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.
Each morning at 6.56am I hear the distant, comforting hum of a passing, passenger train. It rumbles hypnotically through me for a few, brief seconds. On the occasions I don't hear this sound at 6.56am, I pretend to hear the distant, uncomfortable hum of a replacement bus service.
I look down at the cracked & uneven pavement in our street. I count each crack that was wrought from repetitive walks. I stare where Time has stomped & tiptoed by. I think to myself that if Time reduces hardened stone to this then I might well have to start moisturising a bit.
Saturday at dawn displays the crude outlines of a day, as if the world has been drawn from a child's Etch-a-Sketch. I'm having to draw on memory to fill in the blanks. But I misplace a bush, then a tree. I'm forgetting what I'm remembering, so I wait for sunrise & remember again!
Overnight rain varnishes the pavements and a bright, cold start has set the sheen. An England flag hangs limply from a car. A lorry coughs its way over a speed bump. A jogger pounds the pavement so hard that I fear he might break through the varnish and jog right on to yesterday.
Powerful stuff, that first sup from a cup;
it's lives which have slipped by,
it's lives we have sipped by,
it's lives we get hit by.
Sip softly because you sip on my dreams.
Time is a jigsaw puzzle with an infinite number of pieces. Given just a few, precious pieces each, we spend a lifetime trying to fit them together. If we are lucky we'll find other pieces which fit with ours. We are all patterns in the puzzle, seeking the picture on the box.
The Whump! Whump! Whump! of car doors being slammed signals the opening salvos in the Battle of the Commute. Brake-lights slowly snake into town as a giant, homogeneous, metal monster is mobilised; feeding on irritation, apathy and rage, it searches for the souls of lost dreams.
Mist casts a dust sheet across an early morning. Outlines of chimney stacks are the only navigable points on the horizon. Distant lighthouses for eyes lost at sea, yet the safe harbour of familiarity feels an ocean away. I'm drifting on a dream, waiting for a morning rescue.
"Your dreams can come true" they once told me,
Which wasn't the filip they thought,
Who wants to be doing exams in the nude,
Or falling and never be caught?
"Your goals are in reach" they once told me,
"Be anything you want to be"
I never became The Fonz or Kung Fu,
But I'm still holding out for Bruce Lee.
Atop our cemetery wall can be found stubs of uneven,blackened teeth.Fixed in Time's rictus grin,they are all that's left of iron railings,clipped for a wartime effort designed to bind closer our boundary of death. Harvests of hope. They sit with old company.
Time; ever the Gentleman Thief,
forced to return that
which was effortlessly stolen.
a bauble, one trinket hour of traduced Time, mere costume jewelry tarnished with indifference.
Time; ever the Gentleman Thief,
gently strokes a sleeping face and smiles.
I look towards a sky
filled with a panoply of trees,
and there I spy a love
under the canopy's soft breeze.
Tuesday arrives on a swirling luge of cold, white air. Underfoot; frost-tipped grass sounds the first crunch of autumn, crisp as a bite from the sweetest apple. Shimmering ice crystals dance upon pavements and rooves before a petulant Sun reclaims this brief Narnia of the dawn.
Sunday arrives spinning thin cotton clouds to garnish a morning with whispers of white. Redundant chimney pots pretend that they still have a job. Evergreen trees watch deciduous neighbours slowly undress. Lawns stop growing soon. Not yet. Any minute now, though. They just st
when I first sip my cup of tea
I ease into my memory
here is every sip I've taken
hidden well but now awakened
memories of tea I've shared
or drank alone in soft armchairs
they all come rushing back to me
when I first sip my cup of tea.
Friday arrives under an inscrutable sky. A giant cloud of indeterminable colour. But slowly I see trodden-down snow, badly-made porridge, over-boiled white vests, papier mache, cabbage water, wallpaper paste, the last colour a bruise turns.
Who knew grey could be so interesting?
Atop the trees a beacon Moon.
Buried deep beneath the folded flesh of living cloud, shining like a lost pearl on an ocean floor. Soon a jealous Sun will stomp all over the night, demanding fealty to its own garish gold.
The Moon shines not with pride or envy but because it can.
The morning sneaks in under marshmallow clouds. A half-deflated gazebo, a metaphor for Monday.
In a garden of hibernating features does the evergreen flora ever wonder where we all go?
Sunday arrives on frigid air.
A 'Do Not Disturb' sign dangles from the morning. I feel the rocking rumble of a distant, passing train, hurrying away the remaining echoes of Saturday. I want to hop that train and become a hobo to the past; drift through yesterdays, stealing time.
Saturday arrives freshly laundered and appears as bright and crisp as a newly-ironed shirt. I feel the nascent cold tickling my nostrils as I draw in the sharp morning air. My breath escapes in vapour form. I watch it fade into the morning, knowing not where I end and it begins.
The merest hint of rouge; applied to the cheeks of the morning sky, like the face of an old great aunt, it looms over us all, threatening to lean in for a kiss, covering us in face powder and that lingering scent of a perfume we thought Estée Lauder stopped making in the 70's.
Morning drive: an old woman in a headscarf sits on a doorstep. A lady in her dressing gown stands waiting by the road with 2 mugs of tea in her hand. An abandoned electric scooter propped against a wall. An ambulance, alarming its way through traffic.
Short, unfinished stories.
Someone's taken a toffee hammer to the clouds and left them cracked and bruised. Sunlight hits the windows of the posh houses. In a trickle-down world we have to wait for our turn. The trees, once silhouettes of the night, are gently teased by the morning into colour and form.
gossamer mist tickles dawn's early light
remembering dreams of fancy and flight
Sunday arrives on the wings of a fly
so soft we don't see that the night has passed by
little is said in such lands of the strange
where day follows night in such perfect exchange.
Once;
a pile of dirty, fallen leaves,
whipped up by the wind,
corralled into a shop
doorway, covered
a sleeping
man.
He
becomes
more invisible
to the passers by,
a pile of fallen leaves
atop a pile of fallen being.
Someone's son.
Someone's sin.
Remembering.
Friday. Ever The Weekend's understudy. Line-perfect yet certain in just one thing. That it will be seen, if at all, as a small credit at the bottom of The Weekend's programme notes. It takes its own seat with a gentle smile, as we all barge past looking only for our own.
A fresh, cold Wednesday nips at my hands like an overenthusiastic puppy. A bus stop resembles a miniature steam train as each waiting passenger emits a tiny plume of vapourised breath which looks like vanishing thoughts. Each lost in their world, queuing patiently to join ours.
As a desert of darkness fades an oasis of houses appears at the back of my garden. I've caught the morning in the dark room with the negatives. I'm comforted to know the start of each day still requires such a drawn-out, considered process. I need time to develop in the mornings.
I once had itchy feet, I tried to scratch them,
But they ran off when I did, I tried to catch them,
They're living somewhere close, they wrote to say,
I'm guessing they're about two feet away.
Thanks to Ian McMillan and Peter Hamill for inspiring this two-footed, nonsense poem.
At the corner shop a man picks up a Sorry For Your Loss card and is lost in thought. A woman enters in a pink pyjama onesie. I wonder if she knows she's sleep-shopping? The pies in the heated pie machine sit next to the scratch cards. Both are a bit of a gamble, if you ask me.
The faint hum and the distant cadence of a passing goods train. The frantic shaking of a small bush and a large bird as they rid themselves of each other. The staccato taps of a stilleto shoe. The dull whump of a car door closing. Brief rhythms of this morning's metronome.
Thursday lightly doodles atop blotting-paper sky. Vague pathways leading nowhere. Its plans have yet to fall into place. But if we seize this moment; catch it unawares, influence its direction and include our stories, then by sunset we will be there, writ large across the sky.
Monday inhales silence. It dare not breathe out. Then a jogger runs by. Through the pounding in the pavement I'm certain I briefly run alongside her. But it's all just a memory of her footsteps, an echo of her passing. Monday still holds its breath.
Soon it will have to exhale.
Let us stand on shifting sand and watch the tide return
We'll see it flow between our toes and wash away concern
We'll watch the tide go out again and whisper plans once more
And with the past dragged out to sea there's hope left on the shore.
Row upon row of clouds quietly queue overhead. There seems no beginning nor end to this queue. Just 1 amorphous congregation of cloud. As a nation who loves a queue, why can't clouds, too? They shuffle by.
I remain slightly puzzled yet I'm assured of clearer skies come Tuesday.
Autumn hasn't quite yet moved in but it already has plans for the place. The mornings seem darker as the night slowly overstays its welcome. The grass doesn't grow with such energy as before. As if it's been handed a redundancy letter and it's stubbornly working out its notice.
from memory it blotches and it ploughs,
from cold and mottled legs when I was young,
from chasing love on school cross-country runs.
and how I did chase after her in vain;
and how my vapoured breath did briefly pierce that stinging rain,
and how before I even knew of words like 'unrequited',
I found the flame of early love was cold and unignited.
Battleship grey clouds scour an ocean sky looking for a fight. Friday's varnish will take time to dry. The sound of a distant, passing train quickens the heart, fuelling my desire to explore the endless possibilities of travel. Then I remember the next stop is Milton Keynes.
The faint outline of houses appear in our street just before dawn. They're almost childlike in their rendering. A square, a roof, no more. But then the morning's still childlike. Its young fingers have to sketch a whole new world.
Today I hope that it sketches me slimmer.
I wake to an archipelago of clouds dropped upon a sea of uncertain blue. I dream of sailing between these islands, exploring their rugged coastlines, pursuing the lost and buried treasure of my mind. I look up once more to find that the map has changed. It always does.
Friday's early morning sky wears the merest hint of rouge and duly attracts some attention. Thin cloud tries its luck but with dreadful chat-up lines. There's a playful 'pinch-punch' nip to the air, maybe to remind us that autumn soon arrives and there are no returns of any kind.
Once I went to where I was going
But when I got there I got cross,
There was now here and my mind was just blown
By figuring out what I'd lost.
The sun rises late, blaming rumours of Autumn. Clouds bully their way across a wimpy sky. Rain falls where it wants. Pavements are varnished wet. House bricks suck it up but blush a deeper red. Puddles dance their peculiar rain dance as fallen leaves float down gutter-streams.
An oak leaf could be forgiven for thinking the world consists of nothing more than oak leaves. It's surrounded by oak leaves. It wouldn't think of a wider world; different trees and leaves, all looking for room to blossom and bloom, though some will fall, there's room for us all.
A few fallen leaves mingle around a tree in a dress rehearsal for Autumn. The echo of Summer will soon turn into a memory and eventually that memory will be nothing more than a myth. Nature's magic storytelling keeps the legend alive. We reimagine the myth through Hope.
tasty, timely, alliterative, tea,
free from all blank verse and hyperbole,
make yourself another, make it hot and wet,
keep the meter running for your own rhyming cuplet.
Sunday's found the dressing-up box, trying on lighter shades until one fits. Time's added one more day to everything, challenging us to spot the difference. Today's still a fuzzy silhouette of what it will be. The reassuring clink of teaspoon on china begins the focus process.
Early morning drive. I pass an old man bent double with age as he walks meekly across a bridge. His leathery, tattooed arms, once host to raucous stories, are now just faded memories of sin. He once walked upright. I watch him shrink to a dot as he recedes in my rear-view mirror.
Puffed-up and bruised, thunder clouds bully a uniform sky. With choreographed alacrity they appear to dismiss the blankets of grey in which they move, brushing them aside like a street gang in a musical. In place of thunder claps I almost expect to hear a clicking of fingers.
That recalcitrant party guest of a heatwave has finally been persuaded to leave. The sun rises for the first time in ages without malevolent intent. Clouds gather. Reunited long-lost friends. Separate at first, edging together. We're back to our best. Moaning about the rain.
Our council's introduced a prose-pipe ban. I'm watering each line by watering can. It's working to a point but things ain't fine. Me glottal stops are with'rin' on the vine. They say that poetry's the next affected. So hidden in these lines I hope protects it.
I'm starting to forget what clouds look like. Brittle soil cracked by a toffee hammer sun. Brillo-pad grass stained nicotine-yellow. The coolness of the morning, a promise from a convincing charlatan. Perhaps the cost of living crisis means we can only now afford one season? Hot!
Wednesday's playing spot the difference with Tuesday. I see the early sky's been lightly doodled upon by a bored morning. Overnight, the Earth's tilted one more click towards autumn. The trees begin to notice these minute vibrations of change from deep beneath an unyielding soil.
What if we're the shadows in a world of solid black?
What if we're reflections of the shapes behind our back?
What if we just shine in moments all too brief to see?
What if our world passes as another's fantasy?
What if our world simply just does not exist at all?
Mere shadows upon shadows up on someone else's wall.
Caught in the early sun, the tips of trees
Opera's quite boring
and face it, quite long,
but our tea-drinking nation
we know a good song.
We maybe can't stretch
to operas high C's,
but the British sing best
in the key of high teas.
Sunday holds its breath, waiting to exhale. Soon it'll breathe its warm, August air over a parched town. The world looks so much brighter in a Technicolour, golden summer, yet I've no idea how the trees stay so green. Some say they paint their leaves in the dead of night...
Friday arrives. Weekend clothes stuffed into an overnight bag. Our summer holiday street is devoid of kids so early on. As if the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang has visited. Even now I shudder at the memory of his feline grace and fear a horses hoof on cobbled stone.
Binmen arrive in our silent street with a clink, clank, bash and whirr as the street's rubbish is crushed by onomatopoeia. It sounds like a suburban End Of Days. I guess I'd miss my house but I feel a tiny bit smug that next doors lawn would finally get to be as eaten up as mine.
A sticky, overcast start to the day with clouds resembling badly-made porridge. My kitchen fills with the deep, rumbling bass notes of my kettle. Shaking itself to the boil it sits steaming in the corner like a scolded child on a naughty step. The petulance of the simple cuppa.
A recycling box with No.42 on its side is sitting outside No.50. Perhaps it's recycled its owners. We have more litter in our street than the posh houses one street up. Trickle-down home economics? 2 black cats stare uneasily at each other as if unsure whether real or reflection.
The tiny hammer of first light begins to gently break shadows apart, exposing fine detail within. What looked like a giant stag is just a thorny rose bush. That spaceship is simply a shed. I hope Saturday keeps all the pieces. This all has to be put back together by dusk tonight.
A morning varnished by overnight rain. Operation Evaporation begins. One downpour can't change a jaundiced grass. A conversation underfoot is underway. Precious water is teased back into a welcoming sky by the promises of a smooth-talking sun. A stuttering grass has no response.
Two pictures of the same tree taken in my local park from different perspectives. I love the tiny sapling attempting to take root in the roots of the dead tree. The fragility of hope, born from the certainty of the past.
Schrodinger's removal van sits parked outside a house. The SOLD sign gives no clue as to whether it's empty or full. The giant vehicle looks out of place by the tiny cars in my street. As if a blue whale has beached itself upon suburbia. Three Jonah's emerge to start their day.
Idle patches of grey sky are moved around by the wind as if it's attempting an aerial jigsaw. Tall trees help, pointing at pieces that fit. The wind's tried Jenga with recycling bins but gave up because it was rubbish. Sunday remains picture-perfect calm below this puzzling sky.
In that twilight of Time
When Night and Day cross
They will still steal a kiss
At the point love was lost.
For here sweethearts meet
By the clocks tender chimes
Feeling they're more
Than mere strangers in Time.
White dots of sheep grip tight to a hill as their bleats tumble down in waves. It's difficult to give this all up and return to towny suburbia; where car horns are substitutes for bleats, where drivers grip tight their steering wheels, tumbling a way through a morning commute.
Monday holds its breath. The temperature slowly rises. There's a holiday feel to suburbia in the sun. Shorts; no longer the sole preserve of the postman. Lawns; still green, highlight houses with hoses. Street rubbish mouldly goes where no rubbish has gone b̶e̶f̶o̶r̶e̶ be-phwoar!
Melting haze, dissolving clouds, brings forth burning sun
through the everlasting gobstopper of blue sky.
Heatwaves suck,
and this is why.
The coming of the dawn reveals a yellowing of the lawn. Trapped within it, a thirsty memory of preceding days. I hose down dusty, outdoor, pot-plants. An arc of sparkling jewells, dancing within the refracted sunlight and water, is quickly swallowed by a greedy, grateful garden.
The rooftops of my back-garden neighbours are crowned with the hazy halo of a summer's morning. We don't qualify for bucolic in suburbia. We have to settle for bright days and clear skies and imagine our patch of green stretches on forever. This morning that is quite easy to do.
A car and a van simultaneously execute U-turns in my narrow street. Facing each other like gunslingers in High Noon, the tension's palpable. Who'll draw first and try to pass? Gary 'Mini' Cooper or Lee 'White Vanman' Cleef? Like in all good westerns I dive into a horse trough. 😉
Never ever make yourself the perfect cup of tea,
For in that cup you'll reach the highest point that tea can be.
Nirvana can't be reached with every cuppa that you do,
Just embrace the imperfections, you're alike, your brew and you.
Scratched scratchcards loiter around the litter bin outside the corner shop. Little cardboards balls lie scrunched where they were tossed. There are so many they look like a flowerbed of hope which has steadfastly refused to bloom. A litany of litter fallen upon stony ground.
Mary Jane is not forgotten
Though her gravestone may be rotten,
Overgrown with moss & weed,
She once was here, a life to lead.
Now she sleeps here, undisturbed,
Weathering time with no concern,
Like Mary Jane, we all will scatter,
Mary Jane, you lived & mattered.
pic courtesy of 'Lutra'
Saturday smirks in the murk. It knows the rain is due. My gazebo flaps about as the wind tries to look up its skirt. My straggly lawn has welcomed dandelions and colourful weeds to cross its borders. I wonder if my lawn is 'woke'? I choose not to build a wall. Nature knows best.
At the corner shop a man opens a magazine. All the inserts fall to the floor. He looks at me. He rolls his eyes. I roll mine too. We tut. We sigh. We part. We meet again at the counter. We roll our eyes, tut, sigh, and chuckle. The eye roll-tut-sigh-chuckle. It's how we men talk.
bear witness to the tail-end of the night
as dawn controls the dimmer switch;
such briefness of colour at this time,
where new light clashes with new light
in a forge of fading thought,
leaching the present,
leaving us hope,
the colour of the future,
it colours us all.
I'm talking to the tea leaves in my cup
Getting closer to my mouth each time I sup
"Why do you now float? What is the snag?"
"Well we're loose-leaf now, we're free, we've split the bag!"
Passing clouds, so light they barely have the breath to say hello. Uneven pavement dares me to not watch my step. Birdsong peppers the air. So much so I want to sneeze into song and dance in my street. I don't. Because I can't sing and this isn't Oliver!
But I do want some more.
Dark clouds tumble over themselves in a rolling sky. A cat is a horizontal Slinky tiptoeing along a brick wall. Next doors synchronised door-slamming could be in the Olympics. A man in a van honks his horn. Next door rushes out, slamming yet another door on a percussive morning.
Tints and hints and shades and hues of Sunday blue. Look to where the deepest blue touches the fringe of space. Black and blue. The Gossamer Gods have spun a delicate atmosphere around our silken sky. We hang in infinity, overseen by ancient threads. But are we spider or prey?
A house hides under a fresh coat of render. A new look to compete with our pebble-dashing, stone-cladding neighbours. But what lies beneath? Fake Mews? The memory haze of summer; remebrances recalled in pebble-dashed, stone-clad uncertainty, rendering us all unreliable narrators.
A dull, grey, Shoetown sky, the colour of cabbage water. The gazebo proudly waits for no one at the back of my garden, like a child whose parents have forgotten to attend their school play. I listen to a songthrush sing. The gazebo bristles and stiffens in the wind.
Nobody's sure why this one tree leans at such an awkward angle. Romantics say it's because generations of lovers have leant against this landmark while waiting for their dates.
Pragmatists say it's the only perpendicular object around and it's the world which is out of kilter.
Time is the second hand sweeping so fast
Time is the hour hand immovably cast
Time is our face on the clock we all see
Time is the acorn and time is the tree.
This is the same tree from different
Life is all about perspective. Make sure you see the big picture, but don't forget about the little things. They're all connected.
A bright start to a day where anything is possible. Clouds have vanished leaving nothing but hope. A man whistles a tune I once heard long ago. The name escapes me. I smile at the thought that this is how memory is made. It arrives flat-packed for self-assembly. No instructions.
The tick of the past
The tock yet to come
The Present falls hard
On Time's beating drum
On Time's beating rhythm
No time to succumb
To Time's algorithm
Mere parts of the sum.
I drift while I sip in this timeless, unpoppable bubble of the present; yet the pull from the tides of the past urge me back to the shores of an eternal summer.
A man out of season walks by in a heavy coat. A petrol can rests on an old car roof. It's probably worth more than the car. The other side of my street resides in early morning sun. For now I'm housed in shadow, waiting in turn for my season in the sun. I could do with that coat.
I'm getting rich slurps
with delicate tones of sips,
I'm getting the odd burp
with hints of smacking lips,
I'm getting floral bouquets
from every cup I pour,
but to make sure I am certain
I think I'll have one more.
Overnight, the rain was greeted like a returning hero to parched lands, to much thunderous applause. Now birdsong is the only sound left in the morning. As if nature Herself had sent tiny, winged fighters to chase away the noise. We are hearing their melodic songs of victory.
Dappled sunlight falls on shadow as tree canopies become parasols for hire. The cost? A mere walk in the park. The slick salesman of a summer scorcher will catch many out at noon, including mad dogs and Englishmen, who wear their bright red arms and faces as a warning to us all.
Thursday's overnight chill is replaced as the great sky furnace ignites. I'm hoping it stays below 25°C, today. Anything above and my proud, ancient, Celtic skin is in fear of turning shades only found in old Dulux colour charts.
'Scotsman Burnt' or 'Sunstroke Red' come to mind.
whether your tea is in bags or loose leaf
whether you sip or you slurp for relief
whether you drink from a mug or a cup
the very best brew is the one you last supped.
Tuesday lights its pilot light and the day whooshes into view. The ghost sign for Wedding Car Hire at the top of my street is now as faded as the photos of the brides and grooms it once served. A hint of the past. Cobblestones peeking from the edges of Memory's tarmacked road.
Monday. A baby-bull-in a-china-shop sort of day. Monday is led towards Tuesday, causing as little damage as possible. We're cowboys for the working week. Cattle herding for the weekend. We're all the man with no name. We work for a fistful of dollars, sipping from broken china.
Colourful weeds grow out from a thin gap where a garden wall meets a pavement. Are they wild, urban flowers? Parkour pansies? They grow incredibly quickly. They weren't here the last time I passed. They know their time is limited. Brief, misclassified beauty. Wallflowers no more.
The sky is such a deep blue this morning that I wouldn't be surprised if it's trapped people's gaze. Flecks of birds occasionally dot dot dash across the sky canvas in avian Morse Code. I cannot decipher what they say. I realise the beauty of this message is all in the pattern.
Bin day. Black bags litter my street on a hill with no sense of irony. One long, unbroken, saggy line arcs over the brow. What lies at the end of this rubbish rainbow? The sun glints off empty wine bottles in boxes, redefining righteousness, recycling fleeting crocks of gold.
A puppy pulls and strains from a brand new lead at a brand new world, trying to sniff everything, everywhere, all at once. A cracked speed bump suggests a sleeping policeman is waking up. A plane flies so high overhead that it may as well be an insect crawling along a blue leaf.
Dark clouds tumble over themselves in the morning sky, giving Monday the appearance of heavy bags under its eyes. Soggy bunting sags. Parties popped. The clink of glass bottles tumbling into recycling boxes signals the slow march into the week to the beat of the Jubilee Retreat.
As the last trestle table is folded back under the stairs, the last strains of God Save The Queen and Sweet Caroline fade from our ears. As the word Jubilee enjoys its long retirement. A country returns to normality. Work or school on Monday. Cold Coronation Chicken for all.
It's still Jubileeing outside, though it's forecast to clear by Monday. It's the heaviest downfall of Jubilee on record. Scattered outbreaks of trestle tables still likely. Cake in the North. Quiche in the south. Gale force bunting rising to hurricane strength in some newspapers.
A Union Jack and a Ukrainian flag hang from a bedroom window. Continuity and chaos. A pigeon flaps rubber wings and emerges from a tree of twigs. A milk float groans its white bones over a speed bump. The milk shakes. The milk shakes, shake. The clotted cream just wobbles a bit.
I'm so pleased that God has now saved The Queen
It means all our singing wasn't routine
If He has now stopped saving old monarchs
Could He please help the homeless and stop with this bollocks.
A fading 'ghost sign' up our street still touts for business. Like a weak, black and white TV signal lost in space, it hurtles through time with no final destination in mind. Only when the last brick fades will our transmission end, but it will live on in the memory of the stars.
Today's reminiscent of a colour convention where only grey has turned up. My weather app, ever apologetic, reads out that this is as bright as it's going to get. My gazebo flaps about in the corner of my garden like the uncoordinated wheezy kid who always,eventually, sat out PE.
Patches of purple cloud. Bruises on a prizefighter's face. A swollen aftermath to last night's storm and its giant bagatelle of raindrops. A faint film remains. Puddles in a silent dawn, born of energy, peacefully reflect the stillness of a morning, subduing the passage of time.
Here comes a jogger
he's right upon time,
there goes a jogger
he's more hills to climb,
here comes a woman
she's smoking a fag,
there goes a woman
she's having a drag,
freight trains of people
pass by us each day,
all long-lost junctions
we miss on our way.
The cold curiosity of a church at prayer. Flagstones polished by sinful shoes. A bully pulpit calls out. Repent! More trestle tables! A fete worse than death. Notices, passings, blessings. Organised religion. Ah, men.
Over this ridge is Danes Camp, once home to conquering Vikings. Clamber over the exposed roots, you'll find the ridge encircling a silent,
We come here now to pillage time and plunder memory for our own dark ages.
Overheard at the corner shop.
"Jean's in hospital."
"Terry's Jean with her hip?"
"No, Mick's Jean with her leg."
Get well soon, Jean, whoever and wherever you are.
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Where my wife shouted in dejection,
"Please, just one walk without reflection!"
The languid burn of a joss stick behind the counter of the corner shop. I'm captivated by a long piece of ash drooping from the stick, refusing to fall. How long can it defy gravity, spreading sandalwood throughout the store?
Oddly, I almost tiptoe away, thinking of Dot Cotton.
Tiny rain dots fill the air, as if they've learned how to fall but not yet how to land. The jogger who was once so big runs up the street again. The more is see of him the less I see of him. A cat pat downs a bin bag for breakfast. Rain clouds hover, not quite sure of themselves.
Lazy cloud-doodles scribble across the sky, too wispy to form into anything but idle thought. Sunday's are at their best when they're free-flowing and without regiment. Tendrils of ideas, tickling for suggestions, reaching out for fruition, yet waiting for nothing in particular.
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