the final countdown

Time flies. Day follows day. Each the same shape. Each the same taste. My days are numbered. So are yours. But I won’t bow down to calendar convention. I choose to rename and reclaim my days. (I’m humming ‘My Way’). I recreate days of meaning and mayhem. Each stand a little taller this way.

one is company

Recent sunshine has lured me to the seafront. Surrounded by my pens and papers I am content to while away a quiet afternoon. Others would not have it so. On my next seaside afternoon I intend to erect the following sign beside me…

outward bound

Books. I don’t just read them, I think about them too. I fantasise and criticise and fall a little in or out of love each time. I wonder what it means that the bedroom is where the bookshelves live whereas the study is wall to wall music. One wakes me up and while the other keeps me warm at night. Sleeping soundly beneath a blanket of words and waking to a concentration of sound.

I think about the books I part with, sent on their way, to travel to another pair of waiting hands, who welcome them, and give them a roof over their papery heads. I wonder what they leave behind once they’re gone. Not so many new words these days, not so many new ideas. But perhaps a few new questions and a clearer idea about the kind of book I don’t want to write.

And with them they take my fingerprints and my dust. Perhaps a hair caught between their pages, a scent of certain soap or sunlight from time spent on table or lawn. Maybe the footprints of a money spider that passed by. Or the aftertaste of a dream from where the book lay by the bed on a darker than average night. A nail mark on a page where I gripped too tight or a tiny tear on one turned too fast. Or a heavy breath sunk into a sentence that I had to stop and read again. And again.

If books could speak, the stories they would tell.

losing faith

She’s stopped praying. Stopped holding her hands together and closing her eyes. Stopped bruising her knees for you. She's loathed to waste precious breath on anything other than blue balloons. For every wasted wish she ties another knot in her hair. She saves graces in the cutlery drawer. She’s making a stainless steel nest, so she’ll never have to fly again. She’s polishing tomorrow and trying to keep out of the rain.