Paperweight stone

Ochre hill

chalk cut hound

hunting companion

for Cerne Abbas giant

Connections

It still fills me with delight to know
if I get up early enough
I can converse with Michael in Mexico,
Gita or Mike in Alabama
and receive photos from Kristine in New York

July's missed and now remembered stones

12^th:  Rare for me not to have that last-night-before-I-leave

final, cowardly thought that I don’t wish to go to sleep in an alien bed

and even though I fumbled with the airport tax machine,

anticipation that I will cope remained full strength

13^th:  And fully justified because I wake up with a smile in Alabama

cocooned in warmly welcome and so easy to be here.

14^th:  Both anticipation of the end of day, the smaller widened circle

tempered with regret that we must leave this place.

15^th:  Waking in a bedroom with my daughter

last seen last month on a station in Berlin.

16^th:  A second day of writers, more new faces to set beside their words,

reading, writing all together, eating too and then so very, very late to bed

and absolutely clueless as to what time I might  awake.

17^th:  Knowledge that today I leave for home lies heavy,

staggered though the parting is.

A day begun with Highland Park and ending with a Maker’s Mark.

18^th:  A day bereft that doesn’t really seem to properly exist

flying high and heading east across the Atlantic

Cross trainer diversion

Their first time at the gym, a couple
with a Fitness Trainer in attendance.
He moderately fit and keen to show his capability.
She sluggish, sulky, lumpy, clearly there on sufferance,
and suffering.

Without scale

Without scale, the desiccated, split and damaged fig tree leaf

becomes an aerial view of urban destruction,

a well-inked with burnt sienna collagraph plate.

A fairness of rooks

One magpie, six rooks.
Five content to let the fight progress fairly,
one to one,
until he looks like losing.

On my way to buy a morning paper #3

Large, empty plastic bottles

spill out of recycling bag.

Don’t they know how therapeutic

it is to stamp them flat?

Under new management

Every day for a month now

the windows wide open

to let out the stink of the previous owners

Joust

A pagentry of or and argent

a mediaeval trumpet fanfare of murrey

brought to mind by honeysuckle flowers

and Boutell’s barely read and mis-remembered ‘Heraldry’

Night sweats

Even when I've access to the whole of the bed
the sheets lose their cool too quickly

Ode to a solitary pansy

Pale face showing tracks of bloodstained tears

solitary and despondent gaze across the black expanse of tarmac

no longer unaware of your misbegotten seeding.

Seen from a balcony in North Carolina

Bracken ancient, arrowed tip resting on part circle drawn in concrete by the dripping from above.
Leaves blinking with a rain-hit tic, a cat's ear twitch at stimulus unknown.

I don't mind solitude but ...

Having landed at Teesside on Monday night
I did not feel grounded
until he phoned me from Germany on Tuesday

eight hours wait at Schipol

Startlingly seen from above on an escalator:
an apparently, abnormally short-faced man with protruding tongue
subsequently seen to be wearing his sunglasses on top of his hairless head

Awaiting an opportunity to dance the polka

Silver, semi-spherical static raindrops on the windscreen
circles echoing and overlaid
by reflected rowan berry clusters,
green and orange.

Presentation is NOT all

A flimsy plastic supermarket punnet
yet the cherries still taste sweet

On my way to buy a morning paper #3 - Replenishment

An over-abundance of pink granite chips

surging tidal round unwary cars

Heard from the garage below my room

Decreasing husky rasp of door support in metal runners
Sharp click as catch slides over aluminium lip
Burble from the radio becomes a sudden silence
He’s finished playing motorbikes for the day

Family history

If I prised up, intaglio-inked and subsequently printed

any one of the kitchen cork floor tiles,

would the resulting image tell the story

of the thirty years we’ve so far trod?

On my way to buy a morning paper #2

A rough, tobacco-damaged, dirty chuckle

conjured up a much-loved and delinquent aunt

who took me apple-scrumping when I was eight

Heard from the garden

Distorted megaphone voice

indecipherable china-sharded words

brief silence

then the grass-blown screams of children

         

            ... sports day at the local primary school

On my way to buy a morning paper

Iridescent rainbow in the gutter

red orange yellow holographic shine

closer, blue green indigo bedazzles

courtesy of Benson Hedges

On the shelf above my monitor

Effie's stone
silver earrings 
wooden egg-cup
and an emery board

Seen in a new light

daily black dog walking man
discussed Caravaggio
in the restaurant last night

Not a silver lining, but a red?

Last night’s spilled wine, imperfectly wiped,

a pattern of alarm on the carpet

and an illustrated tale