Small Steps

Take one good idea
Perhaps a candle flickering
Then imagine its magnification
A thousandfold
Or at least two candles
Would be a 200% improvement

Take another good idea
Maybe to be kind to yourself one time
Then imagine its amplification
One thousand and one kindnesses
Or at least to be kind to yourself twice
Would be an infinite improvement

The third idea
Is of your own making
Find your own values
Adopt them
To do that each and every day
Would be exceptionally brave

Available at Amazon

Christopher's Website
for his Collected Works

From Where

I am in pain
Physical pain
That much I know
That much I feel

Yet the mind
The mind roams free
Mostly
Except when tears

Ask if they might share the space
To try to find one grief
Which one could work through
Fully and completely

The physical pain
Will not go away
Not of its own accord
I very much fear

But psychologically
Could I settle one grief
Then another one
And go on and on ad infinitum

But where to start
Where to sit
Where to wait for the tears
To make an entrance

Available at Amazon

Christopher's Website
for his Collected Works

Out On A Limb

Bread, or potato
With butter and cheese
Or, if a jacket potato
With curry or curried beans

This is the seventh day
Of the fourteen days
Of fourteen weeks
Of self-isolation

The sun shines
The wind blows
The workmen hammer away
And we have no bread

Two Christmases back
I was given a bread-maker
It was never put to use
But these are different days

No travel
Next to no shopping
No and again no
No we have no bread, or potatoes

Available at Amazon

Christopher's Website
for his Collected Works

Islands, Continents

It was cotton
Cotton on the bog
Halfway across the country
From West Coast to East Coast
Galway to Dublin
Ireland to England

But first a stop-off point
At the art gallery
For a coffee and a cake
Or even a spot of lunch
After taking photographs of the cotton
The cotton on the bog

Years later
Or years earlier
But definitely years apart
Although once
The land had
Continued through

To that place
Or another place
Though today I write
Of that place, the special place
With deserted beaches, with the machair
Where a painter called Volbeda, paints from memory

Available at Amazon

Christopher's Website
for his Collected Works

Snap

Tiredness courts despondency
As love favours skipping
Only water from the stream
Will bring the eyes back to life

You might choose
Or may already have chosen
A time or place to lose
Or for the object to be broken

That I co-exist
Is hardly any enhancement
A past unable to resist
What the glance meant

A gleam in the eye
As passing as a smile
All the while and by and by
It was either pure or puerile

Without the dotted page
Where will be the guidance
No more the energy to rage
Simply to slide with subsidence

Available at Amazon

Christopher's Website
for his Collected Works