Iron Orchid

I don't want to dig

In old family plots

I'm done

*

Memories I cannot drown

Come gasping

Choking back

*

I don't want to search old photographs

Trying to find one to show

I once fit in with misfits

Even then an outsider

*

I know these old snaps by heart

That many times brought memories back to life

Now they are full of strangers

Since the world drifted off

Along with the alcohol years

*

And at the bottom of the box

Unsmiling passport booth photos

I look into that woman's eyes

And wonder who I was -

It was a small patch of normality sewing together a little rip in their lives – a few snatched hours of togetherness, silence, laughter, music, stitching the leaf shaped tear so neatly and invisibly you would never have known it had been there. The two poets together on their boat, their Barge, resting in each other and mending the stress and frayed nerve endings. The boredom and confusion of the outside world and other people’s chaos settled down from a jagged zigzag to a steady beat beat in which their hearts vibrated at the same velocity of calm.

Scrabble and dark chocolate digestive biscuits, Chateauneuf-du-Pape. Cigarettes. Janis on the stereo. The boat drifts and rocks as they linger over the next word, peruse the dictionary, check to see if they are neck and neck. He wins and they make a story from the words, laughing at the twists and turns. They say goodnight to the heroes of the story, Kit and Jip, as he pours the cream tiles into the green bag she holds open.

The best nights rest.

Breakfast is potato scones, baked beans and eggs in the blue and white tiled kitchen. She loves to smoke over her first coffee of these mornings, while he is still sleeping, and the breakfast is on. She adores the spring sun on her dresser, the shelves holding her Grandmothers beautiful gilt edge porcelain with the stroked on lilacs.

After breakfast has gone down, before they have to go their separate ways again they get out their instruments and go on deck and play. Old gypsy tunes, and French songs. They go below, and she plays Einaudi on the piano, tripping over the keys and he does some correspondence. All is as it should be in a good world.

As he leaves, they embrace. They hold each other for a while and he kisses her neck. “See you tomorrow Lovely”

Later as she is alone in the evening she cuddles herself into his plush midnight blue dressing gown breathing in the scent of his after shave on the collar for reassurance and drifts off to sleep.

A tiny curl of jet in the outer endings of a spiral

It reminds me of a lock of yours I kept

When I cut your hair in the kitchen in the summer

It was curled up like a cat on the kitchen floor

Later I posted that lock through your door

***

  Did this black feather come from you?

Like an echo of a tune I once knew

A tiny copy of the curl I kept

As if from our children that were never born

Did it fall from your blue-black wings

You bright, bright thing?

***

  Where did it come from, this tiny, significant jolt?

It reminds me of the tail of my cat

On the check tile

I put the feather carefully in a small china box

It seems to be pregnant with meaning

Finding it was like hearing a new song

I already half knew

Just the first five notes before it was swept away

Sets let you organize your photos on Flickr. Explore the 8 photos in this set.

Buskers Stage, Sweeps Festival 2013, Monday 6th May

Sweeps festival Rochester - the Gordon Hotel Stage - the new act is shaping up nicely with a nice variety of instruments - with Linze Maesterosa and John Forrester.

This was the start of a top night!!