Though I may be laughed at for my simplicity
I’d like to assure, I still have the capacity
To learn
To earn,
If they have listened properly to my life and all its cadences,
Each of my doubters’ respects and silences.

I am a girl, since in my soul I know no better, of curious notions:
I take storms in teacups
I collect them, and channel them into whirlpools
When my soul can no longer take the ups
And downs, when I no longer possess the tools
To build a façade, or can no longer hold them
I accumulate the dust from molehills
And make them into volcanoes, from which stem
And flow the plumes of fumes and spills
Of my lava anger.
And if my spirit intellect were stronger,
I would not bottle my emotions.

Why do I feel like I’m falling?
It isn’t me, it’s lost time falling
Away from my feet.

But why should time be lost,
When it is I that am lost,
I acknowledge my defeat

In the face of my own blind pride
And beg that you might spend another second beside
One who deserves to fall from grace,
But in its place
Is flying, soaring, hurtling,
At a rate so star-rate startling
I had to still my coursing thoughts to realise
All of this beauty is passing before my eyes
Passing in my life, and I saw none of it.
I accepted, lived in, used, but saw none of it.
Therefore it isn’t time that should be lost,
When I failed to make the most
Of it, when it’s my value that’s falling
And its is rising, and I’m failing
To match it, in its falling, and its rising,
And realising
Far too late, the worth
Of stopping, admiring, planting ones feet into the earth
For just a minute.
Living in the minute since I am, you are, we are, in it.

Ravished by lethargy, I sat outside, and gazed at the ground,
Then, thinking, how all the ants and flies went about so sound
About their business, I posed a question in my mind:
Are they aware of our misfortune, or are they blind
And thus continuing untroubled, and so unhindered,
And so thriving...? As we just sit, bewildered,
Inindustrious, confined as mentally
Just as we are physically...
And if we go, dozy giants that we are,
Neglecting of the fact, will it truly matter?

Once more, through town upon my bike, I flew
On Marston Rd, to think, that once, I knew
This road was as the daily one to school.
Then up through Cowley, thinking myself a fool
That hot summer’s day
To make the same way
Down Magdalen St so late, so mad,
Thinking of the fun I had…
Then down past school, the roundabout
Where I’d do a quarter turn about
Each and every day a month ago.
Even past the fields, father would not let the river slow,
The river of my memories, as he asked were these familiar to me
Too? And so they were; Rounders, tennis, punting days’ insanity
Have not escaped my mind just yet.
Up High St, past the colleges, I could not bet
For thoughts to be abated. My sweet town
Bereft of all but my memories strewn down
As I still rode on, and down Queen’s Lane now
Where many a happy lonely moment was spent, thinking how
I rushed down there with shopping early before Christmas…
Taking the corner, admiring the blooms, and fast
The next one, and my chest is filled with a twinge
As I remember a rainy night beneath New College Bridge…
Then St Helen’s Passage, the Bridge of Sighs, the Sheldonian!
My sweetest, proudest moments as an Oxonian…
Broad St, broad and small from lack of crowds
Still my head is in the clouds -
And St Mary Magdalen, the concert with my brother in winter,
The Ashmolean standing tall within the hinter,
And up St Giles, and down the Lamb and Flag,
Thinking of the afternoons I’d sometimes drag
Walking there, various aims or none in mind,
Now leaving the Natural History Museum behind,
And Dad reminds me of the trees that used used to fruit
Along Park Rd where now there are none… So, en route.

Childhood lessons are revisited
But through the eyes of one much younger than myself
Old films, old books, old pictures, taken off the shelf
Are brought back to the eyes of one visited
By all that once I was told worthless;
I realise now it they aren't children that are earthless
They are us. What is it, that they teach us now?
How to compete, ******* others, ourselves, how
To deny life of its substance, and to be hypocrites to those we love
They give us empty quotes, say that we can prove
More just by thinking, and what of feeling?
What of looking, what of loving, what of kneeling
To thank the Earth for that which we have,
And that which we yet may give?
Rather than thinking solely of ourselves, let's do
That which our parents taught their children to be true.