Expressive Explorations

darkness swallows the nighttime  flick   light flits from the ignored expanse.        midnight mirror misleads the eye amongst the gloom.       all reflections confound at night.     as i'm watching what light there is    seems to hover between the walls. clocks rush through hours in one tick.          i turn to look towards outside.     daytime window reflects sometimes - part-time mirror that in a mind       click can flip to being a hole to the outside.    i am trapped here in-between. as          what's before me stares blankly back, water creeps down my spine again.              as sun arcs,  changing light confounds. whether via mirror, window or air, and however you look, all light arrives distorted - it's the rogue echoes half-light dance, curving through the turbulent air, searching for solidity.

To create and maintain 32 seconds of wonder can take a lifetime. Like some strange law of diminishing returns, where meaning spreads out, like ripples, from the creator, who finds such pride, such purpose, in their process, that they drop a stone into water that splashes through the medium of people. We can create our meaning, through where we spend our time, if you can feel it gleaming.  ------ I'm very grateful to have this poem published in Issue 2 of Flights . 

We are walking in a wood. To our left I see paper in the process of dissolving in a pool of water. You are wearing a long, beautiful skirt, that I haven't seen you in before, which occasionally swishes against the clumps of newly fallen leaves. Above, the wind replies. Nearby, to our right, but out of sight, water burbles by, though the ground we walk on is gradientless. Birds chatter music all around, enjoyably consuming lingering summer insects. There are no further away sounds. We have walked like this for years, extensive explorers. Stronger. Interlinked. A twig snaps. You turn to me with a well-known, warm, calm smile. Let's keep going . 

As I round the corner a man and his tiny daughter are standing beneath a tree, eyes on the ground. "They're called helicopter seeds," still uncertain on her feet, she reaches down and grabs one and throws it into the air. She giggles and he smiles as the small seed twirls to the ground, to rest and then I'm past them.     There was a sycamore tree      in my neighbour's garden      and the helicopter seeds  would fall       onto the path  of the house I grew up in.      I'd grab handfuls       and float them      into the village stream      and watch them wash away. As the delight fades behind me, I am alone again and grab a copter of my own. I carry it down to the river railing of the big new city and look out across the churning water, until watchers move on. I let the seed fall and follow it for the time its beautiful shape allows, before it cuts through the surface and I continue on.

I just saw the cord of my blind swinging and was surprised by the strange shapes of its shadow; the differing of an object and its shadow felt like original thinking, until I remembered the cave of an old chap called Plato. Other languages probably have a word for when you felt so mindful but were beaten to the idea by more than 2000 years, when out of the obscured, spins a thought, so graceful, until new light means the shadow disappears.

My partner                    at the time found you in a hedge on the way back from work dirty tired and alone and brought you home So small                    at the time that we thought you were a kitten rather than malnourished and mistreated as we later learnt from the softly spoken vet who you didn't like at all It took a long time to loosen your fear of people as long as it took for the beautiful grey and black splotches of your fur to return to beautiful white and black and to soften to our careful gentle touches that were permitted more and more by our new family member I didn't mention                     at the time that I suggested the name Bess for your superficial  resemblance to a cow but you responded to it and the name stuck before my motive was uncovered A miracle                    at the time mere months later when you would wake me at your own sunrise by standing on my chest and purring nose to nose I've found no better way to start a day than this outpo

My friend was talking about a painting by Magritte, of a pipe that is not a pipe. Straight into my head, with calm fidelity, I saw an image of a pipe, floating in space - the sort of pipe water flows through, with a right-angled bend in its shiny metal. I looked up the painting, to be sure, and I'd got the wrong sort of pipe all together. It was not a pipe, but a pipe . Hmm... Maybe I was thinking of the cover of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells? Out comes the phone again. Closer! The background is as I imagined and the material is similar, but still no pipe. Unsurprisingly, this floating monolith is a triangular tubular bell. So where did I see the pipe? If I did see the pipe. Which is of course not a pipe (of any sort) anyway...