Dawn ignites a morning pilot light, and suddenly a thin, golden flame erupts across a dark horizon. Colour cries for the first time. Shape and form are being born. A new world is being built beside what has fallen from the shadow pockets of the night.
Early Drive. I make my way at dawn through this festive period known as The Land That Time Forgot What Day It Is. People as feint shadows, individual tidal bores, pushing against the first edges of morning. A fluorescent trainer meets headlights & urban marsh gas springs to life.
"Gonna be a week, mate. We need to strip away your verse and look at all your stanzas. Could be a starter word. Maybe a misfiring, rhyming couplet. They don't like cold weather. Gonna check your break lines. Likely an enjambment. They run on in older models."
The robots at the Co-op
sport these little orange flags.
The robots at the Co-op,
might look cute,
those scallywags.
The robots at the Co-op
have us fooled,
just wait and see.
When the robots at the Co-op
do the jobs of you and me...🤖
I'm embraced like an old friend by warm air as I enter the corner shop. Muzak seeps from the store speakers. The Girl From Ipanema makes me smile in passing. As I leave I hear Rocket Man starting up, and I think it's gonna be a long, long time 'til I get that tune out of my head.
-7°C. An eerie silence descends when the temperature falls this low. As if all from the tiniest bug to the biggest tree have taken a collective, sharp intake of breath. The rising of the sun is no longer enough. I turn to the ancient power of the humble cuppa & the world exhales.
7am Drive. Virgin snow on roundabouts; muddy, iced-slushies on verges. Slip-roads live up to their name as a breakdown truck prowls around town like a shark. At the industrial estate, bus passengers cross in the dark for a shift that ends in the dark. Pit-pony people pass by.
7am Drive. This cold snap's developed into a full photo album. Fields of white patiently wait for a harvest sun. Frost clings and blings the pavement. We wear black diamonds on the soles of our shoes. The air that I breathe joins the low-hanging mist and each becomes the other.
7am Drive. Light, overnight snow dusts the town's pavements. Enough so it's held there like a single chord at the end of a symphony. After the cadenza of the frost, after the virtuosity of the night, we come to a finale. The note fades without encore as the 1st footprints appear.
Rising fog sets ghostly peat fires across my concrete town. Orange crowns on choirs of lampposts. Pretenders to the morning throne. I pass a town partly hidden from view. I play pass the partial. I peel back mist. I reveal memory. I drive home on roads lit by the past.
Warm words only this morning
With round vowels and dipthongs, galore
We can't do with edges
So my morning pledge is
All frosty receptions, ignored.
Each time we part we cast a mask
And there we forge and smelt the past
But what is left of memory
When masks are Time's accessory?
🎭
A fluorescent backpack floats in the air
on the back of a man dressed in black.
A cyclist's dynamo wheezing its light
up a hill, he's just blinking not bright!
The cast of today are out in all weather,
For we star, just a moment, together.
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