the schedule

my day was
scheduled to death.
every slot too small to
fit a human.
I had to hope
that no-one had any
curiosity left in them.
or everything would
fall apart.

I was lucky;
they had all forgotten
what life was –
if they ever knew.
obediently they toed the
schedule line,
retrieved themselves from
exuberance.
someone had bad news from from home,
regrouped in a
coffee break,
swallowed sadness and
cappuccino straight down,
got back in the game.

all around us autumn beauty
unfolded steady as a
queen.
we had four point five minutes
in which to walk to the river and back;
by then numb to it all,
I can see it like a photo,
feel nothing.

I don’t know if I can
do this anymore.

routine poetry

I woke in my bed
voile curtains adrift
at the open window.
Perfect tea.
Absorbed in a magazine
that never disappoints.

I sat in the garden
to eat breakfast –
a courtyard really,
five metres by three,
maximum, all my
flowers are blooming.

I swept; faint scent
of rose petals,
of sweet peas,
which I picked.

I ran at the seaside.
It was easy on the way out,
due to the wind, but I didn’t realise
this at first and thought I
could run faster.

I wrote my journal with
tea in a thermal cup that
tasted – just – of washing up liquid.
I’d used too-old cherries
for the rock bun.

I bathed in the
bath that used to have an
uninterrupted view of sky,
until my neighbour
moved the television aerial.
I try to pretend it is a bird’s
perch.
It’s not often.

I dealt with email;
at the garden table, to
an old friend, after ten years
distance, at least.
His children are grown up.
Clouds sniffed past
cool breezes.

I ironed sheets and
pastel clothes that
wafted comfort,
listening to Chopin.

I wrote a poem.

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.

swiftly

Today, shadows of swifts
swirled
over the bleached road surface,
up the red brick wall,
became flesh in the
clear blue sky
for a moment,

then again silhouettes,
swooped down the
apartment block
and again
seemingly unceasing
in spheres
of silence.