Early morning
I stand barefoot
On watered grass
As the rising sun
Kisses leaves of olive trees
With beads of yellow light
I am earthed
My static buzzing
Dampening down
Like the drowsy bees
Hidden in the lavender

My teenage kids have never been
inside their grandma's house.
I've told them tales of footholds
in-between tall piles of stuff.
What stuff, they ask?
Magazines and books,
bags of shoes,
boxes filled with cutlery,
a printing press,
tea chests emptied of their tea and
filled with things she doesn't need.
Stuff that's kept in case.
Stuff that's kept because
some secret now insists she must.
Does she have a bed, they ask?
Furniture once designed to guide
her eating, sitting, sleeping life,
now lies buried
deep inside her hive.
Is it like the Pharaoh's Tomb?
Perhaps.
I hadn't thought of it like that.
I prefer to think of it
as honeycomb.

It's as if that everything
We ever made or did—
Paintings in a distant cave
Every minaret and spire,

Each telescope or microchip,
Washing flapping on the line
As No. 5 sits down as a family,
Silently, to eat their tea—

As if all those things
Were only ever real
In the moments when a dream
Is shook out by awakening.

A distant eye will never spy
Another fading star in the night sky.
And when all we have to say is said,
We'll notice that there's no one left.

By morning,
the bright red peonies
that brightened our evening
stood silent and bare,
their petals scattered
on the table
like a soft snow.

I gave him money
He told me he would put it
Towards a hostel

Here where the town has gone
The final kerbside flush
Against the straggled ends
Of summer weeds

Above the tarmacked hills
Cars fall and rise  
Ever casting pinpricked lights
They navigate the starless nights

Each time we stooped
Inside that parabolic arch
We left chalk marks
With our restless feet

Perhaps we sought
A turning point
A way to stifle down all thought
Of when our road might start

We both saw the young lovers
Stepping quite oblivious,
Holding outstretched together
Forever awkward hands.
Seems we're growing old together.
Our sorry kids now don't care to see
The stunning bluebell studded
Woods of Wanstead Park.
Does your heart swell still
With that same coy pride
When we're alone together?
Ahead of us, a skylark dips,
The dew soaked marshes
Dampening each sodden step
Towards certainty.
I am forever glad
Of finding warmth.