Jigsaw

 

This jigsaw can’t be done

Its 52 idiot pieces refuse to be

As one

They’re different sizes, from different sets

I turn them round and round

Try to force them to connect

The image creases, bends and folds

Tabs are locked in wrong sized holes

Pictures, juxtaposed, a half face frowns

The other laughs

Grotesque, disjointed 

Mockeries of photographs

Run your hand across this surface

Feel it bump and fall beneath your palm

An uneven sea

Of gold and blue and red

Rises and swells to chaos

Breathes and drops to calm

I need you

To show me how to see the sky

To lock the edges in position

My pieces are all misaligned

But you can take them, rearrange them

Part counsellor, part mathematician

This jigsaw disobeys the laws of time and space

It can’t be understood

It can’t be done

But this mess we’ve made will have to do

For now

Next year 

There’ll be another one

Christmas Eve

 

Towers of snow billow through the halo 

Of the streetlamp outside

My glass is just under half empty

Just over half full

This still moment of my life

Is good

Christmas Eve is dark and warm

And disappearing beneath the weight

Of this beautiful blizzard

And I love the weight

And I love the waiting

The sky is alive

Flurries of weather

Snowflakes, daft and playful

They don’t know

What is down

What is up

And they dance accordingly

The book, open over the chair arm

Is my companion

I can’t read - the sky is too bewitching

And anyway, it has grown too dark

It is enough that it is close by

Myths and legends

Its words humming below the quiet

The snow comes down and down and down

The moment breathes me in

Breathes me out

Quiet joy in a quantum state

Glows in, through the cracks

A lot of weight to put on a single day

It’s a weight which wraps me up and 

Makes me warm

A heavy white blanket of imagination and maybes

And I love the weight

And I love the waiting

Lights glow gently on the tree

Outside the world is shaped and reshaped

I think, 

Maybe

We’re going to be OK

Useless

 

Be brave. 

Be strange.

Be completely useless.

Be a wonderful mess

Be a thing without a function

Be a complicated story that keeps re-beginning

Where the heroes and villains

Just keep changing and shifting

Where the themes get all tangled like Christmas tree lights

Try to find the end 

And you’ll be up all night

Be a painting that people might fairly assume

Was a drawing by a child 

Reflected in a spoon

Be a song to which no earthly being is dancing

That won’t ever get slowed down 

And rearranged for an advert

Be a poem that offers nonsense

Not advice

Just vibrations of the long fluffy 

Strings in your mind

Be a sculpture that dances and wobbles and stretches

Be a canvas that simply won’t stop at the edges

Be mad, be colourful, 

Be ineffectual

Be arbitrary and weird and conceptual

Be a thing that you wouldn’t even 

Really call ‘art’,

Made of tangents and gaps and great big question marks

Juxtapositions throwing flamingo shapes

Broken arpeggios on old cassette tapes

Be brave. 

Be strange.

Be completely useless.

Be a wonderful mess

Be unfinished

Be truthful

Be the beautiful things I fail, 

Every day,

To be 

And when you do it

Come here

And throw your foolish arms 

Around me

Bad Continuity

 

It’s dark and it’s been cold all day but

The steam from the tea is warm on my face

I go to drink, 

Fingers through the handle of the cup

Blink

A cut

An elliptical edit

A random memory

Heat on my skin

My day, thrown out of synch

And it’s Summer and you’re there

Smiling, sun behind your head

And I turn and try to move

But my shadow’s not ready to follow

It stutters and jerks

Bad continuity

This sequence doesn’t work

There’s a drag, a pull on my soul

You’re gone and I’m here

As the room realigns

How did this cup of tea

Get so cold 

In so short a time?

This happens too often

A robot would handle these 

Contradictions better

My face in the mirror

An overcomplicated representation of very simple data

A Kuleshov experiment in ambiguous meaning

Longing, happiness, 

Regret and annoyance

All readable in this blank face

Whenever the memory of you

Leaves the building

Spaceships in the Sky

 

The real world fluttered, flickered, warped

At the edges of my vision

Blurred shapes, muffled noises

My only concern, a 19 inch TV screen

The bright, sharp, beautiful colours

Of spaceships

Of the moon

Of Space… 1999

It was set in the future, 

Back then

A future so distant I couldn’t imagine

1999

I’d be a grown up

Like you

Old.

Twenty eight.

Impossible to comprehend

Down in the cellar

You were painting the surface of the moon

A secret

A lunar terrain of wire and plaster

And glue and paper

Maybe four foot square

Made, by you, 

For me

Revealed, one afternoon

Laid out for me to find when I got home from school

Model ships hanging on wires

Above the plaster rocks and cliffs of white

You’d carved the moon into my day

And you hung spaceships in the sky

I was small and so short sighted

I didn’t understand or see what you had made

Didn’t take a moment to feel wonder

Just asked if I needed to tidy all my toys away

Reached out to grasp those

Die cast metal ships

Even as they floated impossibly

Above the kitchen surfaces

Not seeing the now

Preoccupied

I didn’t see your face,

Don’t know if you looked sad, or angry

Disappointed at the distance between

The work put in, 

The joy expected

And the confused, muddled reality

As I gradually realised what you’d made

And you never said what inspired you

To fashion this beautiful thing

For a generally ungrateful child

Or if you did, my ears were not tuned 

To that frequency

But I loved it, that moon

Played with it until the paint wore off

And the wire mesh poked through

The craggy plaster mountains,

A million miles away

Up in my room

I was a kid who worried and dreamed 

And hunched my head down

I could barely see

And worse, 

I didn’t take the time to look

But you created worlds for me

In the dark, in the cellar

As I ignored the here and now

And dreamed of Space 1999

You carved the moon into my days

And you hung spaceships in the sky