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TomDoubty Feb 2022
I find your sketchbook
Discarded in the corner
It is Sunday it is Winter
I open it

Standing tall
A charcoal cactus
Cutting shade from sun
In a bowl of cliffs
Flat desert expanse
Mojave, Sonoran
Bright Light
Places you have never been
Yet see the shadow
Cast around
Shimmer and shadow
Silent, expectant heat
The suspense of high noon

This mirage
Your thirsty dream
Your whole future  
Shimmering before you
Is beautiful
Beautiful like a dream
Like a life
Shimmer and shadow

You see all this
Cool shade
In overhangs
The long shadow
Stretching before you


20.2.22
TomDoubty Feb 2022
This grey sky
Squared by my window
Cut across by rooks
That rise and slide
In a moment takes me there
Like ashes kicked from pit to air

Blown east to the City
To loneliness and chaos
Beyond these chalk hills
Loose boweled I walk
At the kerbside braced
To the howling wind
In a Waterloo tunnel
Chip papers and diesel
Dizzy my senses
I stumble there, there and away
From the bloated rose-hip
The fragile blue ***,
Its paper thin skull
Deep under London’s tiles

Here Lies
My Dirt My Bones

Shall I go in?
Shall I go down?
London
Yes you have me now
You have me powerless
London Town

20.2.22
TomDoubty Jan 2022
don't assume
everyone is like you
  Jan 2022 TomDoubty
Evan Stephens
“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.” -Edgar Allan Poe

We're all sick animals, tied together
on this clouded ball. Wet snow erupts
on a Sunday night, a gray flake navy,
mobiles above a black crib -

snow loosens into shaking sleet.
There is no one here - not even me.
The night is pink and orange,
under an anesthetic dome.

Don't we deserve more, better?
The streets are filled with taillights,
red rivers of light, salted, frothing,
as the freezing drips spray the pane.

Maybe we don't. Look out there,
at the wet world. We're just seeds
that open a root to the flood, swept
away into the teeth of the past.
TomDoubty Nov 2021
Blowing leaves around my ankles
Burning colour in the trees
You are my autumn
Long light crossed with branches
Lights your limbs
A pace behind
Your mellow loftiness
Haunts my walks
At the nearing end of day
I am full of woodsmoke fear
Changing seasons, churning motes
Unknown as the dread-dark conker
Cracking underfoot

You are happiness
Gone , now
An empty bench
Gold and orange
A pace behind
Wearing that look from the station
Pity-I mistook for regret

7.11.21
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