Post Diary Blues

This melancholy fug
burrows into my bones
After delving back again
into those memories recounted
with such forensic clarity
Comes a cold blue atmosphere
a fragrant longing
and precision-tooled regret

Those searingly stark lines
old faces, wild flames
lost friendships resurrected
I’m dropped back into the thick of things
Drifting through teenage streets
old freedoms, vintage fantasies
and all those confusions
I could now straighten out so easily

The many story threads left dangling
friendships brutally truncated
as people moved away to university
or were scattered as dandelion seeds
whisked across the globe
some blown beyond this life
I’d love to call them up
and chat for hours again

It’s a temporary sadness
thin blue tendrils grip my heart
As I mourn it all together
the loss of those faces
and that old way of living
The people we once were
they still exist in stasis
trapped inside my dusty diary

My head swims through all the memories
out of time, for a little while
Arriving home, I’m calmed again
warmed and thawed by the place I live
A loving smile to greet me
as the kitten mews for my attention
the past is passed and left behind
a stepping stone to the beauty of now…

Thanks for reading.

Highbury Fields

That sixteen-year-old words 
scratched there in my diary
could bring the two of us here
seems almost supernatural

A spring-evening walk, so like us
the us we were as teens
when you were my first
and still my only kiss
as we walked the peaceful parks of home

Now, so many years stretch across
a wide valley of unshared experience
they squeal and dance between us
slowly and methodically we close the gap
spinning our silken bridge of words

I pull the feathers from your lungs
they’re knotted and tarred
dripping with the bitterness of isolation
they’re catching in your throat

Your silences
and the space between those words
they say much more
they say it all…

Your sorrow is a blanket of leaves
your sorrow is blossom that falls
and covers this park…

Highbury Fields disappears
beneath the tears I know you cry
in your silent room
from your hiding place

Recently, I read again of all you gave me
when the two of us were lost together
so I ask myself ‘what I can do
to help lift you from this place’

What can I do for you
what can I give to you
only my time, only my time to you
the healing warmth of resuscitated friendship
as we walk the adult evening
through this pretty park

And you can say it all
you can speak it all out loud…

Thanks for reading.