POEM: Another Fucking Sunrise

I don’t remember feeling normal,

To the point that normal is unwell,

And bleary eyes and pounding head is all I know.

I just need to get some rest.

It’s easier said than done.

I close my eyes and wish for sleep.

That maybe this time I’ll fall deep.

But it’s 3am and I’m lying in the dark;

Familiar to me as the dawn’s dreadful chorus.

Sunrises aren’t beautiful when you see them every day.

Jealous of my cat and wife who sleep the whole night through,

I try to still my mind

With techniques that never work more than once.

My deficit is in decades not days.

Five years old and lying awake

Thinking about cartoons too early yet to air.

I moved my bed around that tiny room

As if it’s placement held the key.

A different pillow? A newer sheet?

Empty or shared, in bed I’m always alone.

Same wide open eyes.

Same taunting bird call.

In this battle with consciousness

I’ll sleep when I’m dead.

Though even then remains the fear:

Awake again at 3am

Restless even in the grave.

Another fucking sunrise I shouldn’t have to see.

POEM: I Am My Patterns

My old notebooks and journals

Look too much like the ones I’m writing in now.

Though words are different,

I’m older now, of course,

And people and places have changed,

I am just as fucked up as I ever was.

Doing all the same old fucked up things.

Just in marginally different ways.

A reboot barely even trying to feel fresh.

A sequel that reminds us of all the worst bits of the first one.

The background of a sprinting cartoon.

I am nothing more than a pattern of behaviour and thought,

Replicating and repeating.

A childhood trauma fossilised in amber,

Wrapped and repackaged in new clothes,

Pretending to be all grown up.

POEM: My Wife

I am pushed beyond my comfort zone

By a hand so gentle

It holds me close and guides the way

Even as it urges me on

POEM: Windermere

I’m not one to write poems about mountains.

I do not make literature of the field.

Flowers bloom and wither without bother from my pen.

I’ve never yet rhapsodised a tree.

Not a drop of verse from trickle to ocean.

But the view from this window is the stuff of poems,

To be written by better men than me.

POEM: Easing Lockdown

The broken system,

exposed,

leaves us

(for fear of losing what little scraps we have)

longing for our old oppressions,

clinging onto the corpse-foot somehow still pressing down on our neck,

even from the grave