can't see the wood for the trees

Often I have wondered, whilst standing here besides the Thames, whether my fate flows as surely as this mist-covered river.   Further up they call it the Isis. Further up I am allowed to drop my Ts again, like sacks of rock I suffered to shoulder.   Sometimes the mist down here thickens so much you seem to see elsewhere, perhaps, and old friends take shape if just for a moment. Visions fade.   Where is the mouth I once called with? Where are the words we shared like stones made smooth and beautiful by tides? Pebbles and memories remain.   That seems the way of my fate - slow erosion to a faceless mean, an average slate on which is writ the waterways I’ve wandered, sick at heart.

I bend, pen in hand, to dig down to the root of things, coming up one millennium ago, when this garden looked quite different. Then our saplings were just starting to show their flowers, to bloom with their own colours, becoming before the weeds came. Three centuries of struggling ensued - but roots suppressed can still survive. I lift these twisted branches and spy their intertwined growth…Now the terms of flowers and weeds are changeable. Here our garden is rich in thyme, lavender, lonicera, lily - smelling just as sweet by any name.

I sent you a poem on a postcard and look where it got me. Cloistered inside the confessional booth, trapped and tortured, now I must atone for my sins. This note is necessary to exorcise the memory of finding a postcard crumpled, barely showing through the wreckage the words I had wrought from my heart’s deep forge.

Some secret room inside my brain must hold the sleeping nature of my soul.   Whilst worn grey matter moves the mouth and puppeteers the habits learned by rote   inside this cradled space I dream of poetry, and stars, and falling leaves.   A hidden garden such as this could grow beyond its aging shell - unless   I fail to feed it, or neglect the gentle care an artist’s soul knows best.

As we pass on our tracks the best we can do is leave notes on the fridge, chairs, doors. Unable to stop the hidden hand that moves us, we rush to end the daily circuit. So it happens our curt “I love you"s and short requests for milk or bills or emails must be made via left messages. We could surely not endure it, were it not for the gentle, soothing joy of leaving the station at dusk to find a red sky, and each other’s arms.

A soft October sky fills my rising eyes as on a cloud I soar to heights only dreamed of before.   This dawn is drawn in a new language, for the morning light fills the floor to the foot of the bed, where it finds two halves of one body - mine, finally reunited with yours.

“I am trying to push you,” is what I told them, though in their minds they added “…off the edge of a cliff…”   It’s not like that. It’s just that I see minds like mine but blessed with more time, and more chances to use them.   Coupled with a growing fear of how quickly it all goes, the heart lurches for a hand to pull, at first, and then push   beyond yourself.

Autumn turns me philosophical - nostalgic for a thought I’ve never had. In passing faces I see the rain-streaked lives that sprawl across this city. Behind each set of grey eyes lies a story I want to tell.

Close your eyes and the pixels still burn a little. The lingering sensation of unreality stings like a fever. We are suffering from double vision - brainsick sights that remain like frost on the windows.

The sliced moon hangs suspended in the red afternoon like a sun half-mended.   As the painter waxes and the daylight fades, the sky relaxes to bluish shades.

Sometimes they come like filings to a magnet, like air to a vacuum. Sometimes they happen like they were fated.   On off days I stare at blank pages like by observing them I could change their state. But this   was never a science. This was always a fall, a failed experiment, a strange transmutation.

The moment they catch it you see the skin searing - the eyes light like smoke flares while the words form like ash on their tongues. The disease has taken root. Now nights will be spent sweating words, feverish with language, corrupted by the son. The only respite comes from the ink injection lancing the linguist’s boil.

The moon mocks me with memories of you. A pale pock-marked face, unhindered and wry, floating effortlessly through the sky - untouchable. Uncatchable. Unclaimable.