I look for you
In passing faces
A stranger's glance
In haunted places

I feel you among
Nature's grandest setting
It is you that I remember
Even when I'm forgetting

I see you wherever I go
In everyone I meet
Your words echo in conversations
That pass me on the street

Your soft, easy way
That safe familiar tone
That always takes me back
To a time long gone

i turn the sound of the shattering into a punchline
and the laughter almost burns the room down.
and it feels almost like a promise.
(of what, i do not want to know.
i do not want to say.)

and the truth of it is
sometimes it truly is just a joke, a skin-deep wound, no one's loss;
other times
(most times)
the hurt scrapes against my bones,
and the promise echoes just as the laughter ends,
(sputters into a silence more deafening than the uproar)
as they leave the room,
as i am left alone.

i ride through the breakdown and become too lost to rebuild,

much less to rebuild alone.

I've been driving at night
With every seat empty but the drivers
Hoping my mind and the road are the same
It seems to me I'm always in the wrong lane

Streetlights are the only illumination
On a dead and silent nation
I've never been religious
So my tires pray
And an engine's hum
To replace words I can never say

God as in asphalt ,driving to exist

Bathed in the beauty of the day
Staring as the autumn signals.
Once I had a true love,
The summer silky skin,
The unseen bearded him.
Prove that I am mad

Such souls who fought,
Such hearts in drought,
They neither touch or kiss,
Every word was alive
A stream of the love unknown
Prove that I am mad

We woke up again, the clouds are the same
We rouse again, the soil on the earth is the same
When the night draws we lock and dream
When the day storms we exist as labour machines

An Irish couple buy some fertilised duck eggs and they hatch.
But then they’re missing!
The cat is licking her lips.
Oh No!
They follow the cat to her snug in the barn.
She too has given birth.
Snuggled beneath the cat’s protective paws
Are suckling kittens and DUCKLINGS!

Had those dear ducklings hatched an hour earlier
Or later
They would have been cat food.
But around the birthing time Missus Cat was only a Mother,
Mothering anything that moved.

Mother Nature breeds such Motherly instincts.
A thing of Wonder.
A story that happens to be True.

Since then those ducks grew up
But still followed their “Mother”
Everywhere she went (within reason).
An unshakeable bond,
Lasting for ever.

Paul Butters