I have forgotten what it is to breathe
Deeply and long,
To drown in the sharp, cold hit of an autumn morning,
And luxuriate in the slow exhaling.

I have forgotten what it is to walk
Barefooted and bare-legged in the rain,
Across a field where the soft mud envelopes my toes
And dries a smooth brown.

I have forgotten what it is to stand,
Wind-buffeted and laughing on the precipice,
Sipping celebratory wine from a flask,
And impervious to the lure of the long drop.

I have forgotten what it is to sit in the park at twilight,
Lie face-down in the snow,
Sing softly in an empty street,
Swim underwater and naked in the sea,
Turn consecutive cartwheels across a late summer meadow.
Be held so tightly I can scarcely breathe.

But forgetting, of course, is the easy part.

Copyright Vicki Watson 2013

I'm a runaway writer, the wolf of the pack,
In pursuit of the thought as the words seem to stack
One on top of another like bricks in a wall,
Like a tower, an Empire, answer the call.
But the rhythm keeps flowing, the rhyme never ends,
Like a postroom of mailbags when one letter blends
To the next in succession, a fleeting affair,
A romantic illusion, with no time to spare
On the sentiment, rushing, the train careers on,
Full of people and packages, memory and song.
With a sting in the tail, there's a transfer of weight,
Or a pause for a second . . . never too late.
It's a race in my head, it's a storm, it's a game,
And it carries me on but is never the same.
The soaring of seagulls, the roaring of rhyme,
It's a pattern that's pawing and clawing at time
Yet immerses itself in the verse of a thought,
And the fish, by the seagull is suddenly caught.
And they say it's forever, a language in stone
But the pages of people are gradually blown
One away from the other, too far and apart
To act with conviction, to play their own part.
And the words from the waves to the wind they are tossed,
And in one single moment, the poem is lost.

Copyright Vicki Watson 2012

Sparks jettisoning into the crisp blackness,
A vivid orange against the backdrop of ebony silence,
Fairies of fire, winging their way home
On an unexpected breeze.

The bonfire a crackle, at once dangerous and comforting,
A furnace ablaze with light, livid and burning with raw energy,
Luring its annual admirers ever closer,
As moths to a flame.

The people, hatted and be-scarved, huddle, cluster,
Sparklers whirling before them, glitzy with extravagance,
Their wispy signatures hanging in the air, short-lived
And fading, fading into nothing.

And only now the fantasia of fireworks commences,
The artist experimenting with line, with colour, his audience captive,
And then at once, a dazzling fountain of jewelled light: ruby, jade, opal, sapphire,
A painting of shimmering castles in the sky.

And a middle-aged man with his son, glove to mitten; in his arms, a daughter,
Her bright gaze betraying the hands over her ears,
A snapshot of dizzy delight, breathless and enchanting,
A simple picture of rare beauty.

Later, with the remnants and debris of the evening lying discarded,
Dying, the brave bonfire, now petered out, sizzles and smoulders,
A scarlet and amber glow lingering on,
Still warm with the memories of youth.

Copyright Vicki Watson 2012

I have shut myself inside this box.
Sealed it well, from the inside,
And filled the cracks.

I fashioned it myself,
Based it on a model I devised long ago.
I remembered the dimensions intimately.

And inside I am safe.
Inside, I can hardly be seen.
The art of invisibility is slowly and carefully learnt.

Copyright Vicki Watson 2013

She crammed her head full of clutter,
A fragment of this,
A snippet of that,
Nuggets of unnecessary knowledge
To fill the expanse.

And books.
Notebooks,
Small, large, spiral-bound,
With lines or or, better still,
Plain.
Blank.
Ready for filling, and she filled them all.

It took a lifetime.

And once the spaces were finally full,
She was comforted by their strangely suffocating warmth,
And only sometimes allowed herself to wonder
What it would have been like
To have left some pages blank,
And have faced that vast expanse.

Copyright Vicki Watson 2013

Ignorant of the whole, one cannot mourn the loss of the half,
Despair has no foothold, loneliness no grip,
Until that half is found, recognised, loved.
And lost.

Is a half, unaware that it is such, then whole?
And on discovering that it has only ever been but one of two,
Must it forever live its half-life
With no hope for completion, for fulfilment?

copyright Vicki Watson 2013