TRAILS

A snails trail at my back door shows a travelogue of curly, aimless, silvery wanderings. Escaped from sleep I take comfort in a book. I wander and wonder aimlessly through my imagination.
Like the snail, I travel silent and far without leaving home. Forging my own trail.

AFTER

Will we remember how to dance?
Will we know where our feet should go?
Will it become a lost art?
People in awe of those who once knew
someone who knew
someone who could.
Street dancers carved into stone.
What was waltz?
Tea dances excavated
by dusty archaeologists.

Late May in Lockdown 2020

A normal dawn
For an almost normal world
I know which colour the chameleon sky will change
There's a pleasant nip to the freshness
As the night is removed in small chunks
To reveal the inner workings of the day
Flowers clunk
Pigeons whirr
The earth clicks once
Then we can stir.

EXPERIENCE OF MEMORY

Heavy, marbled sky. A butcher's slab of expectation. Lost in a memory of rain yet to fall. Touching a face with the imagined softness of an unrequited love. When light rain does then begin to fall, I'm left pondering. At which point does memory change to experience & back again?

THE EVERLASTING CANVAS

The everlasting canvas of an ever-changing sky. We interpret the artist's mood, & dress accordingly.
We have a gallery above in which the eye wanders for inspiration. We try to make sense of our own palette. It is small, & our brush strokes temporary. Yet our vision is infinite.

GOSSIP

Birds chirp from rooftops. They could be shouting abuse or questions or simply gossiping for all I know.
"14's got those fat balls hanging from her trees. They're mine!"
"Dream on, sunshine"
"Cat's gone from 18. Keep em peeled"
"Anyone seen Reg?"
"Well, he was at 18 last night"

STUNG

I look up & I'm stung by the sight of the tumbledown clouds & the sky. It pricks at memory as I cradle a coffee. As children we'd run through long fields of grass, searching for nothing. Stung by nettles, ignoring the pain. We're protected from the sting by the beauty we chase.

DAWN GALLOP

Night is measured for a demob suit
Weather forecast partly cloudy
Or if you prefer partly shining
I watch dawn silently gallop
Over back-garden fences
With no faults or favours
Stirring sleeping flowers
Encouraging birdsong
The equine grace of the effortless ride.

SHOWING THE WORKINGS

I look up to the great sum of the sky
The cloud equations showing their workings
Cumulus calculations
Inky stratusticians
I stand beneath the polymath
That is the beauty of the dawn
And see that we are all but fractions
Of the whole.

CONFIDENCE AND ROUTINE

I watch in shivering admiration as the dog races into the back garden to chase away the night. Birds scatter from the saga of a forsythia bush. Confident his garden is free of intruders he trots back in and sits by the fridge waiting to be fed.
I want his confidence and routine.

THE FIRST SUNRISE AFTER LOCKDOWN

Will the sun feel different after Lockdown?
Will the hug of a granny be changed?
Will the memory of solitude,
Leave us with a world-view, skewed?
Will we feel connected or estranged?

MEMORY STICKS

I've a bunch of random keys on a fob that would rival a Victorian gaoler. 
Two tiny suitcase keys for long lost holiday luggage still sit hopefully waiting for life's carousel to return them to me. A Yale key for an old house rests beside them.
Maybe they unlock memories?

STOPPED CLOCKS

A stopped clock. Briefly the most accurate timepiece on Earth. I think most of us would settle for that. Not for us the constant ticking expectation of time. That'd be, well, too time consuming. But the knowledge that for the fleetest of  moments we were all without equal.

LET IT GO! LET IT GO! (Poem 4 kids)

If you save up your sneezes all inside your head
And never let go of diseases to spread
You'll one day be full like a clogged-up machine
And shoot skywards on thick trails of rocket-fuel green.
Sneeze into a hankie
There's no need to thank me.

DANDELIONS

The tissue-paper mist of early morning.

Grass needs cutting. Dandelions demonstrate this by poking through in defiance of the social distancing rule. I can cut through them in 5 minutes with my Flymo. 

I doubt I'll have such success in the queue for Aldi. Oh, for a longer lead!

BRIEF MEMORY

I used to pass a man waiting at a bus stop every morning when I drove to work. He must remember it as seeing the same car every day slowly turning a corner. We nodded briefly to each other every time.

We didn't know each other. Each of us a brief memory of the other.

FULL OF ITSELF MOON

I'm still thinking of last night's Moon. Full of itself. It was as if it was auditioning for the position of understudy to the Sun. I'm not sure if I'd ever seen it so bright.
It was heartening to see something so bright in the darkness. I shall cling to that image today.

FROSTY FELINES

Pavement cats will just not cross
The street, it is forsaken,
Could they bookend Robert Frost
On his road that's not taken?

SCHRÖDINGER'S CLEANER

Hoover's suck,
Whether they work or not,
Clearing muck,
Past the spot when they stop.

COSY CONTEMPLATION

I lay warm in my bed thinking of the cat out in the cold. Would it swap the freedom of the night for my duvet? Maybe.
But would I swap my duvet for the freedom to stay out? To be able to go where I liked when I liked? Maybe another few minutes of cosy contemplation on that one...

BOOKMARK MEMORIES

My grandfather's leather bookmark smelled of pipe tobacco & Brylcreem. After he died I used it. The smell very slowly faded away.
It must now smell of me.
I don't smoke or Brylcreem my hair. I'll leave it to my grandchildren to one day work out what all too brief a memory I was.

MY DAWN GARDEN

My dawn garden is dark & light retouching the oldest picture. Mixing colours as they dance in the sky. Birds stir their palette of tentative song. Flowers blink once and are awake. Grass grows so slowly that its noise wakes only the worms below. I sip coffee amid silent beauty.

FIRST CUP OF COFFEE

Heart is woken
Put to work
Everything's created
Nothing spoken
Start to jerk
Pupils are dilated.

CORONACRACK OF DAWN

So this it seems is my new norm,
Wide awake at four,
And tapping on my door is dawn,
Dirty, little whore.