I can tell that it's coming once again.
The chill down my back, tensing my muscles and even reaching my bones.
Most people shudder at the thought of no longer spending time in the heat of the sun, but I feel as though an old friend has come back to greet me once more.
That chilling feel, making my body stay in the confinds of a warm bed for a bit longer.

My blackberry love
you stain fingertips, lips and tongue
bittersweet purple
grown on a summer of promise
to end by watching the day
retreat past equinox
feels like loss
and though the longer night has virtues
there are dangers too
behind the fairy lights
and dazzled trick or treat
the immutable cold waits

A deep pulse of spinning waltzers
burn electric thrills
while pre-teens buzzed on sucrose
and fried dough
scream hot: they want to go faster

back on the promenade
Renee and Don, eyes on a horizon,
warm themselves reminiscing in circles,
minds dancing under glitterball embers

further back, gapped tooth shop fronts
shelter ripped tents, cold on concrete,
meagre piles of trash bagged jetsam,
of those stopped here by memory’s
pernicious tides
and forgot

Still loose, my mind drifts
over coppice, brook,
past fields left fallow
to heal
ragged with sedge, ragwort,
while crickets twitch defiance

Here is where I send myself
as the keyboard walls clatter in
and time returns to rigid
and gravity remembers to hold

The impulse of summer waning
sends an annual, yet always forgotten shift,
the hedgerows and fields conspire
to rewrite the scent enough
so the mind wanders to open fires
and comfort food
even though the sun still beats
scant weeks away we’ll swaddle

I feel nothing but
riptides in my stomach,
lightning pulsing through my hands,
and sunbursts in my eyes.

Accompanied by
pink flower flushed cheeks,
cool ocean fingertips,
and slightly burnt thighs.

we
are on, but

your headlights
are off.

I always wondered why, but now I understand.
I wanted our love to be known,
not shielded by the four doors of your car.

I don’t want to fade away
alongside the tangerine dream of summer.

Sisters and I spent last summer on the beach
No lesson, no in between the line to teach

Listening to the rolling and crashing of the wave
That sounded like fresh opened coke echoing in the cave

With ears craning and softening breath
Like in one night stand of the ******'s final death

The bittersweetness of summer weather
Brief it falls and float up as weightless feather

We sat on the beach for the last summer time
Hoping to come back once more with a dime