Airplane

Define for me the moment of loss of contact;
the moment we lose touch with the ground and
the Sun becomes a lonely witness, as you fly into the horizon.
Deep curves, swerving through the air you fly.
You never knew the estuary would be that blue, (a mind serene).

Complications of the ground become vague trivialities,
as whole, sprawled cities become microdots on the vast spectrum
of experience of life that becomes more and more remote
with each molecule of air that holds you: As a buffer
between you and the ground – so soft you cannot feel it, hold it;
so hard it will hold you - can it feel you - as you curve
through space? So far that if you reached, you could not touch
the Earth; if you closed your eyes, you would not be sure
of its presence. And for some hours, it isn’t there.

The sunrise, painted a rainbow of red and blue in pastel,
has been blotted dry and pinned up – hanging - waiting for you
to meet it in the sky (waiting just for you) where unique it lies.
Last strengths of sun, strike along your eyelashes as you
prepare for sleep. (Alone now and far from life, you’re safe.
You’ve run, you’ve succeeded. There’s no need for metaphors
Assuming you choose to never land.)

i think the grammar here's a litle too heavy, but it needed this amount cos of the regular lines and something to break it up. concrit appreciated as ever!

And so there we were. Dancing, dancing, dancing away under the sun. Myself and my shadow, my shadow and myself. I couldn’t shake her, not even with the movement of my shaking, quaking hips, oh no. Though I didn’t want to shake her, I didn’t want to shake her, we were one, we were united, we were a duet. United as one, we danced, we tumbled, we swirled, we dived, we grooved, we swivelled, we jumped, we jived. Together, the two of us developing a rhythm under the music of the sun, I couldn’t shake her; I didn’t want to shake her. I didn’t want to shake the energy of her hips, the movement of her torso, of her dancing arms, her rhythmic lips. Just the two of us, together as one, a-one two three four five six seven eight, the timing of our hearts beating as one. Sway, two three four, and back, two three four, dance and prance and glide and slide and smile, yes I smile, as my shadow smiles at me and we smile together and we laugh and dance in the sun. I’ve never danced like this before; I’ve never felt the warmth. I’ve never felt the beat of a heart pounding in time with mine. I’ve never been hand in hand as we gently sway, in time with the rhythmic beating of our hearts.
I’ve never been asked to dance before.

I guess I’ll have to make do with my shadow.

Spaceman? Listen, if you can.

Keen is the mind to wonder of the skies
And the stars and the planets that pleasure the eyes
With millions of your tokens to spare for the missions
That could send strength of man, darling into submission.

It’s amazing we pay to think outside of the sphere
And question your very existence here
When men could be using themselves for the world
They remain staring upwards, wings in-curled.

Such magical creatures men could be!
If they could look back at their land and maybe see
World; abandoned; no floor undiscovered
Yet poverty, worry, war remain covered
Under the blanket that shields men’s eyes from the fright
That lies in this world...

..So let’s try with our might
To change man from looking up at the stars and the moon
And unfurl the world from a terror-cocoon.

'Life' of A Student

Trudge homewards with calculus work in the dark,
Six o’clock through the door from the physicist’s talk.
Stack books on the desk where (half soggy) they lie
Go lie on your bed girl, exhausted you cry.

Close the door, open books and lock off your weekends,
Expectations consist of no fam’ly or friends.
Just stamina, stubbornness, subverts the mission,
Dreamed of in one whisper of idealism.
Success, inspiration, fulfilling your best,
Are twisted by coils of revise-dampened tests.
Wavelets of paper overflow your desk,
All prooving your dedication and success.

As you struggle to wake tomorrow in the dark,
Your back hurting still from the weight of your work,
Smile, girl for the future – and all you aim for
It’s getting so you don’t want anything more.

[Thank you for the constructive critisism, please do let me know if it has improved!]

I thought that night, you had forgotten me.

As I lay beneath a spark-spangled sheet
The breath of Miss. Night leads me to thievery!
The discarded cocoon of a forgotten little lifery
Lies mournful on dewdropped tickler carpet.
I wrap myself tightly in woven masterpiece
Masterpieced by Mr. Mr. Butterfly
Now dining with Mrs Butterfly, and the little butterflees.
Butterbutterflees.
And I wait for thee.

Pitterpatterkins begin to kiss the ground
Begin to kiss my rosy cheeks, my button nose
All forbidden kisses. Then little petters
Start to pitterpatter harshly
Where’s your love lover love lover love?
Pitter patter lonely? Pitter patter lovely?
Squeaky squeak they giggle away
And I wait for thee.

Put high heavens under lock and key
For it’s time to release my bravery
I crawl unto the weeping willow
Weeping weeps of willows around my tiny body
I hold up the nearest conker shell for sheltery.
And weep willows to put a willow tree to shame!
And I wait for thee.

I play hide-and-seekyseek with the moon
But he was victorious. As he hid and wouldn’t be seeked!
Lonely lone again, waiting for mocking pitters…

And you come!
Bringing light into my night
Mister I’ve been waiting for you
My saviour from a coldsy cold, a darksy dark
From dancing shapes that steal themselves
From oak trees, birch trees, willow trees, who cares trees!
You are here and you are mine for 12 hours glee!
My Prince. My daytime.
I thought that night, you had forgotten me
But, the sun, my Prince, always rises for me.

Written Out

Yesterday I wrote for thirty minutes
Wasted, transcribing onto a page left in a black bin.
Writing - imagine
Imagination sucked into sprawled lyrics
spinning themselves into anecdotes, with a question of reality.
(Life.)
The day you fought with your parents
Walked calmly outside to hit the wall (again and again).
Stumbled back inside in silence
And stripped the paper into incoherence.
(Writing.)
Last week I wrote my autobiography
I accelerated from six to sixteen in
Twenty-two pages flat.
My life in writing. Imagine
Memories of experience, emotion
Sucked into
black and white.

NB: I'm having real trouble make this one work - any advice badly needed and highly appreciated!

Cambridge in Autumn
Autumn days will be permanently characterised by sundown over the common and the sunlight chasing the clouds across the once-blue sky. I love reading stories in the clouds as I walk Shadow over the Common, wondering if the shapes I read will forecast the future like tealeaves, tangled in the trees as they are.
Yesterday, with my job hanging over me like a storm, all I could read in the clouds was that it was probably going to rain tomorrow. I was supposed to be a Cambridge graduate, life was supposed to be perfect and pre-arranged if not preordained. But with all the energy quotas changing due to new government guidelines, my MsC in nuclear research felt like four years down the plughole and this monochrome city was drowning me in that same bath.
Today, the grass smells as damp as living fog would - this autumn grass hangs over the ground as though it were a stranger to buttercups and dandelions. I don’t look at the sky – I already know they’ll predict redundancy. The only source of happiness on this field is Shadow, who bursts and darts through the trees like a buoyant, rampant scribble. I smile. My computer-wary eyes are unable to appreciate all the fabled golds and rusty leafy colours that inspire so many idle poets. They’d clearly never had a job in research.
The gate to the Common creaks as if alerting me that I am no longer alone in the park. Someone else has come to walk their dog and parade through the stillness of autumn dusks. Nice dog. A golden Labrador, with the heart and height to match my own black German Shepherd, they’d make a perfect photograph as they chased each other childishly through the fading light petering through the trees.
“Hey, Sunny,”
Aptly named dog. I watch the owner. He’s tall, fair-haired, young and has the look of someone who enjoys laughing and making people laugh. My hand automatically flicks through my hair, as I wonder if he lives locally. God. I work in a patriarchal industry with chauvinistic colleagues and in my scraps of free time I notice a man? I turn away to call Shadow back to me. It’s getting cold anyway.
“That’s your dog then.”
He’s watching the dogs too and I can tell that he’s been struck by something artistic in the scene, as though the coldness of the oncoming Winter is straining the last rays of inspiration out of us.
“Yeah, they don’t half look beautiful together, don’t they?”
He nods, blowing into his hands as he does so.
“I’ve seen you with him before, wandering over the Common just before dusk. It’s when I tend to come here too.”
I smile at the acknowledgement of two strangers and our mutual appreciation of the fading light.
“But I’ve never seen you, here?”
He looks up from the cupped hands that his nose has been buried in as he blew into them.
“Oh, I tend to let you keep to your aloneness, there’s a beauty in the silence that you’d probably find that I’d disturb.”
Smile. Look back towards the dogs.
“Yeah.”
I do think that most of the time, when some cluster of children scuttled in off the back of the school bus and disrupted the only patch of time that I get to myself. But …
“No, not at all.” I laugh and twist my fingers in my scarf self-consciously. “Yeah, if you’re around, just say hi. I’m Helen, by the way.”
“Robert. Yeah, I see you most days, actually, so I’ll probably see you tomorrow too.”
I nodded.
“Probably, yeah.”
We stand a while longer watching the dogs make patterns in the damp grass and watching the clouds sweep like a velvet blanket over a sleeping sky.
“See you tomorrow, then.”
I wave and call Shadow to me, cheerful as ever. We trail out of the Common, though I’m walking briskly to get back quickly to my city flat with its warm, but still unfamiliar rooms, though I’ve been living there six months now and should be flown past pining for my Essex moors. The same Sun will be setting over my parents’ home, two hundred miles away. Can I let the line blur between Cambridge and home, like Summer overlaps Autumn? Smile. The future can’t be bad enough to scare me – even if keeping my job will entail a balancing act more delicate than preserving frost-brittled leaves. If I look at the sky in a certain way, I can see two dogs playing together. That speck of cloud in the distance must be their owners, talking and holding hands.

Thursday

Thursday.
That word has meant so many different things to me
I sit, pondering what this Thursday will mean,
While the dim recollections of what used to be
Slowly emerge in my mind.

Thursday.
It used to be that dreaded day
When I would lug around an enormous
Fluorescent yellow sack of papers,
Fighting against the wind and rain
Along the dull roads of a dull town on a dull day.

Thursday.
It used to be something more exciting than that
It used to be the day
When I would meet my first boyfriend
Under the shade of a tree in an empty park
“Kissing day”, I think I called it…..
I remember the apprehensive chaos
Of over-straightening my hair
While applying way too much lip-gloss
(rose-pink, free with Shout magazine)
Followed by the nervous thrill
Of holding a boy’s hand
For the very first time.

Thursday,
It used to be free-day, play day
When brownies, swimming and gymnastics
Would cease for just one day
To let me have round any friend I wanted
To play barbies on the stairs
In the most inconvenient place,
Or to play mummies and daddies,
Dreaming of how cool it would be
To exist in the adult world.

Thursday.
My dim recollections were only a few short years ago,
But they feel like a completely different world.

Thursday.
What does that word mean to me now?

Just one day left ‘til Friday.

The silence is deafening you. The darkness swarms around you. It smothers your chest, comforting your body, protecting your very identity from any cracks of moonlight splitting through the curtains. A mere shadow in the night, you slip into the dead house.
Harmonising with the quiet around you, you take your first step, allowing your foot to seep delicately onto the staircase. You draw in your breath. Could they hear?
Not a stir. The house continues to sleep.
Up and up, your feet glide, one foot then the next. As you ascend towards your fate, you cannot shake the gaze of innocent eyes watching you from the walls. Trapped in their frames of happiness, they smile at the stranger making way towards their present selves sleeping soundly upstairs. Frozen in their poses of joy, Daddy will forever have a lively smile; Mummy will forever weep with laughter. The sun is always beaming onto the rosy cheeks of the little darlings playing in the sand. Forever blissfully unaware behind the shield to their rose tinted world.
Ignorance is bliss.
As you reach the highest step you look to see the shadow of your partner lurking in the doorway. He nods affirmatively.

It is time.
In the split second that it takes for the signal to be sent, your mind flickers. How can such a simple gesture, a mere nod of the head, unlock the fate you have chosen? How can such a terrible deed commence under the instructions of such an innocent signal? This one nod hits you like a bullet pounding in your heart. A bullet that can mark the beginning of something: a race around the world, perhaps, an adventure. A bullet that can simultaneously mark the end of a life: with just one shot, everything stops.
Yes, you know very well the power a bullet holds, as your fingers run across the hard metallic trigger clutched in your hand.
A mere shadow in the night, you slip into Daddy’s room.