Nautical Optimism

barely awake it seems
the sun forgot to bring coffee
or a fogless breath
to her window –  
but that blue’s a fine glow,
she thinks – is it dawn
or the tread of a storm
colouring over the divide
of sea and sky?

she waits and sighs and asks
of the beasts she colours
in daylight and picks apart
when the ease of splitting weaves
where oceans cohere and forbid
an easy return,
 
if prayers count when thrown
to fishes, day after day.

The Old House

I know I was meant to do one a day . . . but yeah, I failed at that. Done . . . three. So I'll edit up the other and post is in the next couple days. This one's more of a musing than anything else, and is going straight on my 'to edit' pile. :/

The Old House

The wallpaper peels itself back,
stringing decade-old glue
like party streamers, made grey
by the rain, over the carpets
we scuffed black and blue,
and then ‘till the colour wore away
and our names were revealed,
etched into the bottom stair.

This house pretends
that ghosts play in the eaves,
weaving banners between the beams:
the children who lived here smile
and draw crayon wishes on the ceilings,
the walls, and unravel their way
to an attic where laughter
filters through the dust
like sulphurous whispers.

Unsolved

[Beware: word-vomity awfulness drizzled with a dash of eww. Trying to get back into this, 29 more poems to do in the next three weeks, hopefully it'll help - wish me luck.]

Wonderland was the name you scribed
on the patio doors, though stiffened
by fortnights of rain, and swollen at the hinges.
You’d gaze at the flat areas in the grass
until the curves of your mind spilled
like laughter down the hundred worn hooves
of a carousel as it spins, entombed  in its own
symmetry, waiting for it to spring up
between the daisies fainting against the glass
when night rises, unsmiling.

You remember my name
sometimes, and call it out loud,
as though to the cat who’s pawprints
still ghost the concrete steps, looking
for the dried-out milk I used to leave out,
while every night in this garden,
more moons look away in the sky.

Your fingers reach out to stroke my face
but pull away when splinters separate
your memories of what you always believed
happened here. The garden listens, but only speaks
when nobody is there to hear its murmurs.
The pink champagne we spilled between the blades
dried like blood in the moonlight: black.

And I thought I saw a star cry my name, before
the constellations became your witnesses.

[Sept 3rd]

Helloooooo

This is my shiny new blog as the other one never seemed to get used and I thought a change might help that, though so far it hasn't. Hopefully, thanks to a September Napo, this will be for poetry, but let's see.

Also, other poetry people - if you're using wordpress and the automatic space between line breaks annoys you (I hate it because it messes up stanzas) then [shift]+[enter] creates normal linebreaks without the space between the lines. :)

Just
like
this
:)