White Out

A claw closing in around us.

And waiting.

As it always has been.

Waiting for a reverence,

I cannot give it.

I can't understand,

Let alone be it.

It is too strange for me and

I am too far away.

There is a moment when all is lost to it.

We are an island surrounded.

And we are too difficult.

It is a pleasure.

It is a loss.

To be so cut off.

To be so stranded.

The white has eaten the green.

There is nothing left.

Even the light basks in its glory.

Even the light is not its own.

We all have to be difficult.

We all have to be strange.

But most of all,

We all have to be lonely. 

A Comet Born

At first I thought you invisible,

As I struggled to see who you would be to me.

I couldn't place a person in that first glimmer

Of starlight.

The phosphorescent haze solidified

Into a single angle of diamond light

Holding an entire microcosm

Of human life.

Held in my hands I can detect

The coiled potential strength

Tailing the tiny body like an aura

Of independence.

The Smoke Dragon

A Smoke Dragon sits on a mountain.

Crawling curlicues of smoke circling

The mountain top

Colliding and colluding with the clouds

So thinly stretched they are transparent;

Tears appearing as in old worn sheets.

The people lived in a dampened form of

Permanent terror

Caught in patterns of forgotten fear inherited

From unmet ancestors:

No one alive had seen the smoke Dragon.

No one alive doubted the existence of the Smoke Dragon.

At the foot of the Mountain

Lived the girl who ate books:

Onkei had begun life

Caught on the currents of curiosity

Catching knowledge like the sails of a

Boat courting the breeze.

She lived a heightened life of

Brightened discovery.

Curating the skills of generations

Of unmet ancestors:

No one alive knew as much as Onkei.

No one alive was as aware of their lacking knowledge as Onkei.

As inevitably as time moves through moonlight

Onkei became aware of the dragon

Dancing thoughts drifted up the mountain to tangle

With tails of tepid smoke.

Dragon smoke.

Silly slaying soldiers

Enigmatic exorcisms

Were rejected

So she continued consuming text

Until the answer drew clear

Clear as a smokeless mountain

The dragon lived on fear.

Epilogue: there is nothing to fear but fear itself. Books are good.
Onkei continues to eat books. The smoke Dragon is gone. 

The Moonlight Is Just for You

Bewildered, foreign and lost

You lay across

The arms of your father.

Unsure of where your

Breath had come from.

And unknown to night

You'd watched light

Seep out of the world

Grown silent and empty

Of activity.

Unaware of the split

Between the twilit

World and the stars,

You watched the night turn

On Daddy's shoulder.

Moving to and fro

You passed the window

Noticing the slim white

Disc of the moon

Who's light follows only you.

A Walk to Hestia's Temple

An aborted morning,

Dawn lost to mist,

We went ahead anyway,

With the walk,

A four miler planned weeks ago.

I waited first in the car park,

Muted by mist and mud,

But backlit by mellow torchlight,

waving on the branches,

Of a Gingko tree.

The family drew up,

Sister, brother, father, mother,

In a selection of toffees,

Mulberry, burgundy and grey.

Hats: flat and rounded,

First gloves of the season.

Greetings exchanged, the,

Dog set us off.

Sturdy ankle boots crushed,

The fragile open wounds of the grass.

Soon the clouds drowned,

The path we'd forced.

As we pushed onwards,

Emboldened by having,

Done this so many times before.

Only once had it,

Defeated us.

Circular trails through,

Fattening mist had led us,

Closer only to darkness.

But salvation in sighting,

The floating tower,

Had seen us home,

By the fire for tea.

Older and wiser, today holds,

Complacent ease.

Until one of us mentions barking,

In the distance,

Can you hear it?

No. Not yet.

It grows: the sound lengthening,

And stretching to tether all of us.

It wavers, holds,

The crisp, fat gunshot of a

Shot gun

Unanimous flight,

An unplanned narrative.

We leave the invading sounds,

In the bodiless mist.

Sure of where we are heading.

As sure as we are wrong.

Destination imperfect.

Soon I am among the Japanese maples.

Burning and bleeding.

Unashamed by the sky.

Unput-out-able.

I know we can find our,

Way back.

But I'm uncertain if,

We want to.

If I want to.

Perhaps it would be better,

To stay.

Enfold my fate with the,

Trees.

And be consumed. 

Bones

Music's memory holds me strong,

A cutting current owns my bones.

Like a hoarder of aged bodies,

Giving up his dead to dignity-less exposure.

Unnerving flash of white,

A blunt sword buried within all

Gives itself up with decomposure.

I didn't know you were inside me.

Disovled of myself those empty sticks,

Are all that I've left.

Ippon, nihon, sanbon.

Memories I didn't know I had,

Bind me to you.

Through old man's eyes I see,

My death reflecting,

Our second youth.

That we can never go back is clear,

So let's go on 'cause the future's all we've got.  

Packing Boxes

Emboldened like worker ants we move,
Storing away brown box after borrowed box after broken box. 
'No, wait. Not enough tape. This is storage, not removal. 
We might need to ship it out or bring it back.' 
Back to here or back to there?
Where, now, will be home?
Empty out the saucepan, cheese grater and measuring jug.
I see a rethink coming on.
We're paused in our black armoured convoy of practicality.
Someone asks me: 'could you not just buy some over there?' 
But we might come back.
I might come back.
The convoy shifts, lets go its defences.
We all know that in this moment,
These boxes aren't coming back.