We lost us for a while.
I Am Losing the Habit of Speech
Language itself grows strange.
I forget the names of all I knew.
Colour, shape and texture blend.
Those things there, what are they called?
Those people, what is it that they do?
How do those little words go
Sense to make situations of?
Soon, I will only meow
or bark
or quack.
My tweets will all be bird-like.
I Sense the Sadness
New-leaf trees can almost mask
loss that lingers, a mist among them.
They do not care a twig
what humans carry round within
those stupid little heads —
news of illness, death, the ache
of separation, all irrelevant.
Birds fly in, and birds fly out.
The higher skies are silent.
Below, the humans wander,
avoiding touch as if it were
forbidden in this slow dance.
They smile and nod, turn their faces
to the trees that sway, regardless.
But I sense their sadness.
I Begin An Argument With Myself
It’s so easy to start. Frustration bursts out
in curses, everything’s fragile in this silence,
and there are so many things to be irritated by
but nobody’s around to complain to.
Inside, I break my glasses, turning over in the bed.
I set the plastic carton on the still-hot stovetop.
Outside, litter trails, left by the daily picnicers.
I blame them, but forget to bring a binbag.
Yet sometimes the river gods do intervene,
restoring equilibrium. Today I heard a voice,
a woman keening by the weir, to a loud
accompanying rush of water, falling.
Seven perfect notes repeated, seven times over.
No words, but both a melody and meaning.
She left the sound to echo, where I picked it up, as I
half-blindly mopped sour milk, and then forgave me.
I Don’t Care Too Much For Money
Must be six weeks since it jangled in my pocket,
since coins were important — or indeed notes.
That community cafe where they didn’t take cards,
I think, when I drove home from the festival of poets.
It can’t buy me breath, nor health, nor touch now.
Not even my supplies from the local Tesco —
a dead commodity nobody wants, if it can’t
pay the cashier for a bottle of Prosecco.
I dandle none, dander to the shore, nowhere
to go and nothing there to buy when I arrive.
Other matters matter more now — new-born
values that are somehow very old and wise,
precious as those four tiny ducklings that
repay my real expense of energy in walking
by two trembling minutes of splash-play —
instinctive, feathery balls, together frolicking.
Live, little ones. Avoid the crows.
Flourish.
I Interrogate the Front Door
I deconstruct constituent parts,
mentally separate hinges from frame,
panels, lock and handles, but your sum
is greater than all this: your border post.
You do not answer.
You always swung so smoothly, fit so well.
I’ve never told you I admire that,
how you perform your simple function
without a squeaked complaint, or hesitation.
I hope you know
if ever you’ve refused the task I asked,
it was because I’d heaped up coats on you
or left my boots to block your route —
it was always my fault, never yours.
I hope you know that?
Now you keep me in, you keep the others out.
Two-faced, but not duplicitous.
I wish you’d answer when I ask, who’s there?
Say, only me, relax, I’m here.
Why are you so still, silent one?
I Want to Feel the Weather
Indoor surfaces reflect the same dull scene repeated.
Even the not-so-polished, or decontaminated.
Screens. Dusty Glass. Streaky Windows. Cracked
Mirror. Dull Lamp. Varnished Picture.
Ceramic Glaze. Gloss covers. Tin Foil.
Laminate. Porcelain.
Wood and paint.
Plaster. And plastic, always plastic.
All pass the dwindling
Light between them till it fades.
But no hint of weather touches me.
The sun doesn’t reach, even at sunset.
Just the numb, seeping inwards slowly
Through the skin, the eyes, the disengaging brain, as
I press my nose against the flat cold pane.
Cough. Inside here, breath is haar — rain, a tear.
I Consider Going Feral
The garden seemed a place of shame,
overgrown with sick spring idleness.
The sign I made last year, old already.
Stonework, pocked with isles of moss.
The pond, a pool of rotting leaves and twigs,
The fancy shop-bought windbreak, broken.
The lawn, a sunny dandelion thick-pile,
the cloche, an ocean of forget-me-not.
Yet the cherry tree still drops white blossom,
The lilac bloom still casts an aromatic spell.
I check the chaos, find beauty firmly rooted,
smiling as the bees fulfil their careful duties;
two tabbies prowl through long grass, catching
nothing but the wind from a butterfly’s wing.
All kinds of creatures, most tinier than human
eye can spot, creep in this miniature universe.
The soil is seething, a healthy mass of friable life.
Seeds sprout, unsown. I feel somewhat unsettled
to be so little missed. This summer, maybe I should
just observe, let all unfold, this constant wilding?
Our straight lines, close-crop hedges, all that mowing,
the wish for outside to be neat like inside, seem wrong.
Let me roam around the long grass, as the cats are,
roll about in sunshine. I feel I’ll heal much faster.
I Don’t Know Where the Ejector Seat Button Is
Not that I’m anybody’s Martini
but this has shaken me.
I realise the truisms, how tenuous our
grip on life is, the dangers we face daily —
and I’m no special agent, with or without
those fancy gadgets at the ready.
I realise, too, how fast we’re ageing,
in living through epochal change,
as if while time has halted socially,
it had privately accelerated.
This before-and-after marks
another phase, another stage,
for sure, but we’re not there yet,
the after bit. Right now, I’m lost
at home without a mission
or a map, no sports or car.
I can’t see anywhere to go. Like
somebody slammed the brakes
and now it’s slo-mo, a free-fall
arcing by in milli-milliseconds
towards the foggy windshield.
The airbag hasn’t inflated.
This is no movie.
I Claim the Noble Prize for Economics
Okay, I know I’m not a financial doctor,
But I got a you-know-what — a billfold.
And I know that when I got no money,
I gotta find a way to get me more.
Maybe a bank loan, maybe a credit card.
But what you got here is like a massive hole
In your pocket where the billfold falls through.
Like there’s hardly anybody gettin paid now,
And nobody’s gettin rich except morticians.
So first we gotta plug that hole.
No point puttin new money into that old pocket
Unless we make that leaky hole good first.
Cept of course it’s not real money, not like gold,
Just numbers on a banksheet, like lines of credit.
So we need to think smarter, right?
Ain’t nothin a sharpie can’t fix. So you just take
Your latest statement and find the balance,
You know, what’s left when all’s gone out and in,
And what you gotta do is shift the zero.
Make that zero a million — see, that’s better?
It’s got a name, it’s called recalibration, right?
Now I know what you’re all gonna say. If
Everybody adds a million to their balance, won’t
That make billionaires comparatively less rich?
Ah, but here’s the beauty — they get a million too!
Bingo!
I Hear Many Things in the Silence
In the absence,
I discover the forgotten,
and in the timelessness,
I found a little soul.
i’d thought it a myth,
or mystery without solution,
but there it was, all this time,
something transcendental,
beyond consciousness.
It had no meaning.
It had no message.
It had no question.
I would have brought it home
to care for it, had it not
seemed quite content right there,
out in the wilderness.
It wants no feeding.
It wants no rest.
It wants no comfort.
It simply is.
It must be.
We Lost Us For a While
Until we were ill
We didn’t know how sick our world was.
Until all was silent
We didn’t know how noise polluted.
Until the hospitals were full
We didn’t know how brave the staff were.
Until the animals came to town
We thought them dead, or they’d deserted us.
Until we saw nobody
We didn’t know the ones we’d miss.
Some we’ll miss forever.
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