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

A Poem a Day (725): The pub at the end of the sea (poems from a pub)

 
While waiting for the check-in time for a hotel, I sat in a rock pub with a pint and wrote some poems.

The pub at the end of the sea
 
Ice-cold shots bewilder,
drunk in the stall, the pause,
a vacancy of purpose.
Without ambition do we die?

He thinks he withers like a tree;
he just pauses, thinks, dreams a while.
Leaves refresh, repurpose in rain,
treasure will unearth secrets long hidden,
any move to betray beneath sound.
 
Waves revolve in steady rhythm
while she walks jagged to the surf line,
the edge, a crossroads in water,
looking for the bridge she once built,
the one the enemy sought to destroy
through his lack of understanding.
 
Take the pause.
Walk backwards into the sea.
Light beckons and grows,
blasts ignorance to smithereens.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, August 17, 2025

A Poem a Day (724): Drop

 
Drop
 
Let go.
 
Get off.
 
Be in this freefall,
this downstroke,
this oblivion.
 
Don’t reach out
to catch yourself,
to trip yourself,
just breathe into it.
 
Colours drift into you,
seek to become,
ensure your light.
 
There is wonder by night,
a little stardust,
a little something other.
 
We trust beyond it,
resist the gathering storm,
walk in the sparkling deluge,
untethered,
feel it flick on skin.
 
The bark of a tree tugs rough,
silken leaves lift you up,
twisted roots drag you down,
yet you can breathe
in the drop,
the abandonment of strings,
cables, dragon pulls,
suspensions you don’t need,
holding you back in places
that eclipse you
when you can just...
 
There’s an ocean beneath you,
a wide-open smile
of dripping rain.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, August 14, 2025

A Poem a Day (723): Catching lines

 
Catching lines
 
Hold the pencil steady enough
& you can draw a line straight,
something true, a bridge,
a crossing over a blank page.
But can you draw a circle,
round like an orange is?
 
A fruit you don’t dare to eat,
only encompass with your hands,
a black & white creation,
maybe crosshatched, a little shaded,
a thing you could bond with
if you’re not feeling too jaded.
 
You could put it out there,
post it to your windowpane,
announce that you’re an artist now,
a big hello to the wide world,
even though it was always in you,
cos you are that thing, that word,
 
the crazy something you deny
thinking you’re just not good enough,
but it’s still you through & through
because you are that hand that draws,
that paints, writes, that cannot laugh
but can touch, can feel, can give.
 
You draw a circle so you can become it,
step inside it, open up a portal,
this open thing you want to kip in,
slink into, escape & be gone in,
but it’s an opening just for you
& it ain’t staying open forever.
 
There’s a message upon your door,
but this one isn’t for you.
It’s for every drifter-by to see,
to accept – an invite to come inside
& feel this curved charm, this oval,
this true thing you can offer them.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, August 14, 2025

A Poem a Day (722): The bubble

 
The bubble
 
There exists a window without a view
upon a world that does not exist anymore,
a cyan cast of faces adrift on breeze,
strokes of cirrus without sentence.
 
We are as time shifts and steals,
recalls echoes without shields,
swords that cut without a bitter edge,
the taken with nothing to take.
 
Shadows drizzle a lake without encumbrance,
and we drift out of perspective.
 
And so there is a window that once held a view,
a reason to discard all mockery,
a vision of a self not yet lived.
 
The watcher stepped inside himself,
out of himself, as others got things wrong,
but even he could not live forever.
 
We gaze back, all measured out,
build a wall against an invisible army.
You don’t know the drill, the phrasing,
and we all melt in welcome heat.
 
A drum roll without a crescendo
turns in echoes of fortitude, smoothed
out without discipline or order.
 
It just finds an alternate way of being
in this traffic of organised sound.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, August 14, 2025

A Poem a Day (721): A purple rose

 
A purple rose
 
In this place a light went out
yet its echo still flickers, still lingers,
an arc of rainbow reflected in rain,
a dance of scattered notes.
Patches, flowers, cards & empty cans,
dreams that will never set.
Memories of places, faces, dances,
conversations & drunk romances,
his voice drowning everything,
like water reviving parched earth,
& we are found no longer crying,
but reliving every chance meeting,
every song, every riff, every drum roll,
digging the beat within our rib cage,
& every time the lights seemed to blow out
as we staggered into the starry night
like zombies, our hearts full of lyrics,
silenced a while in contemplation,
smiling wide, eyes bright, feeling lighter,
our spirits swept up by sound.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, July 30, 2025

A Poem a Day (720): Burial in water

 
Burial in water
 
It’s a listening thing,
fake disappearing, halo effect,
a plunge into obscurity,
disintegrating in oceans rapt,
a burial, held aloft to wonder at,
to hold, let fall into dust –
feather-like, stranded stars
crossing the sky like ants.
 
The childlike dance of the mystic
hits you, a rainbow striding,
motions arcing over broken idols
drilled into the shore.
You count the score when you
should plunge, salted, disheveled,
into breath. A starfish shapes itself
in sand, winks its orange skin,
 
and I pick it up, this delicate life,
its radiating heat, rhythmic beat,
guide it through the crystal deep.
The horizon walks a heady line.
It whispers sometimes,
bubbles beneath this jaded sun,
an arc of dripping yolk burning
words of hope into water.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 18, 2025

A Poem a Day (719): Sea claws

 
A prompt from napowrimo.net: “I challenge you to find a news article and write a poem using (mostly, if not only) words from the article. You can repeat them, splice them and rearrange them however you like. Although the vocabulary may be just the facts, your poem doesn’t have to be.”
 
Here’s draft 2 of my poem and the spliced version follows underneath.

 
Sea claws
 
Choose an article & splice it,
redo, refit, the prompt said,
so I hunted for a happy one, devoid
of war & fighting, death, hate
& suffering. It took a while.
 
So here we are with lobsters,
those snippy little fellows with claws,
a crusher & a cutter, aqua-true
with beady black eyes.
 
Homarus Gammarus, to be posh,
or European lobster to me & you,
paddling the Atlantic to the Azores.
 
In calm waters around St Michael’s Mount,
baby lobsters indulged in their first swim,
all 1,088 of them, ten weeks old
& just an inch long.
 
You’ll need to check a map
as to its whereabouts,
but it’s pretty famous,
so you can probably picture it.
 
It was the end of a challenge
to do 25 releases in 25 locations,
a happy 25th anniversary
to the National Lobster Hatchery.
5,000 little snappers in all.
 
A female lobster can carry 20,000 eggs
in her belly, but only one is expected to survive
out there in the wild.
 
Released from a little plastic tube
they dive down, limbs flaying, scuttling,
to settle on the seabed & burrow
deep into spongy sediment
to spend a year learning how to live
in the bounteous sea.
 
You can even adopt one.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 17, 2025

 
 
Sea claws (the spliced version)
 
Happy devoid,
no war, no suffering,
a shakeup into cuteness.
It took a while.
 
With crusher & cutter,
snippy & aqua-true,
Homarus Gammarus paddles
the Atlantic to the Azores.
 
Ten weeks old
& just an inch,
baby lobsters begin
their maiden voyage.
1,088 tiny clappers floating free.
 
A dive down, scuttle
& burrow deep into the sea floor.
They’ll spend a year here,
learning how to live.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 17, 2025

A Poem a Day (718): The circle

 
The circle
 
There is a reason
bereft of season
extinct of leaves
that survives emotion,
a release to savour
beyond endeavour
the world’s compassion
amid pure elation,
to seek to celebrate
outside the obstinate
all the indelicate,
afraid to waken it.

Beneath this starlight
jibes another trick
that licked the night,
the way it burned so bright.

We stand still in time
outside of every rhyme,
every turn in the sky
seeking truth, not lie,
fierce oceans ironing out
beyond any doubt
this desire to speak
when you feel so meek,
a vowel left unsaid,
a need unfed.

So we caress water,
defend with laughter,
stand still, naked,
always so eternally naked.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 14, 2025

A Poem a Day (717): Crossing water

 
Crossing water
 
We gaze into the ears of seashells,
listen for the soft surf of water’s flow,
the truth of all our destinations,
a lover waiting in the wings,
this always-in-the-ether maybe.
 
We dance on beaches we once drew,
recite conversations we never wrote,
seek recalled waves from all our yesterdays
and watch the sun set into a sleeping sea.
And somehow we are encouraged
 
to walk on, to swim, crash, rise or fall.
So here we are, not so small after all.
We are the waking and the being,
and the rush of something else
we can never get a handle on,
 
but here we are in our looking glass,
reflected in flittering black obsidian,
wondering who stares back at us,
clerical, whimsical, ephemeral,
and we are reborn without even wishing it.
 
Distance is a subtle turn of the page
or a deep dive through a kaleidoscope
of shiftless shapes we cannot even see
until here we stand at the all too familiar
crossroads, seeing only as far as we are allowed,
 
burrowing against our every restriction,
throwing caution to the delight of our heart.
We are the divided outside of division.
We are the wonder that we ever spent this long
drifting.

 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 14, 2025

A Poem a Day (716): Exit right

 
Exit right
 
Where she is
she drifts like water flows,
a warm abyss, your welcome
into sweltering rain.
Pure rush, this downpour,
an effervescent everything.
 
And when she subsides
you’ll feel it
in the silences,
the emptied out,
the spaces she’ll leave behind
in the walkout, the exit,
the surrender outside of herself
just to be her.
 
To be the person who lived
before you,
before the accusations,
the dance, the pretence,
the other women you couldn’t ignore,
the criticisms, the putdowns
cos she could never be enough
for you.
 
But she didn’t need to be.
That’s the kicker,
the punch,
your realisation. So,
you’re gonna have to forgive her
cos it was you that wasn’t enough.
She walked through the blizzard
and she kept going.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 14, 2025