smell of petrol

Smell of petrol and sea air;
a scrappy dirt-grey rubber dinghy
purchased by my father, secretly,
wildly overdrawn, while at home
our empty cupboards were
filled by kind friends.
Falling off backwards into
barely choppy seas,
hemmed in by boats of plenty.
Three children, bobbing about in
in buoyancy aids, our very
own, wild with
unfettered delight.
Utter freedom,
Shrieks of laughter.
Wild, alive, free.

(If my mother had had her way,
we would have been playing
in the back garden.)

long silence

a long silence.
mute, I have been wandering
for aeons.

in the dark recesses of my past,
in the unseen glimpses of the future,

all alone underground
tunnels
chasms and
unheard of springs of
ancient purity.

gathering the wisdom
sedimented over time
by giants
and mice.

discovering jewels that
would perhaps glint
given light and time.

nuggets fill my dusty pockets.
weight makes movement slow.
how long have I been
lost to the world outside?

found to myself though;
perilously alive.
breaths of the deepest stillness
fill my lungs,
chase out dreary.

darkness sparkles
a blackness never before
as vibrant.
engulfed by unknowing;
known.

lost poem

A poem hovered near me the other day
while I was doing something else
possibly more important, I
can’t remember.

Giggling silently, it swished its yellow plastic
grass skirt,
tried to catch my eye.
‘Check me out’, it was
longing to say,
but it instead just lurked,
transmitting ‘catch me’, ‘catch me’
through its pores.
Preoccupied, tired, I was aware,
but not quite.

It was funny, maybe
even laugh-out-loud hilarious.
It wanted to be written in
rhyming couplets
for a joke; it was all
irony and winks and
hijinks.

I caught the tail of the poem
that preceded it, reeled it in,
but despite my inner
‘must write that down’
tasks overtook me.  The cute
poem with the dancing eyes,
disconsolate,
went to play elsewhere.

Maybe my cheeky quirky poem will come back to
visit me.  Maybe not.
Either way,
I’m not making the same mistake this time.

all kinds of twilight

A moment in the lit night
Appliances hold their breath
while order turns the house
inside out.

Dying, toes in heaven,
whispered conversation
trust eternal trust
and a fleeting goodbye.

Just-born tiny being
paused a long moment
silently sleeping –
were you even there? –
the ward’s time teetered.

6am on Christmas morning,
we played outside the door
to bliss, unheated in a cold
December grey.  You didn’t need
a jumper.

A glance and moment’s wonder
forty years light-sped
into a pause, fleeting,
richly full and awkward in
pregnant expectation.

Long silhouettes spear
dazzling sun.  Lunchtime
crowds turn mysterious
My city is haunted.

All kinds of twilight.