John Edward Smallshaw

John Edward Smallshaw Apr 9

They tell me that the weather is changing
but changing or not, it'll still be the weather.

John Edward Smallshaw Apr 9

Buy British?
inward looking

I sometimes wonder
who's cukin' who
and who's the cuckoo?

The world is global
although
it doesn't seem to want
to be
perhaps
a pre-frontal
lobotomy
or maybe not.

Meanwhile
there are plenty of studies
by buddies of buddies
that pay very well and
tell very little.

John Edward Smallshaw Apr 8

About the Crocus

Yes
I saw it,
but only when I wanted to
and even then
I never believed that
it could be true
and yet I knew
that it was.

Life
is just because it
can be
and we
have no control
over it,

we can only see it
through our own eyes.

John Edward Smallshaw Apr 8

Nursery rhyme time

Tuesday's child is full of grace
well
that didn't work out
did it?

Tuesday
1 May 1956

Everything was last century when I was born

John Edward Smallshaw Apr 7

Grim fairy tale

He's driving a two-litre
and going fast
because he's desperate to meet her,

she will not be there
because
she doesn't care for him.

John Edward Smallshaw Apr 7

Fly me to the Moon.

In
that space
between old age and death.

I am
not here or there
but liminal
yet always where
the sun shines.

Apr 7

Renee C

Unsolicited

I have witnessed unsolicited exposures
And revisited old faults without closure –
This painted ceiling, slowly stripping off its finishing
To bare its defects, begets nostalgia over

How your name is still a byword for frustration,
Shelved within my innermost synapses;
Like a dog-eared page in an Asian
**** magazine, sound & stiff as an equation.

#absence #***