12 pages turned; back at that seminal day.
I close this shiny jamjar, capturing unresolved issues in the air.

In early evening darkness, an endless entourage of engines sails streets exactly as Doppler predicted.

His trolley case traverses cracked concrete until her heels slow, halting to heed a busker's beat.

Polite soles approach the pair, sidestepping into loose layers of leaves - compacting gold and brown with a crunch.

Well-travelled tongues whisper foreign fears and wishes in a fog of white noise, fading to null as four eyes silently share three special words.

She's eyes to
Make poetry with

Reading her novel
On trains, morning and night -
Fictional parentheses
Bookend-ing the story of my day

Life tosses a conciliatory bone,
A string of tiny texts form a story,
Written in pages interwoven across the day.

But I'm still trapped in mid-week,
Looking forward through Wednesday's bars,
To a weekend's promised freedom.

I claim the night as my own,
But am cheated by the dawn,
Alone at the end of the rave.

With my summer spent,
And winter yet to be earned,
I finish my colourless breakfast solemnly.

My detoxification becomes a hollowing of the soul,
An empty vessel left listlessly on the sea,
Floating in an ocean of conspiracy.

When life is your lover,
There can be no other.

Absorbed by the dreary remains
Of a web of circumstance,
You fumbled in the dark for a door,
An exit strategy.

Whether "can't" or "won't", it's clear you don't understand these tears -
Well, each tells a story of its own:
This one's for best, but never enough -
That one's for brightest, but never on show.

It's a sorry series of unfortunate events,
A spidery path of ups and downs.
Reflective to sensitive others,
They remain opaque to you.

Then the world collaborates,
Confers and corroborates.
The domino network forms a chain,
A bridge to distant decisions.

So long a life donated to the service of man,
Thinking the weight of the world
Rests on two shoulders.
Now, finally. A man. Donated to life.