A Poem a Day (735): 4 poems from a rock pub in Brussels

 
Mannekin
 
Into the cave,
bricked up, forbidden love.
Wooden tabletops compare sunken contrasts,
muted lights flicker in cloudy glasses
awaiting the big turn-off.
 
We measure streets on maps in streets.
A man carries half a mannekin,
his missing bits strutting their stuff,
held aloft in a real man’s hands.
It raises a smile in the slinking day.
Half a man being better than none.
 
I go the whole yard on a butter croissant,
flip it with tucked-in cheese, au fromage,
rediscover mellow sweet Home Alabama
cos it never went out of fashion.
 
Checkerboard tables invite your knight to play,
so bring your sword and magic helmet
Bugs Bunny style, shooting his carrot guns,
flipping the guys on the football table.
He scores without even trying.
Jambe-de-Bois someone called,
rousing cheers from blocked-up ears.
 
Circle back, confound the crowd,
trace backstreets to your starting post,
scribble poems in an Irish well-easy
in a high corner on a round table.
 
Red Hot Chillis take a turn on the box,
‘like nothing I have ever seen,
waiting for you’ – an invisible skin.
They take a chance you might never run.
 
Flip the switch and it’s night-time leaving,
wondering how much time you have left
while the light flickers in your hollow glass,
music caressing an empty room.
 
There is a reason to smile at something new,
delight in the potential,
the unexpected corner untaken.
There is no time, yet there is always time.
You can sit and think and dream a while,
remember every moment taken,
every chance you didn’t walk on by.
 
 

Slink
 
Strip
the light,
embrace dark,
raw, how it curves,
how it slinks,
the way it holds you,
this swallow whole
into yourself,
inside who you are.
Outside comes in.
Welcome the full,
this opening
beyond you.
Feel the rise.
It is the ocean,
deep.
 
 

Reflow
 
Oceans of stone,
feel the ridge, a stolen pause,
unreal, discarded, unwieldy,
where coral ceases to speak.
This underworld on pause,
bereft of flow,
simply pauses,
waits for reinvention,
for seeds to grow
and become what the oceans
are starving for.
 

 
Feel
 
I don’t feel.
I overfill.
Can you feel it?
Have you had a moment
where you pour over,
where you are more?
You find your thing
to find yourself.
We go out of our way to search,
but it might be here all along,
in your hand, in your heart,
in your eyes.

 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, September 4, 2025

A Poem a Day (734): 5 more Poems from an Irish pub in Brussels

 
Unfaded
 
To be unfaded,
I’ll trace your reflection in ink,
a memory recorded in smoke,
a maybe you will never obey.
We starve ourselves in contemplation.
Starstruck, we fall to our knees.
Pour your presence into my hands.
I will carve you out of clay,
write a capturing, a blessing,
mimic you as a leaf dressed in autumn colours,
send you into the wide open skies
and give you freedom
to fly.
 

 
The unsettling
 
Triangles, all the unbreakable
prisms, an alternate side of being.
Scarlet dawns, a castaway’s curse,
distances we swore we would keep,
but give away in truth in a day.
 
It is happening in this unhappening,
blue-green journeys of a never life.
It stopped at a red light
and this pause continues to block
any semblance of incoming traffic.
 
Wait for go.
Wait for continuation.
Cast aside reinvention.
Wait for life.
Even if it takes another lifetime.
 

 
Cyclists (in paintings in an art shop)
 
Paint in ovals, screams of light,
scribbled movement, effervescent, alive.
It streams in waves,
a torrent unstoppable.
There is no end to this thread
casting rainbows, iridescent hue.
Motion in lines curve in enigmatic music
unwritten, unplayed, simply drawn
by hand, by eye, heart and emotion
in synchronised rhythm.
 
A couple balance on two bicycles
drenched by rain
streaking blue-soaked canvas,
trailed by blasted yellow lights,
the lamps of oncoming traffic
twisting paint under neon signs.
 
We are lit
when no one is watching.
 

 
Throwing stones
 
Triangle spires mark the distances
between lovers in time & space,
sink sadness like a weighted stone
to position & reposition.
Thus we spiral out like wool.
 
We don’t change places to confound.
We don’t twist to break.
We break in order to be ourselves,
to move in freedom,
follow our own footsteps,
And be. Shadows can yawn,
play bored or die. But they must leave.
The departed ghost needs to stay so.
 
We have free will.
Without it we can only hope to shatter,
for we cannot live as spectres.
 

 
Block paintings (in an art shop)
 
Block paintings
of bleeding colour
stack lines, track figures
unthought of,
believe in disbelief,
where every thought is readied.
 
We try each other in suspension.
Hands trace words in empty air.
 
I am the chase,
you are the follow.
I am the chased,
you are the fellow.
When can we reverse
so I have free choice?
If there is a reason
I am not a part.
What is the reason
to be apart?
 
I might just shatter space
with what is never said.
Is this a curse to be female?
Is it better not to stand out?
 
You follow cues
and get nowhere,
trace a line into an eternal void.
If you meet shadows on your path
ignore them to feel yourself grow.
 
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, September 4, 2025

A Poem a Day (733): 3 Poems from an Irish pub in Brussels

 
Stricken summer
 
She spoke, she moved, she eloped.
It was a stricken summer stripped of steel.
 
Knock out, step back, repent sideways.
Hear the gasp of glass shatter skywards.
Smoke clouds rise as epitaph, smart, depart,
limit their echoes into spoken words.
 
We cannot disparage what we don’t understand.
Cards of hearts assemble, spread, and fall,
stand the time in a simple house towering.
It won’t break unless you crack it so.
 
Here we are, and love won’t gather here.
Lend your ears and watch him cry out loud.
 
A joke won’t wake him out of himself
or change his time of departure.
Set a date and drag him out of his coffin.
 
We are all stood in the waiting room here,
loitering for some fool to stamp our wrist
or take us on a journey out of ourselves
where the hourglass won’t ever freeze again.
 
 
 
Guinness tortoise (from a poster on the wall)
 
A tortoise wears a Guinness crown,
carries time on his back to distant climes,
counts the dates of the calendar slow,
tells fortunes on his many-sided shell,
shiny octagons that blink in the night
to show the path to every indifferent stranger.
We wait his coming in this steely pitch.
 
He takes his time, this endurance, no easy ride.
Come hail or storm, he gets there in the end.
She dances in fiery signatures stolen
from strangers she tried to connect with once,
for we are all built of straw in owing time.
We ride with invisibility balancing our shadow,
not measuring the cost of forgetting we are here.
The tortoise waits at the darkest hour.
He’ll still be there, no matter how long you take.
 
 

Circular paths
 
Words seer the back of a plate ever spinning,
unstoppable. A world fallen off its wheels.
A trickster, card dealer, a mind in motion
knows when to cast adulation on the wind.
Don’t pause. Don’t thumb a lift.
Liken gratitude to a broken spur.
It’s a hopeless light that seeks a retract.
Footsteps mirror in stripped windows bleak,
a maze scribbled in a kaleidoscope of black.
 
You strip your clothes down to the basics,
keep going like a jumbled, rumbling stone.
Distance wakes, keeps itself anonymous,
not knowing what to say for every occasion.
Clueless, it steadies itself in silent inaction.
With nowhere to go you stand still.
The field won’t wait, but do you really care?
If it cared it would walk a straight line to you.
A roundabout route circles wildly until the bitter end.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, September 4, 2025
 

A Poem a Day (732): 3 Poems from Waterloo Station

 
Silk
 
The tall & the skinny,
sheer explosion of black silk.
It slides, it spills, it senses
when the world revolves anew,
as rain energises daily rhythms
from beach to urban to mountain high.
 
We are the escape from every notion
of being left behind, of forgetting,
of being stilled out of our sleeplessness,
knowing we can only be one,
all else submerged in silences.
 
There are no offerings in daylight.
Dawn washed them all away
& berries don’t wish to grow there.
 
 
 
Bower birds
 
Sometimes we are lost
& sometimes we are found
& sometimes we are beyond ourselves.
 
It’s an allegory of mixed betweens,
out of, in, and never inside out.
 
He makes a match. He never finds himself.
She never gets off the starting line.
The ever-potential of being something.
 
He leaves his suitcase in the bower,
scatters glitter to decor & adore,
struts his fancy manoeuvres to a captive audience.
We can only stand & stare in awe,
wonder how he can still pirouette,
balance, flex his muscles against the sphere,
flick a tail feather & bow.
 
The setting sun has more to do than stare.
It plants a star only the moon can see,
captures the full vesta for eternity.
 
 
 
Check out
 
Check in, check out,
newly awake & caffeinated.
Greet the naked rain in peruse.
Barefoot in the park, it echoes green.
Grass tickles, pokes itself between toes,
seeks a carpet of woes newly vacuumed.
Carve a pathway like Moses’ sea,
fenced in by sculptures of washed stones.
Crawl to walk.
 
It’s a wander into starlight,
an adieu to the beyond of day.
Figures dance in shadows met.
They cash in on nothing.
A manufactured thing is meaningless.
Grow in the knowledge of free thinking,
a knowing we can be ourselves
without the pressure to be anything more.
 
If we are never nothing
there is always something to aspire to,
even if we become invisible.
 
  
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, September 2, 2025
 

A Poem a Day (731): In/Out (poems from a hotel lounge)

In
 
A life in nine frames,
ebony lines on pearl,
stripped bare of colour,
yielding to mix.
 
Cut in, cut out,
a reveal without the whole,
a copy recopied,
just an interpretation.
 
An almost echo,
we reflect our symmetry.
 
Light paints fresh patterns,
moves in waves,
casts doubt on stillness,
enters into self.

Out
 
Calligraphic scales,
a dance in streaks of ink,
rip stark contrasts;
partners in depiction
fighting to describe,
like bodies out of tune,
desperate to separate
into disparate worlds.
 
For now we have pictures
of our life,
a memory of things
never written
for they were never lived.
 
Left with only an idea,
colour in the spaces
between these bold lines
that breathe and scold.

You seldom exist
outside of things.
 
 
Vickie Johnstone, August 23, 2025

A Poem a Day (730): In the turnabout (poems from a pub)

 
In the turnabout,
footprints walking blind,
taking their cue from the invisible,
a source with no foundation.
 
You await the uninvited,
take the step they think is slow
when you’ve already appraised it all,
evaluated and relived every detail,
every destroyed element,
your life scratched out.
 
There are things you need to forget,
there are moments you will never forgive.
If a wish was ever made
it was an empty one.
 
If you tell everyone the truth
it’s their failure not to listen.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, August 19, 2025

A Poem a Day (729): A missing piece

 
A missing piece.
You can feel it,
can’t see it,
this fractured thing,
an echo in the dark.
 
A piece of something
you never knew.
What someone said,
but never meant.
A memory of being
the thing you wanted to be.
 
And so you need to ask:
what do I want,
what do I need?
 
Who are you?
 
Because the more you ask
the less you are.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, July 2025

A Poem a Day (728): Smoke (poems from a pub)

 
Smoke
 
Smoke,
a trickle of haze,
this distant daze
within this maze of being
smoke.
 
Write letters
you can never extinguish,
an unbreakable line.
 
A muse
seldom amused,
she feels the afront
of being female,
actually daring to be so
in a world of bias.
 
Smoke.
It gets in your face,
refuses to shift,
confuses your perspective,
overstays its welcome.
 
Wave your hand
simply to free yourself from
smoke.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, August 17, 2025

A Poem a Day (727): Bang (poems from a pub)

 
Bang
 
It’s a rush,
a spill of adrenalin,
the turn feels like the ocean.

A body built of water
feels the flow, the slide,
the churn of the turn,
the fire inside,
this nocturnal high,
a figure eight never ending,
always in tune
til the end of the world.

This raging burn
will never die.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, August 17, 2025

A Poem a Day (726): “Normal” (poems from a pub)

 
“Normal”
 
It isn’t “normal”.
How you dress, how you smile,
how you move, how you dream.
It’s something outside normal,
this beyond, this becoming
someone they don’t understand,
a person they will never fathom,
no matter how hard they seek
to control, to use.
You broke the mould,
you became something new,
someone unforgettable,
just by being you.
A peg that didn’t fit,
someone they didn’t want to breathe.
They held you in contempt.
They kept you down.
But you can only be you.
The peg that doesn’t fit.
That was you.
The person you built.
The human you were deep inside.
A unique thing.
A treasure.
A gift.
No need to feel ashamed
of who you are,
who you had to become.
You are just you.
Let it be.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, August 17, 2025