How long to have been away

How long to have been away

So difficult to return

Especially as the pen

Is not flowing freely

Yes, the Berlin Blue

Is in need of replenishment

As also is the soul of this writer

On a quite troublesome day

Yet the debt must be repaid

To have lived such a good life

Without giving an ounce of thanks

Is not praise as praise should be

How long then until the next time

What certainty of pessimism

Might cause the words to dry up

Or, to dry out, may read better

There is always a distance

A gradual wandering pathway

Through climbing moorland streams

To those times of future passed 

The new year diet is begun

The new year diet is begun

Music, art, literature

And a little less food

Yes down to sixteen hundred

Calories a day

For the next three months

Mind you, the walking

Hasn’t taken off

Like it should have

It’s just not in me

Not in this dull cold weather

Where I prefer to play

With inkblots

And spots of memories

From the near and distant past

When I encouraged

The Rorschach test

To take me anywhere that it wanted 

I do intend to begin the new year

I do intend to begin the new year

With a more inward looking journey

Which is what I am trying to realise

That is, this is what I hope to find

I am not alone in having lost a lover

Of that I am 100% certain

I am though entirely alone in dealing with it

In the way which I try to deal with it

I know that it goes dark outside

Also that that happens earlier

In winter rather than in summer

I know too that loss goes darker

If all that I am is all that I am

Then what am I to worry about

But if I also try to include you

Does that not create a new story

Once upon a time, long ago

I did include you

Indeed thoughts of you preceded all

Which was, perhaps, a little bit wayward 

I was going to have just one more

I was going to have just one more

But then, out of the Celebrations

Bumper Christmas re-seal packet

My hand emerged with a Twix

And a Mars bar, honestly

I had no choice did I

I hate the Twix first

But then, I thought of Fee Griffin’s poetry

Another Christmas gift

But from a more familiar source

Who also gave me

The Hero With A Thousand Faces

Only two of which I will use

To tell you that today is Sunday

And the sun shines brightly

To ward off storm Bella

Who is the real reason why

I did not go for a walk instead 

I did not go to the Mountain

I did not go to the Mountain

To see the Four Colours of Rock

Neither did I walk around

The Basket Dew Pond

I did not enter the Guardian Shelter

Of woven hazel plastered with mud

Neither did I traverse by the Cuckoo Dome

Which interleaves the inside with the outside

The Shelter for Dreaming though lives on in me

I borrowed it’s name for a poetry collection

It almost became that basket

Which lies between this death and that life

The Tumulus on the Downs

Came before I walked there

Similarly the Air-Vessel Canoe

Had more space than I could hope to imagine