#quickpoem

This day

Every year

Makes me so happy.

So calm

The feeling the day envelopes

As if wrapping me in sweetest whispers

From the dawn of time

That rings and shines

And reminds

For the February I was laid-off, 

I told the big man ‘Thank you.’ 

and left on the ring road. 

If they were Downsizing 

I would become fertiliser fed, 

The small cellophane tape dispenser, cracked, 

I tweeze, a splint, into the third lane, 

comments aligned behind

the paper’s cage,

You stay safe in the liminal,

the paper’s way 

to say ‘Don’t write here -

I think about you, often. As habitually but unthinkingly as I turn off lights in the house. 

An old text message reopens that space that was once bright and alive between us. Like some kind of sci-fi flat pack, your few words, whether friendly or hostile, make any room feel larger, and more than anything that is in front of me, here you are. 

Though as fast as digital, or as fast as a morning’s newspaper can shout LONDON IS BURNING, come evening, it is then the papier-mâché stuck to a man’s shoe as he walks past the supermarket in the rain. 

What I mean to say is, these memories don’t hassle or tug. I cut the cable tie and watched the pages fall into the wet, the images transferring nothing onto the pavement. Scandal is washed into the gutters, old messages become a phone’s strata. 

I don’t see the harmful or the sad.