat on. We get nostalgic here in the waiting room, where nothing can begin.

Bubbles

We live in blue, breathe it in, move in bubbles we create anew, glass windows to watch the world in the knowledge we can’t be seen. It’s months since we touched a person, held hands or felt a warm hug grow. We walk in pictures, heads rooted in a past we so differently. We gather our cards, stare out, still, our skin relishing this kiss of sun.

Time drop

It drops, time. It spreads over, sliding waves cascading, blue-grey years, tears lost in an unbridled storm. It separates and skews in sunlight, skies strewn with our own reflections, pulled into being when recognised.

Surf lifts and draws under, piles up over, watery mountains rushing to breathe, descending into a playground for dolphins, arched, deep-diving, waxen curves. We lose sight of time. Seek it out anew. This ticking loses itself fully submerged.

A lone swimmer strikes for the horizon, faint smoke-line drifting beyond oceans. It’s a one-way ticket and he lacks the will for the return. A white flagged boat drifts,

the sailors’ attention rapt, but the dolphins riding the torrent swells have long seen him. They wait for when his pace slackens, a silent warning that his time is running out.

Brackets

In the bracket, walking a tightrope, listen to cloud formations, water droplets gathering

dust. Motions of morning creep slow across the sky, same-old scuttles in. Data an eight-legged insect.

Things flit from pause into an endless end-game. An orderly queue lights up, plays dumb. Déjà vu.

Pictures in time

I see you in photographs sometimes, staring back, eyes softly crinkled in the beckoning sun, a laughter line. I’d like to step inside, walk the beach, linger and loiter, and listen intently, hold your hand, ask you to recite all those stories I was too young to ask. Time-travel into a photo is my wish, tracing familial lines to all these places to live and learn, and . This one image takes me way back, details blurred, but I can smell the sea. Me, sitting with a spade and digging; you, taking your forever photographs.

Bristle (the dog)

Unkempt brown bristles, rough brush on stick legs runs haphazard, slinking some, cowers down, back shaking in a cold glimpse of rain. Shudder. Picture unperfect sun.

Ears down, languid whimper out. Alleys snake, pancake walls, water slithers, trickles cold. Bristle scavenges, seeks pieces lost, as unwanted as himself, wanders hungry, skin-frame talking.

Sunset, he trips the light crossing, zebra path to Paradise downhill; his regular bowl waits, queueless. She strokes his head, utters words,

leads him to the shed out back, slight drafted solace from this night.

Blue + white

White lines, traces of blue, circular light, misplaced hue.

A wing’s breadth, jagged wake, sliding shores, rested lake.

Blighted trees

Lightning singed, limb-struck, blackened trunks empty out of life. Hollowed ground. Sit.

White plague creeps over brown knobbled branches emptied of apples. It yearns.

Hollowed out, grey self. Once majestic, skeletal. A woodpecker stops.

By night they walk, stalk their forest lair. Faint spectres. Giants with no bark.

Shells flutter

Shells flutter in the blue, pull on invisible strings linking up to the stars; faint moonlight converse flickers.

This speckled carpet undulates, reflective, blinking morse code messages to the sleeping fish, deep depths impenetrable.

Seaweed mats creep out catch driftwood cracking. The air curves quiet, birdless, all sound sacred to the sea,

this gentle swish of motion hungering for dawn’s rays to awaken this stillness,

bring everything back to life.

Sun-blessed caravans, metal cases, laughter lines. A white picket fence.

Flexing wing muscles, coos on the downdraft, flapping a heavy landing.

A handful of songs, cacophony of perfect pitch. A breakfast call.

Notes in diaries while you are forgetting dates to relive later.

Actions without thought, behaviour beyond our own. Understanding sails.

March

Notes on spring waking: yellow sprays on green, unique patterns in the skies.

Nature’s murmurings. Sky, sea and curved cove. Motion drifts, igniting hope.

Conjure a waking. Crocus carpets, skies serene. A burst of lime leaves.

Sun spills, floodlight scrawl, drips from sky to sea to crawl over horizons.

Snow petals perch, skim olive stems nodding. Sweet bloom, silken purse, soft touch.

Tasting buttercups dipped in dew, golden speckles light up dusted chins.

Open doorways through watchful houses, curtains rent. Weekly wages spent.

Sleeping in doorways, shiver-wrapped, counting pennies. Nothing made for rent.

Homeless hands empty; no one carries cash today. Is this their future?

We hang bird feeders, but nothing for human mouths, yet we could be them.

Intervals

They wait for the interval, welcome night in distinct stages, ever green and ever lost, listen to the dark empty out.

We sit as kings, survey it all, while others fish for scraps in bins so tall you could fall in; they don’t see you, snug in bed.

This rotting smell we recognise in the air, pressing on our faces, entering our bones by osmosis. We’re not immune to all this.

The happenings beyond our doors still echo when we close them; all those scenes don’t disappear

in waves ‘til they’re nothing at all.

The man still combs the refuse searching for a bite to eat. The fox still runs the gauntlet, street to street, crossing cars.

This is the true nocturne, waking as we sleep, living as we dream. Poverty creeps in at the edges and we ignore it at our peril.

Wheels on water, snakes hissing, slush & sloop, shifting gears. An artful swim.

We breathe in the day, floral fresh, sun lit, grass blown; a pure life refuel.

Black scamp of a dog, leaps high to chomp on the lead. Circling, happy soul.

Shuttered like a clam, a ‘Keep Out’ to the wide world. This window is closed.

The day in embers blown, sky bleeding, red-blush down. Night waits whispering.

Specks of red-pink dawn, drifting yawn, wakes the still skies, plucks the day open.

A rooftop scamper, tail uplift, shakedown, leap forth… Bird feeder crashing.

Grid invites – begin! The laughing ‘O’ seals the deal, a silent cross falls.

The name signifies. Stolen books, libellous words. A blacklisted crow.

Cards of histories. Catalogued lives, name order. Dog-eared mysteries.

Peace. A slice of it. Emptied out, fast tempest nil. No ships wrecked. Calm sea.

Crossing garden walls, ginger tufts, scraggy hide, slate eyes talk, expectant.

Jewel bugs

We clash like colours bursting outside their seams, leaking out; a disturbance of unruly hue, staggering in our audacity to be.

Sparks from fireflies dig us out from earth’s embers, dripping night, and we are come to rebuild. Light hangs heavy, red lanterns

turn the green grass bright blue. Languid are the skinny trees. They loiter, waiting for us to cleanse, curious how we roll time backward.

The flood

You lost hope when the rains came in, tempest-torn, emotion-drawn, and day became a speck too far away. Photos and memories glued in suitcases of old,

taken by the sea like driftwood. You write pages torn in dissaray, stolen & resold, while sentences play out til they drop, set loose in times you can’t stand in, the field too vast, the pit too deep to crack.

You need a ticket, but you can’t play cards that lack their heads. The director watched your role unravel, cues dripped from stages. The ark turned its back.

Sleeping stars

Where upon the moon? In this space, rendered small, so light, fitting and welcoming. All the stars, they sleep, no edge to their fall, glitter spirals. Smoking lightly, dreams take to the skies, a conscious forming of jigsaws set sail. The light, it breathes easy, relates stories for your mind’s eye to dwell in, find sanctuary, and rescue yourself in slumber.

The original word

The original word turns on a stand, displayed for all to see. A world in patterns found, group vision, once commonly spoken, now soundless, sealed with boundaries; a thick glass shield preventing escape. It’s too dangerous, they decided for us, so we can’t listen when it speaks.

All these little birds were flouncing their funky stuff on Dancing with the Birds last night. My favourite so far is McGregor’s bird with his crazy crown.

Atop a wood pole, he struts his yellow-tailed dance. A female flutters.

Little red-yolk bird unveils his dish-like bower. Eyes contract, he flirts.

Feathers fluff, he curves, angles, straight-keel, yoga-style, blue-black sheen bristling.

He hops, quills twitching, tail feathers twist, scarlet blaze. Yellow-bum hula.

Books republished, sold. Another title, new name. Stealer takes a life.

Fields of lavender wet the senses, rain-fuelled rise of indigo clouds.

What is endless?

What is endless, what is true?

A brush of leaves, rough clip of bark.

The sun endures, this ever-blast

of precious light, a pure being.

Even the rain can’t seek to quench it,

this burnished spill where we stand.

What is here is never truly lost.

Knickers to chips & salt

We’re past the point of reinventing, growing older in our big knickers, snoozing while we check in with TV, a cigarette butt tattooing our hand.

Newspapers don’t teach us anything new, we know before we peruse the pages. In times old we wrapped chips inside, pecked at them with wooden forks.

You could count on the turn of the tide back then, the sea that always came in, beating against the walls containing it, tempting us out, to follow it somewhere.

But we never left this town in the end, stayed while friendships up and left, seeking adventure or a different life,

something to wish upon, call their own.

Today, Wayne Couzens, a police officer, was charged with the kidnap and murder of Sarah Everard.

Reclaim these streets

I’d like to walk day or night where I like without fear.

I’d like to walk in a forest deep, smell the trees alone without fear.

I’d like to take a nightbus home, and not be hassled, face a leer.

I’d like to exit a station at night, not feel I’m running the gauntlet.

All of this shouldn’t happen at all; we should feel safe enough to breathe.

Why are we paying for being women

when we are happy in our female skin?

Is it hate or is it a desire for control, and where does that hate come from?

I’ve travelled the globe alone without fear, so why aren’t we safe at home, right here?

Traces

Where we begin we leave traces of ourselves; thin strips of life grown, birds awaiting dew fall under a many golden sun.

Starlight

We are as the stars tell us, shining brightly by moonlight, a little tarnished at the edges by the impact of circumstance.

Still, we blaze in episodes, gather our old steam within, push forward day-in, day-out, even when we glitter less.

The stars blink our own tune, guide us to where we call home; a place of comfort & sanctitude, an idea lost for far too long.

Dash of butter

Morning’s light indivisible, random cheeps of early birds, shears of gold in drawn stripes and coffee brewing malty.

A dash of butter drips, streaks down fingers on toasted bread, our memories warm and cosy; taste it just by thinking of it.

Sugar sandwich days are long gone, pastured out and mowed away. Skies gallivant broad and open, the rising sun our guide today.

We limit cards and callouts, relishing nature in its element, wild and free and rested out,

our minds uncluttered endlessly.

A blue bra

A blue bra flutters on the post, wingless, caught on camera catching on its clasp. Wind caresses spaces, making mounds, mounting air. Shirt sleeves spiral, pointing fingers – bodiless scarecrows.

The cut

The tiniest tear separates delicate skin,

a little red poke invisible to the eye,

but you can feel it if you press there.

For the entire day it will speak unkindly

just to remind: beware paper’s bitter edge.

Light

The Sandman watches you sleep, steals dreams read by night as the moon runs chill, dripping through his hands. We go deeper for the light, survey all those stolen hearts.

But we have space enough, parts that can’t be taken, the core of all things in the burying tempest between stones & words, hate & the forgiving sun.

Woman

It’s a warning: a blink from the lighthouse.

The man in the street, he won’t turn his head,

let you walk on by; you’re on his list.

It’s a game of control and, woman, you stood up.

Everything you do just makes him angry.

The real is getting lost, falling out, like driftwood

on waves of data strewn. We all sink a little deeper

because the lighthouse needs to open its eyes.

The giants’ pathway

A car speeds the giants’ pathway, limbs splayed up in a dome cradle.

In motion backwards we rewind a reel of pictures, clicking forth,

and hang our clothes on branches, all the possessions we’ve outlived.

Our gold leaves cleanse in the wind, the mind blazing with colour.

Language woven

Silk-thread gossamer, fishnet webbing, a pattern in play; pure language unspoken but sketched out in woven chords. The artist sits alone in a corner, full-dusted, surveying his domain. He knits lines, threads flowing, the whole unseen until the very last piece connects. Dew catches; diamond glints suspended drip life into our hands. Night sets it all glittering; fine stars in our backyard, flicker in moonlight’s eyes, adrift upon the wind.

Yesterday’s poem was about a spider and all his complex, beautiful creations, which are so delicate but strangely strong, and sometimes short-lasting. Today’s poem continues with the theme of home and what it means. It’s a very small word, but with a huge meaning, and that meaning is as individual as we are. What is home to you may be very different from the next person. Sometimes we find a place that feels like home and sometimes we’re forever looking. Maybe our very first home is still the one.

Homeward

Homeward bound, whatever home means to us, so unique, a shell invisible we carry on our backs from place to place.

The house we grew up in, newly born & impressioned by intangible walls, sparkling voices of family, strands we hold on to.

Red flecked wallpaper,

flour-dusted kitchen tops and a bear on a white crib, where we still drift to sleep sometimes.

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About the author

Vickie Johnstone is the author of 16 books. She lives in London, UK, where she works as a layout sub editor on magazines. Some day she hopes to live by the sea with some cute fluffy cats and a lifetime supply of Milky Bar chocolate. One of her children’s books, Kiwi and the Serpent of the Isle, was a finalist in the National Indie Excellence Awards 2013. I Dream of Zombies was a finalist in the National Indie Excellence Awards 2014.

Author links

Blog: vickiejohnstone.blogspot.com Goodreads: goodreads.com/author/show/4788773.Vickie_Johnstone Facebook author page: www.facebook.com/AuthorVickieJohnstone Twitter: @vickiejohnstone Kiwi Series Gift Shop: zazzle.co.uk/kiwiincatcity