Category: Life Poems

Who wants a lift
When you can do this
When you can take a whiff 
Of the scents of leaves underfoot
When you can sniff the air
Feel the softest breath of the breeze on your skin
Feet sinking into soft pathways
Freshly made by the morning rain

For too long I didn't know 
Nothing is better than a slow stroll 
Close to the river's ebb and flow 
A tree canopy so close it looks like a stroke 
Of green feather dusters 
wiping the sky clean
Of clouds 
It's sharp blue astonishing 
Clear of all but the yellow rays of sun
Reflected artfully in window panes 
Duplicated on the rippled surface
Glimpsed between dancing plants
As I glance 
On my way past, in rapt attention. 

Is chat GPT bad at poetry or is it me?
Does it have to rhyme to record my feelings
at one time or another
To track what was important,
like an I woz ere graffiti from the 80's
 AI IS here
accelerating what we now know, 
exacerbating my nostalgia,
for an era we once knew,
a slow time.
When you’d simultaneously press play and record hearing that song you liked on the radio
 that clunk summed it up
the clumsy effort, to be rewarded with a proper play back loop
Not a fake feedback loop
Back when scarcity of information and an itch for knowledge made us visit the library 
to use microfiche
green writing filling a screen full of satisfying curiosities.
Searching shelf by shelf to get knowledge
Following the clues all the way to the copy machine
The world was in a book
The world book
A case of knowledge,
we took the time to digest.
A slow life to be lived
whilst gently polluting as if we knew nothing of it.

One day of rain
And everything had changed
Not wanting to complain
But seeing nothing was the same
I turned to a new page 


Through milk bottle bottom lenses
No longer sure of what I saw
I'd misunderstood what was intended
knocked to the ground
By the ungrateful crowd
Who'd booed without a sound 


I'll count my blessings
Say I've learned new lessons
Wait for the next rays of human kindness
To cure my temporary blindness

Unsaid unsung unseen
Such hidden fears play out in the deepest hour of my sleep
On the mind’s eye cinema screen
To leave a lasting daylight question mark
When daylight finally might
Deign to compete with this phone so artificially bright
In my hands a fountain of other scenes to distract from what has not been

Waking in the early hours slowly emerging from a cloying nightmare
Leaving a snail trail of still real-seeming storyline
The phones’ dimmed but still too bright light guides me back
A beacon of real preoccupation to distract
From the lurking fears brought to life in cinematic deep sleep
To the real yet unreal lives of other people
From the half strangers still posting on my feeds
To the real strangers’ Times’ reported deeds
Stories to distract from the dread acted out at night inside my head.