My simple, but genuine gratitude for our life here in Edinburgh…

A protrusion of gratitude

Cloaked in landscapes of light, remunerations

of remembrance brought clear in the rehearsing.

That literature of land partnered with time

makes for fragrant mornings in settings

of coal-kissed stone, unsullied

by lesser things.

No more exile here –

just a protrusion of gratitude.

At this point, the title of this challenge is, for me, a misnomer. I haven’t even come close to posting a poem a day. However, in an act of profound self-abasement and self-care, I humbly submit to you that we’ve moved into a new flat. Phew, monum explicandum out of the way, let’s just get on with it, shall we?

Day 22 –

Moving

The fragrance of a flower remains,

regardless of the address of her rootedness;

beauty intact, bees to groom her, admirers to

love her still attract. Her voluptuous shape

and symphonious aperture, from the mouths

of old and young alike, still yield a

satisfying, “aaaahhh.”

Grey ash, dead-branch-dim

d

e

s

c

e

n

d

s

into corpses, exhumed-verse to still worse fate –

apathy.

Words, once ample-ripe, now winter-sparse,

hunt, cock-ear’d, lungs-flatten’d, for somewhere

to land, to inhale.

Dust-grey soundings lay coiled, like the end of a painter’s day,

wrestling out colours, lines, faces –

not bothered anymore with looking beyond what is seen.

Just the clamouring fool’s last-call for the quick and easy.

These

lazy

letters, unfinished sen

Like changing tires on rusted farm trucks mired in tired dirt,

we muck about in quicksand of distraction, disappointment, deadlock,

the oppressive weight of art.

As needful distraction, we gather up the prosaic, pretentious, polemical,

in fits of laughing stems knit to notes, clinging tight to daylight’s end.

Throats worn from croaking long-forgotten songs of drunken men and laughing children.

Why not dare, instead, to probe the unentered caves where live

the furies, the forbidden, the fortuitous?

That prodigious, crowing dark –

where poets learn to see.

I’ve been feeling like a suburban home,

family-bound, dog-eared, cat-haired, dust-bunnied.

The floor sprawls, covered in lines of loosely connected

bits of string and tape, shoes without mates,

things without name or purpose or place,

shoved in too many drawers, beside stray Tupperware lids

unsure where home is.

I’ve been thatching a wayward garden,

long since surrendered her virginity to the fate of

time and neglect. Her gnarled roots now

the bed of fools – those with nothing to do 

but wait for another dry Spring and

long, parching Summer to follow.

I’ve lost the memory of how to cultivate in her

whatever tempts or teases a solitary bud.

I’ve lost my place in the song,

where happy, drooling drunks drop their lines

of sprawling melody, disconnected from time or tune

or taste, but dripping, soaked in the solicitude of friends.

Old lyrics lie waiting for my attention,

faithful old soldiers of forgotten wars,

older still, fought on fields among the family

of tables and tumbling talk, well-practiced lies

in well-memoried songs.

I’ve been acting like a poem in progress –

a toss-about of lost words, tongue-tombs tied

together by accident in a free-falling frenzy.

Outdoor syntax lost in the mall,

painted-on ivory-tower lips for her rent-a-friend parties.

The ironies, playground of op-eds and writers of no

fixed address, wasted in wordless

sentences no one can read.

But the best poems are never really

finished