the weight of a hand
resting in yours
the resistance to the touch of a single finger
upon another
the sizzle of a thousand hairs between fingertips
the dampness of breath upon your cheek
the redness of pair of lips
...or of a blushing forehead
...or of cheekbones under droplets of perspiration

the silence of an empty room
the sense of someone close
...who is a thousand miles away
...and thinking of you

She is a flower
Rendered in black and white
I am a poem
Encoded in stuttered Morse

Too early,  the dreary skies, the cold days.
The warm, the sultry, the windy without-a-coat ones
Were allowed to pass without note
And our opportunities to dust off the bike
To put the canoe in the water
Silently changed from must-do-soon
To wish-we-had-done.

Too quietly, our coats and sock and over-shirts
Took up positions nearer the door.
The sandals became stacked and set aside
The lawnmower found a place further back
Behind leaf-bags and rakes that await
The spaces between rainy days.

Too silent became the phone
Too still the mailbox
First summer, first birthday, first autumn
Without garden and cooking notes shared
Or stories of people I don't know.
Too long and silent will come the winter
Without her footprints in northern snow.

I will lay on the short grass
Nobody will see me
Vanilla-cream-pink against a thousand shades of green.
Insects encounter the mountain,
Such little things but with a power
To shrink large woes with their meanderings.

I will let the grass grow around me.
Tendrils writhe beneath my back
To search and plead for sun.
But turn white, bleached of chlorophyll.
Immovable and arbitrary, I am the barrier.
We share a common bond as his victim.

Others numerous soon rest their heads upon the soil,
Their hair grows down into the ground,
Weaving loops around roots and between stones,
And into cracks in the bedrock
******* at the moisture there
Until the trees, the grass and I
Turn brown, brittle and dry.

Maybe it's the changing weather
That draws me to you
And makes us hold each other close.

Maybe it's the length of the day
Making us reflect on the passage of time
And the moments we've spent together.

Maybe the numbers on the calendar
Bring us moments of nostalgia
And spark enthusiastic plans for the future.

What ever it is,
It fills us and illuminates the air.
It comes in on fingertips and shared stories,
And goes out on eyes and arms and gestures.

But it only happens this time of year
It lasts just a brief, fleeting twelve months
Then it happens all over again.

Blank and beckoning
But devoid of content
Into the void are thrown
Ideas and fragments
That stick together like jelly
And may not be removed.

She always knew of my old problems,
Still I managed, always finding a way onward.
From empty conversation about silly, obvious subjects
Or turning our conversation always back upon her.

Even now, I find it hard upon reflecting,
A challenge, it remains out beyond a grasp.
Our words unspoken will always haunt us.
Though our bonds offer strength and years of promise.

Once it was garbage, refuse, trash.
A jumble of foul-smelling detritus hauled to the curb
And removed by sinewy men
Contributing a harder day's work
Than anyone else in the city.

Our energy now removes its entropy.
Sorted and classified into coloured bins,
We add order to our rejected matter.

Specialized trucks arrive to collect
The date-synchronized bins
Emptying them into functionally compatible mechanisms.

Most desolate is the black box of paper and cardboard.
Brochures and flyers, old magazines and letters.
Annual reports and cereal boxes.
Once these were enameled with crafted sentences,
Painstakingly typed, edited and debated,
On the monitors of copywriters.

Now they are just millions of words printed on flattened fibre substrates,
Jumbled into the bruised and scarred black box,
Entering into the recycling stream.

The nouns and adjectives,
Prepositions and gerunds,
All jumble together.

Fragments of precisely-crafted sentences and paragraphs
Are gradually broken, shredded and pulped.
Incomplete thoughts, broken phrases
Like those of a rejected stranger
In an lonely, unknown country.
Then words without context.
Then just disparate letters
Are all that remain.
Their  M  ea  N inG
G  r a Du all y
is re mov
e d
.

The answer to what it was
Was what is wasn't.

In a vacant and a pensive mood
Lonely and cloudlike in my wandering mind
No daffodils are to be seen,
Nor bays upon whose margins to tread.

Sitting in this café crude
Drinking beverages of the caffeinated kind
The world around feels mean
And the possibilities for the future dead

Projects call but beginnings elude
Progress is something I cannot find
The page before me sits there blank and clean
And only echoes ring inside my head.

What silliness is this?
This stage, long intended for strutting and fretting,
Seems now exclusively for naked emperors,
And there are so many waiting back stage.

Tell them it was him
Tell them it was all a mistake
Show them something from your purse
And say that he gave it to you

Describe her face and the touch of her hand
Sing about places you stood together
Where your footprints have never been
And how the memories still burn in your soul

Dance the long-lived grudge against them
For reasons no one can quite remember
Paint it all with red and black

Mount your words on pikes
And your voice from the wires
And leave behind a Daguerreotype
That hangs suspended in the air
When you're gone

Who is it that comes?
A crunch from the pathway heard
Icy frozen steps

The illusions we chase in our work-a-day world
Our actions paint allusions to the person we try to be.
We neglect the elusive goals we proclaimed in our youth
While they sink silently into alluvial beds of time.
Ultimately we wax effusive about how we flew so high
And evasively rationalize the 'here' to which we have drifted.
As if we, exclusively, had missed that bus.
We wear obvious scars of the abusive universe.

On the surface of the ever-turning sphere
Corners blend with curves in the vapour
Shape is lost in currents of wind and fog
Treetops know what their trunks do not
We sit among the falling droplets
They condensed upon the needles
And get shaken loose by the breeze
This shower falls with pleasing staccato rhythm
But the sun seeks to burn away the veil
And lay bare our insecurities.

Just a thing put together on a blank screen
With pointless words that accomplish no goal
No sentiments here that the world has not seen
Nothing to tug at the depths of your soul.

run your fingers through the weather
and walk with the wind pushing
in the small of your back
press your feet
upon the spine of the world

smile with the approaching punchline
and laugh at the end
do that for him
he needs a lift today

reach up high and grab a branch
pull with your arms
and scramble against the bark with your feet
let it cradle you in its embrace
and dream you've always lived there

go join the crowds in the street
push with the rhythm of their steps
help them make this heavy globe spin
stand later on the prow of the concrete median
and feel what you've done
it moves heavy steady and firm
under the spinning wheels
of the stationary cars

an axe lifted high overhead
swing it down
with a power borne of imprisonment
split the icy sarcophagus underfoot
the crack opens up
and the shards falls away
spring winds, flowers and the promise of summer

A few words before a nap
In the heat of the midsummer radiance
In the heavy air of a string of rainless days
When our lawn with its broad diversity of weeds
Sits green without our help

Before succumbing to the mid-afternoon weight
Of eyelids commanding me to put tools down
I will select from the firmament
A few choice combinations of letters
And their concomitant meanings

They will say 'I am alive'
In a landscape of life and death and struggle
I am an organism that works to move forward
Though some days I'll move less than others
And sometimes I will rest.

In a time I never knew
Thankfully, outside of my own lifetime,
Your stories did not exist.

With sentences carved simply and economically
You weave ideas that engage us wholly
And open to us, image-by-image,
Memories of experiences that we have never had.
Nostalgia for other lives.

Or if you turn in another direction
You bring close around us,
The walls
The darkness
The night.
Suddenly, and with the echo of distant guns.

In our own worlds, the colours are a little
Less fragile. The smells a little less familiar.
Our interactions, the lives that end or begin,
With our every breath, a little less considered.

I do not know how your words
Bring somehow more than this
Wordless life that surrounds us,
But something in those pages,
Brings voices brighter than the sun which also rises.
More thoughtful than an old man upon the sea.
Neither the rain, nor the wind
Whispers so clearly.

In fog
the edges soften
for the eyes
but not for the shins.

Awakened
By a breaking light
That dissolved the inky night
Aside the bed begins a path
That leads
To everywhere in the world
And begins
With one foot
Upon
The
Floor

Wrap your arms around someone.
When you do it right
You do not avoid losing them,
You instead lose yourself.

Sit on a chair
Between two people
That you do not know.
On your left,
And on your right,
You will find
Yourself.

A dangling thread pulled
Will either cinch up into an awkward knot
Or pull everything apart.
Sometimes the best strategy
Is snipping it off,
And letting it float away
On the wind.

As you sit down to eat
With vigour and zeal
Good friends at your table
Make the most of the meal.

As you raise a glass
Then toast as you dine
The long evening chatting
Makes the most of your wine.

As at last you head home
It was good friends, well met
If there were still conversations
To which you didn't get.

A little poem to celebrate!
Alice Munro is so literate!
Accolades? There's no debate!
A Nobel Prize is commensurate!

She is a flower
Rendered in black and white
I am a poem
Encoded in Morse code
He is an aria
Written upon the page
They are a chorus
Captured in a photograph

It takes a bit of imagination
And a bit of effort
But the beauty there
Comes partly from
Something from within you

Melt into me
Caramel and salt
Pine sap into quicksilver
Fog dissolving in volcanic lava
An alchemy discordant and electric
Makes an ore of iron sing into steel
A green copper ingot shine into bronze
But discarded I am left as detritus and debris, a cold abrasive ****
Among the twisted forms of the ideas never formed
Far away from the shaping hammer and anvil
The bellows there that only draws
Pulling away the last of the heat
And unidentifiable melted figures
Are each there somewhat me
But are incomplete alone

This anodyne morning *** of tea,
Is clearing the nebulous morning,
Plans that threatened to topple on me
Have muted much of their scorning.

Still there is reticence to put to the shovel
This mound of pending work-a-day tasks
They clutter my head, my week, and my hovel
Snoozing away days behind farcical masks.

Why do you mock me, oh gods of inaction?
What did I ever do to your ilk?
Did I once neglect to grant satisfaction
Tributes in gold, obeisance or silk?

Secretly though, I plan retribution
For what this torpor is stealing from me.
I'll wield hours of output and contribution
Office deliverables and domesticity.

But oaths and threats deliver poor solace,
Whilst I pontificate, not facing my work
The monster of time still tends to his malice
And here I yet sit, among the tasks that I shirk.