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Gerry Sykes Nov 2024
A dead baby
  is a baby that's died
      in anyone's language.
Not surprisingly I am thinking of the terrible things happening in Israel and Gaza. I'm also speaking from the experience of loosing a son.
Gerry Sykes Nov 2024
Sitting at a stained desk
superfluous space for ink wells,
groove to place my pencil
I dream of rockets, submarines and spells
as the sixties swing by
                                  out of sight.

In the lowest English sets,
there’s no dyslexia
only dumb slackness, scribbling misspelt words;
scrapped, I scarcely scrape a pass.

What bare faced side I display
attempting to write a poem
when the system says
You ****.
I went to school early because the local authority needed to make up numbers. I was probably dyslexic as well. I wrote this for the staff of a school I work in, and it's interesting that it engaged teachers, assistants and site staff.
Gerry Sykes Nov 2024
Field of overnight oats
so full of hippy goodness
I might live forever.
Just thought of this when I made my overnight oats. A comment on health fads.
Gerry Sykes Nov 2024
Underneath the thorn
  stinking, **** suppurates.

It throbs–
pulling the splinter–
  pressing out the ****–
      squeezing until the green sepsis runs ******.

The thorn's scar
      is permanent
            biding time,
                  waiting for bacteria.
My reflections my a lost son. I can't compete with the great poem by Ben Johnson, but these are my feelings anyway.
Gerry Sykes Nov 2024
Rubble and dust
spinning in swirling disks
around the fire
until one place
of greater attraction
draws debris to itself
and coalesces into an incandescent planet.
Earth and sky begin
full of promise.
Gerry Sykes Nov 2024
No one saw the hooded man
in the grain of the wood:
every night I slept face down
so I didn't have to look at him.

I'm grown up:
there are no figures
on wardrobe doors,
but some people make me hide
under the bed sheets.
I was just watching an halloween movie and it brought to mind my childhood fear of a figure I was in the grain of the wood of my wardrobe.
Gerry Sykes Nov 2024
One place, pressure, temperature,
The Triple Point,
aqueous molecules skip between
solid, liquid and gas
the salsa between states - identical.

No growth of  ice
water does not accumulate
nor vapour pressure rise
because the waltz, one to another, is equal.

So the three coexist suggesting stasis
while constantly exchanging substance;
a symmetry of balanced dancing stability.
Written as a meditation on the Trinity while on retreat at St Beuno's in North Wales. The triple point of a substance of the exact temperature and pressure when the solid, liquid and gas phases of a substance are in equilibrium.
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