As if nurtured

“From the fallen log,
A sapling grew.”

And

a poem to be paired with With And, another word – verboten in excess, the Creative Writing Rules would warn. And then another thing And, and, And, and. Dandy and, Like but, not to be ushered in at sentence starts. And so for years, and carefully was placed or erased. But now the rules are

Things you do with things

I am preparing this blog on the day of the autumn equinox 2021. At 7am-ish, the big, white moon was still in the sky already blue with morning light. I took a moment to log the scene in my poet’s files: the sun had risen in the East, on the far side of my loft,

An update

I’ll get ‘round to sending you word about this dream I had again about the house that’s under renovation. When it’s finished I know you’ll love the surprise. The bathroom’s to be re-tiled. The kitchen redone. A loft floor inserted in the roof. With all the interconnected doors there are so many people moving in

Three poems to end the year

i 8:58PM write poems x1 x1 x1 I wrote on my week’s to-dos. It’s 8:58PM on SUNDAY. The radiator’s cranking up; Counting down to the bedtime routine. This isn’t a poem: it’s a snapshot. ii. write poems x1 x1 The idea was to help me See each output as a ‘1’; As a single entity

We chose to take a ride

Habits are habits In a friendly coincidence, we pretended not to understand the fumes of heavy traffic. We chose to take a ride entirely on a road to nowhere. Nothing happened. We paid for petrol, an absurd sum, a kind of ransom. – On my calendar, I scheduled in POST for today, meaning come Wednesday

in the glow of celebration

By ribbons from branches Where are we today, you and I? Each, together? Further, closer, the same as yesterday? Suspended from our meeting- point of a hundred points, each weighing down the end of a branch. The celebration season done we will be rustled back into the box where our meeting-points of a thousand tones

5 poems reworked

BBC Radio 3 is my station of choice. I listen to hours and hours of their programming, both on the clock radio that rests on my bedside chest-of-drawers and on iplayer on my laptop. Sometimes I schedule upcoming programmes or concerts into my diary, or mark catch-ups on my to do list. During these many

Black coats, black pavements, black umbrellas, the rain

“Kirchner 1913 Street, Berlin“. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. John Keats wrote his famous ode ‘To Autumn‘ on the 19th of September 1819. This partially inspired my poem posted this time last year. (This year, we are enjoying a generous bolt of extended warmth. The colder snap is still to come.) “Autumn’s ripened harvest store” offers

It is sometimes easier to siphon off blood on Tuesdays

“Blood letting“. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. “From a Stone” engages with the frustrations of bringing forth a poem when it feels like drawing blood from an inanimate source. Like “Glomurelonephritis” this is one of the rare instances where my personal health experiences feature in a poem. For 31 years I have lived