Go Outside

 

Go outside 

And let your mind unfurl

And spread out to fill the sky

Watch

As the houses tumble and 

Slowly

Spin around you

Unlocking themselves from 

One another

Folding into new, impossible shapes

Smell the burning afterglow

Alive and rising as the shadows grow

Watch the stars reveal themselves

One.

Another.

More.

Growing in confidence

The ground is chewy under the soles of your bare feet

And there is the slow, rising hymn

Of all the night, 

Gentle at first

Then rushing in like pins and needles

Like blood

Like silence

Grace

 

She trips and stumbles through the day

A dance evolving from her tussle

With balance

And gravity 

Her sleeves scoop in arcs of accidental grace

Her limbs combine to make new shapes

You could take this film and string it out against the sky

The cells would show her 

Fluid 

Angular

Alive

As they stretch, 

Suspended, serried rows

Of beautiful still moments, 

Sunlit from behind

But when they clatter back into motion

She speeds up, staccato frames

Collapsing into one another

Overlapping

Drawn with crayons

Try to see the patterns 

In the fuzzy dance of colours

As she trips and stumbles

Flutters 

In the corner of your eye

Like trails of planes

Dissolving

Fading

Far above

In a Summer sky

Will This Do, Mrs. Appleyard?

 

Is this poem good enough, yet, 

Mrs. Appleyard?

I’ve drafted and rewritten over the years

Your stentorian voice in the back of my mind

“Slow down, child.

Take your time.

“Use internal rhythm to draw out the point

You’re trying to make

Think

Where does the rhyme hit?

When does the tempo break?

Use punctuation, 

To give the whole thing

Shape”

Have I got it right yet, 

Mrs. Appleyard?

Looming over me, from back in the my youth

A Roald Dahl character brought to long limbed life

Medusa hair and furious eyebrows, 

Sketched in flourishes and charcoal swoops

Bringing terror to adults and children alike

Like Tom Baker reimagined as

A middle school teacher

Your jacket of green and black check

Your sharp, inscrutable features

Reading my poems, at arm’s length, scowling

“This is a long, long way from completion.

“Land on a word that will echo

The heart and the core of your verse.

Make your audience 

Believe.

Take

Your

Time

Let it

Breathe.”

Will this do, 

Mrs. Appleyard?

Would you be suprised to know 

I still care what you’d think?

You live in the 

Folds of the 

Lines that I write

Each comma and full stop

A blink 

Of your basilisk eye.

Are you still alive?

Were you really that tall?

And the stuff that I write 

Would it satisfy whatever potential you saw?

In that boy with the hair and the NHS specs

He still listens to you

He’s still doing his best

To imagine a day when he hands in this book

And you tip down your glasses and read what he’s done

And the corners of your mouth twitch just a little

And you get a red pen and you write

In your wild looping scribble

“Not bad, I suppose.

Acceptable verse.

Not as good as your prose.

I’ve read better. 

But I’ve certainly read worse.”

Faint praise, hardly kind

But coming from you

With your knowledge like a forest and your

Mind like sharp knives 

Coming from you

That would do, Mrs. Appleyard.

That 

Would do.

More or Less

They met once a year

More or less

And as the years went by 

It was more “less” and less “more”

Time goes easier, I guess

As its passing wears smooth grooves in our lives

Lessening the friction of its flow

Like sand running smooth over rock

So they’d meet, once a year

More or less

And that was good because

They had a year of stuff

To discuss

TV shows watched and 

Life lessons learned

And debts paid off

And bridges burned

And that could make up for the distance,

Growing slowly, between

The young, inseparable heroes of

The stories they still told

And the strangers sitting here

With cups of tea

Growing cold

Where one too many bottles of wine

Used to be