Blank

A Magpie Tales post

Blank

The milky-white page stares at me blankly,

a cataract clouding my sight of the words.

I must strike the right key to find the

rhythm where lines once disturbed,

can find order and see alignment

in the snow blindness of the page.

But my guideless fingers strike tuneless,

discordant notes in their rage.

The same fingers, veins filled with ink

once could write a life in the space of a line,

see connections in dissonant images

that my mind’s eye could mine.

But now, the blind page unsees my work

and random letters fall and scatter

from ink-filled fingers, and, missing the page

fall unsighted to the ground and shatter.

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Stonewrapped in Marble

Stonewrapped in Marble

You were one of the original hoodies,

peripheral, isolated on the edge,

cowled and stigmatised as they said

you were for the birds.

Yet you kept chirping away,

scattering crumbs of comfort as they pecked

at your stone-wall countenance

and made you blind.

But there was no poverty of sound,

the rustling of the winds habit as it

brushed past the trees was echoed

by the rattle of the corn

broadcasting their message.

But who listens to nature now,

when the only tweets come from a mocking bird?

We sow the seeds of our decline with every concrete footing

that falls on an abandoned nest.

In our desire to travel from here to there

we forget the journey.

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Framed

A Magpie Tales post.

Submitted to Thursday Poets Rally.

Charlie Chaplin doffs his hat as

Buster Keaton leans against the wall.

“We’re just flickering these days.”, says Charlie.

Buster smiles engimatically, keeps silent.

The white screen wall, blank in its

blinking light, absorbs their shadows,

soaks up their slapstick soliloquies.

In the stalls, Fatty Arbuckle finishes a bottle

thinks about youth arrested and smiles, wistfully,

at a career as cross-eyed as Ben Turpin.

Meanwhile, somewhere overhead,

Harold Lloyd is hanging around, out of time.

The frame shifts out of focus

and the reel ends.

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A Time to Reflect

A Magpie Tales post.

Also submitted to Writers Island.

And to Thursday Poets Rally.

A Time to Reflect

A quick glance, backwards,

and a life is reflected.

Where an eye for regret

is stored in the gilt-edge

surround. The glass echoing

hopes long past, sundered, eclipsed

by shadows of lives not lived.

Where love almost lingered

but passed, etching layers

of guilt and memories inlaid

in wrinkles. And as I look again

that past life settles, like wind-blown

sand, on a present countenance.

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