Tag: poems
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Howl For the Quiet Classroom
(With inspiration from, and apologies to, Allen Ginsberg…) I saw the best minds of my generationtrying to get thirty teenagersto care about a metaphorat nine‑thirty on a Tuesday,holy fools of fluorescent corridorsdragging whiteboard pens like relics,summoning meaning from photocopiesthat still smell of warm toner. I walked the tiled floors of the learning cathedral,the budget‑cut basilica,the…
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April Fools?
We don’t need April to tell us we’re fools. We do that ourselves every time we trust the wrong hunch, laugh at the wrong moment, or walk into the day with our shoelaces untied and our certainty tied too tight. We’re fools when we love too loudly, when we hope too early, when we mistake…
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April Breeze
April speaks in half‑truths:a warm breeze here,a cold shoulder there,never quite committing to either. It lets the blossoms openjust enough to tempt you,then tests your faithwith a sharp, late frost. But you learn to trust the pattern:uncertainty first,growth second,and somewhere in between,your own patience stretching.
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Poem About the New Domain (Which Is Not a Big Deal, Apparently)
I bought a domain. It felt like the thing to do. weatherinmyribs.com;a name that suggests I’ve thought this through. I haven’t. But the link works, and that’s really the whole achievement.
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The Distance We Carry
The story bends north long before I arrive,a woman carrying four childrenas far from harm as she can manage,finding Thurso at the edge of what’s possible.My dad grows up in that far light,learns the sea’s voice, leaves when work demands it.Years later, I come for my own reasons,thinking I’m starting from somewhere else,and feel the…
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The Well Best Forgotten
At the edge of townthere’s a well everyone swearsthey don’t visit.Too dark,too deep,too full of thingsthat were never meant to be pulledinto daylight. But every nightyou can hear the rope creak,the bucket scraping stone,the hush of neighboursleaning over the rimto see what’s floating there. They say the well shows truths.They say it reveals dangersbefore they…
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We Taught Rocks to Think
We taught rocks to think.Not the old way, where stones held storiesbecause someone carved them in,but the stranger way;taking sand that once knew only tides and pressure,purifying it until it forgot it was earth,slicing it thin enough to tremble,and persuading it to carry lightningin patterns precise enough to mean something. We etched pathways into silence,coaxed…
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The Blueprint
I keep laying out blueprintsfor things I’ve already built.Not because they need fixing,but because I can’t stop seeingthe empty spaces between the lines. Everyone else points at the structure;the beams holding,the rooms lit,the whole thing standingexactly as intended.They call it solid.They call it good.Some even call it beautiful. But I’m still at the drafting table,pencil…
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Memories of Amoxicillin
There was a bottle in the cupboardthe colour of weak sunshine,with a label half‑peeledand a smell you could recognisefrom three rooms away.Thick as custard,sweet in a way nothing natural ever is,it clung to the spoonlike it didn’t want to let go. We hated it, of course;the way it coated your tongue,the way it lingeredlong after…