Meaningful Title

Without a caption for the photograph

How would I explain what it is I feel

That you are feeling, or what thoughts

You might wish to express towards me

I could talk of emptiness, of loss

Of pain, of suffering

Of a void in the soul

Of not knowing which way to turn

What good would it do, to wish

That these infections would come to an end

To wish that we might be peppered

With joy, with happiness, with love

With the unbridled energy to be forces

Of new beginnings, pulses in fresh starts

Not caught up in the same old same old

But with the newly discovered originality

So you see the caption engulfs

The photograph; the words, the paths

The ideals, the doubts, the dismay

The despair; they all make an entrance

I could talk of where we aren’t anymore

I could talk of the snow on the ground

I could talk of Christmas, of lights, of presents

I could talk of the new year, but why would I

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Final Photograph

It is in the eyes

The eyes are where I see

The formation of what strikes me now

As vulnerability

I suppose I could say

That the whole body language

The entire persona reflects

What I see, both within, also behind the eyes

Yet it is the vulnerability

Of the soon to be decisive

It is the bathing in that place

From which the strength to act will build

Just as hate is fuelled by love

Then so the vulnerable

Are able to grow, to explode

To allow themselves to find life

Just as pulling back the catapult

Gives energy to the missile

Then so having been confined

Gives extra force to the eventual release

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Skill Set

A Friday afternoon

In the hairdressers

At the bottom of Beaumont Hill

A pleasant summer’s day walk

Down the unadopted lane

From Mon Plaisir

I was taught how

To scrunch my hair

Whilst I blow-dried it

This, by the young woman from Liverpool

Who also asked

Where it was that I was going that evening

In this way, one with one

May become a twosome

Or the twosome already

May recoil to one away from one

I don’t remember where the dance was

Or if we ever did make it

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Actions; As Spoken

The poem as I remember it

Is not the poem as he wrote it

Indeed it is a poem about a plant

Whereas I thought it was a poem about a person

I had it in mind that truth

That truth, with belief, were side by side

In those clear moments of experience

Also that love, with beauty, had played their part

I acknowledge, willingly

That this was not chant, nor response

These were not the sounds of a silent

Monastic order; or were they

Was the whole conversation 

Not a means of reaching

A point of common ground

A place for both to move on from

The relationship, as I remember it

Is not the one as she lived it

When it was extended periods of doubt

Whereas I thought it was nigh-on certain

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Ring Back

I would not have worried you

Had the telephone not rung

Liz on the line, from Lincolnshire Life

Actually what I say is not entirely true

For I had thought of you earlier

When writing of self-help books

Samuel Smiles Self Help in particular

Purchased in the Antiquarian Bookshop

One Saturday morning in St Helier

That I have ever been in need of self-help

Is self-evident from this morning’s writings

First in my Morning Words, now in my poetry

How my path then has followed paths of guidance

Even our first meeting, often thought to be happenstance

Was led to, by my thinking of my own self-help study

First to become a chartered engineer 

Which turned into a search for a self-actualised man

In turn to be fuelled, or felled, by psychology, by love

I answered the phone, thinking that it might be

In response to my scan results; perhaps a date

A date for consultation, a date for operation

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