Books - they colour and add life to an otherwise pale and faded room
and very often to a ditto existence.





Bookshelves - they sometimes help to organise,
sometimes just keep them off the floor.

Studio - messy and neglected

Accusing me for having stayed away
for making coloured pictures using words
not aluminium plates and acid
nor tile grout patterned onto card
not ink
but if I tidy everything away
I know it will be ten times harder to restart.

My office, upstairs, eastern-facing, room

Antelope applied in 1988
or thereabouts
the walls too covered, room too full
to even think about re-painting.
And anyway, the colours change enough
albeit slowly.

Spare bedroom

Mediterranean merit here
offering yellow and blue
a carefully-selected corner
ignoring the chaos beyond
and the dirty brown day
outside the window

Neglected

Observation only ever in this room
when we have visitors
Otherwise the tattered shabbiness
of my ever-favourite, multi-coloured Habitat settee
does not impinge.

in the bathroom

Already condemned, abused and doomed

for a seventies avocado suite

I’ve compounded the error by painting the walls

chalky emulsion Etruscan red

On the bedroom wall

Vivid against the wall whose blue

delivered a similar buzz

to the exhibitions the posters advertise

carborundum prints of Hughie O’ Donoghue

paintings of Prunella Clough

Coloured rooms - dining room

All the sell your house daytime TV programmes
show garish naked rooms,
colour declared a statement of error,
but I love my colourful rooms
(although this IS the only two colour one!)

from the dining room window

Green-dirty greyness of the frozen pond

birds-foot scuffing damage to the bank

negates the crisply pristine whiteness 

On the shelf above my monitor

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