I don't care what you think.
It works – just - fine.
Probably too well, all considered.
But that's a heart for you.
It breaks.
That's the way you know
it's fine.

Before projectors
Before screens
Before Wi-Fi and cabling became a thing
Before keyboards and strings
Before the first drum tried drumming
I am.
And I will be forever,
says our faultless Lord.

While the power may fail,
while signals may drop,
while cables will inevitably come loose,
my love levels will never need a boost.

I will never forsake you or fail you.
I'll never go on mute
and that’s the truth,
says our Father-God.

Hiding prolongs the pain
Running extends the fear
But when you kneel and pray
He who loves comes near

For so many years I felt the pull of the fires in my head
until the years drew them down to my chest
and then to my gut where they pushed me out to new fields
where blood fed the corn and we stood our ground
for the sake of family and for the joy of brotherhood's embrace.

In more recent times the fires have bled down,
fed into my hips and my knees, causing me to slow,
to sit and spend time passing on my story
to younger hearts who may dodge the spills and stumbles
and steer themselves to whiter fields and perhaps sow happier times.

Perhaps they will,
but I'll tell them -
the fires remain.

I can't speak for the others
I can only reflect on my own thoughts and the heat of discomfort.

I can't speak for the woman who wept beside her oversized suitcases on the Piccadilly Line to Heathrow, I can only consider her tears and what they did to my own heartache.

I didn't speak, but I reached over after several minutes of communal silence and placed a tissue (clean and unused) on her lap.  Before I was back in my seat, she had taken it and covered her face in her grief and the tears came again.

The grandmother across from me got up next and placed a red stripped mint on the woman's skirt.

The dad who stood in the doorway, dressed for the beach, followed, leaving an offering of a capri-sun.

The child in the pram looked up at his mother and she smiled encouragement to him, as he offered his Spider-Man, pressing it to the woman's hand

and as she unveiled her face and saw the offerings, she laughed, brief and wet, but with a smile that stayed.  She hugged Spider-Man, nodded and then with a sensibility to a child's needs, handed it back with thanks.

After a moment she found my eyes, and mimed a request for a fresh tissue and then in the silence she settled for her journey as we all looked away, dutifully silent.

As we share our meal,
as we laugh without care,
I like to think that they are secretly -
against their better judgement perhaps,
and despite their best attempts
to resist their inner urges -
that they are secretly,
at an almost primeval level,
repulsed by me.

But they'd never admit it
as they smile across the table
and say yes to desert.

'There's yogurt in the fridge.'
There's always strawberry yogurt
in the fridge.
When all else is lost
there's speckled bananas,
there's stale rich teas
and there's week-old,
****,
pale pink
yogurt in my fridge.