Where questions find answers

This spider is not having nightmares about censorship. With eight eyes I have seen THEM jump from unmarked cars. Felt the Magnum bootsteps cross our threshold. Heard their balaclava breath. They come for you, not me.

 

In the recess of a window, I lie low. Scuttle down those cracks you never see, stalk the dusty under-cupboard. There, with the cache of books you knowingly hid, I need no light. Rest invisible with your companions:

 

Atwood, Morrison, Kobabe, Orwell, Hosseini, Spiegelman, Vonnegut, Joyce. And three more years. I count them: all that time to read. Ignore distractions. Focus only on that single strand – untugged. Until it is.

 

x. 2025

 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002kkmj/storyville-the-librarians

Thirty Days

Withdrawing into itself, this long year

reframes its course, stumbles to November silence.

The season of damp socks and clogged gutters.

 

There’s a loosening of grip, every future

tense with the rustle of pavements, their amber drift.

Confess: not one leaf knows where it will fall.

 

Driven by tailwinds of our past, you’ve reached

that place you can let go. A nation at half-mast,

all cable ties and cheapjack manufacture.

 

Let colours fly. Until starlings gather

there are few enough birds to fill the sky. Sodden

after storm, a frayed, bedraggled prospect.

 

x. 2025

A migrant contemplates the rising ocean

Wing-splayed, I am that dirt white moth

at rest on a redbrick wall.

My time is short

                           but unrestrained:

all your well-mannered shrubbery

has been consumed.

                                I must fly on      or die

before I reach the coast.

There, in newly engineered revetments,

concrete is stacking up:

the work of years, shielded by hoardings.

Sea defence. Its PR low-down tells me

we won’t be overwhelmed

                              at least in my lifespan.

                 

viii. 2025

 

 many thanks to Casey Jarrin for the moth

We have started to crack open the door

as if it were a safe.

From our hiding place in a tiny slice of dark matter,

we must now step through.

 

You are one of thousands

smashing particles, scouring the standard model

for some due cause

                                 of its collision debris.

But the clash of geometry and pure chance discloses

no obvious motive        yet.

 

And I am camouflage,

have passed every experimental test you’ve set

so far.     

           Beyond the AI mirror

where ripples of quantum light annihilate,

my deeper structures pulse.

 

It is too early to party –

that’s the second thing you should know.

We could still detonate the landmines

there        beneath our skin.

 

 viii. 2025

Activities of daily living

 

Back from the refill shop, weighed down

with staples, I pour loose flour into Kilner jars

watchful not to spill the meanest scruple.

But I’ve misjudged capacity,

bought more than there is storage for.

The funnel overruns: I ask myself

(were it allowed) how many people could

our surplus feed. And how long for?

 

Here is our laundry, soaked and rinsed and wrung

by hand, or pulled from drum to basket in wet lumps:

the mundane that makes us human,

going out and coming in like a tide.

We do not dress in salt-damp clothes.

My town has fuel enough – its water pumped

and clean. There’s soap to buy.

No dust of demolition in the wind.

 

Replanting our backyard in terracotta

is a long-term proposition, a luxury.

To recover what has been starved,

cut down, polluted and uprooted

needs more than water and new soil.

I gaze at my earth-dirty hands,

believe in century-old harvests, and

grieve at the absence of olive branches.

 

vii. 2025

Culture Matters

Poetry Wivenhoe