Some poems I wrote in pubs from Monday to Wednesday.
It rained quite a bit! They are all first drafts.
Wet T-shirts
Swap T-shirts in the rain
while the world is scowling.
Shine your peppermint smile
when you’re numb from your own pain.
Walk a mile backwards
so you don’t have to go anywhere else.
You can fool the world sometimes,
but you will always fail to fool yourself.
Letters
He passes boards of letters re-lettering,
phrases reborn of a forgotten phrasing.
Broken leashes spell a wealth of no contact.
We sack the morning because it waved.
In a cocoon we count the clouds,
dance inside a mirror ball of filters.
The world flickers in silver lights.
Shadows kiss faces recalled from lost dreams.
Bird food
A meal deal for sparrows:
three dead worms, a chunk of crusty bread,
a handful of speckled monkey nuts
deshelled, a slice of fruity bread,
crumbs scattered to find their way home,
a spiky nest built too high,
water trickling from a sodden leaf.
A disco ball for blackbirds:
chipped walls of flaking mortar,
stars dazzling the night,
streetlights blinking out of sight,
footsteps in time with the hum
of the world tuned to zero,
a reflection of time echoed in the street.
Someone turns out the lights
and we dance inside twilight.
The churn
In a hologram water churns outside of time,
drips water as inspiration coming home,
rewrites lines in dance, injection, fluid chance,
memories reshaping lives redrawn in reliving them.
Why wait in line before a shapeless machine,
racing on oil before lights shift in degrees?
Faces linger sometimes when you close your eyes.
The simplest number cannot be stowed away.
A butterfly’s tears
A butterfly’s tears circle the world –
orange wings sliced with black.
Imagination will fail to conjure it.
Dust travels, takes you everywhere.
We breathe, discover the furthest limits
of how we can travel more freely,
discover our own selves, walk with others,
push every boundary against the wall.
Out of time?
You’re only out of time
if you think you are.
Take a breath,
imagine an open footprint
in which you could insert your own
and feel the other shift beneath
as if you could share the same place,
the same belief in knowing the other.
It’s a feeling…
of being within the space of a space,
a trace of something superhuman,
of being other than who you are.
Without choice,
Without expression.
Mirrors
Superstition, a word you avoid,
slip by mirrors with no expression,
ladders misplaced in jagged time,
a black tail that crosses you always.
Step out of time to meet him, conscious
of the break, the shift, no real outcome
you can fathom, something you don’t understand.
When it’s over you’ll feel the quiet,
the softness, the break in the storm.
Feel it as a vacuity, an emptiness,
where everything spilt out on bare sand,
waiting for you to cup it in your hands,
hold it to your heart and disappear inside it.
Survivors
He finds himself typecast,
a survivor in an identity charade.
A phrase that failed to word itself,
didn’t chance itself in a dark corner.
It made promises even it couldn’t keep,
even to him. The trees grew outside,
formed roots, hardened themselves,
shielded him in a way he couldn’t see,
while kids initialed themselves in their bark.
They toughened as every decade passed,
watered themselves with karmic dew
until even the caretakers stood still.
Boxes
A dance, a groove, a fitting in,
finding your own space never designed,
your cardboard living, breathing box,
not a suit of armour you can’t bend,
a step outside so you can breathe,
a signature you will never break.
The lesson
It’s a lesson,
but you don’t need to learn it.
You already became it,
lived it, breathed it, wore it.
Yours is a bulletproof vest
that moulded to your soul,
spoke out, indivisible.
It breathed into you,
and you wore it as a sign
of who you really were,
who you are, who you might be.
Oceans
She was always in the wrong country.
He knew it. Waited. Felt the pulse,
examined pools of water after rain,
the softened steps that feet make in sand,
that sound the ocean makes on pause.
We live in the echoes we leave behind,
leaves cascading into dust.
Rainbows
He took it on trust,
looked to the rain to birth a rainbow,
imagined a time out of existence,
a space apart from the self,
seconds beyond the reimagined.
Time is just time. No emphasis.
We are as the seas roll,
as the Earth moves to disintegrate,
how we speak together, break our tune
when we actually think in rhythm.
Drawing lines
To stand without ceremony
and draw lines inside the sand
just to see if they seldom fit.
We sweat, stand up, stand down,
imagine time as a waking hand
beating a clock that long stood down.
An electric thread on a hidden break.
Imagine the sea rocking inside,
a touch you might never forget.
This wondering eye won’t ever sit still.
Take a walk down a metaphorical lane,
where time will finally sink and stall.
See you linger now against the wall,
heart beating still, memories drift,
your skill hidden in the drive,
where no one wants to view it
because they suspect it’s too dangerous.
Clocks
Time beats, a subtle clock,
sucks up time, no microphone.
Try to tell it as it is, alphabeticise,
know you’re losing as you pontificate.
There are no substitutes for loss.
Speak what you want, what you need,
what you forgot when the desert wind blew
your tears adrift without waiting to hear
what you wanted to say, how you felt,
discriminating as you waited in the sun
for your payday, too tired to run.
We are as the world turns, immune to bullshit,
waiting for our time to flag us down.
It takes us months or even years to realise
who we are, who we were, who we might become.
We are as the sea turns, churns and swells.
No idiocy. No theatrics. Just human.
There’s nothing to gain from being someone new.
Not wasting
Not wasting time,
just happening,
playing a flute out of tune,
being outside knowing,
imagining something other,
at a loss to fathom substance,
never broken, just this.
It is only this,
misted breath on a windowpane.
Leaves blow, fathom colour,
echo the sky in pieces.
Colour the lines on the outside,
the edges seldom seen,
make castles out of air,
pretend we can live outside time.
All of it
All the things you do,
I reasoned I would pretend,
but I would not forget,
and I didn’t,
no matter how my head turned,
or I saw the distractions.
I reasoned I would always be,
because I breathed the same air as you.
Tides
The Atlantic Ocean sold me,
told me I would never swim
against these tumultuous tides,
these echoes of a forgotten time,
an emblem of never be –
a season I have never mistaken.
Green gauge
Green becomes her,
this shade so seldom seen,
an in-between of eternal something,
little known, an always maybe.
We stretch for the stars sometime,
never knowing how high we can go,
always slightly out of reach.
We are as the seasons take us,
bathe quietly in our own shine,
myriad memories simply our own,
knowing we can’t know everything
as the world turns and time plays.
Embroider
It comes woven, this world.
It goes round, and round,
forgetting what was never.
I catch stars in the falling rain.
They glow, but you whip the has been.
I age. I grow. I wither like a tree,
and you wonder why I don’t stand still,
but it is the way of the world you feel.
I can’t be your standby.
And there lies your problem,
so you walk away
while I find a new card to play,
a scenario I have redrawn
without you in it.
You might return years later,
but we will have had our day,
and you let it go.
Wordplay
She’s the echo you forgot
when you speak,
when you try to rhyme,
something more than you are,
so out of time you don’t know
the other side, and the in-between,
the roar between continents.
I am as the oceans formed me,
this elusive figment of water.
Waves bury waves,
the light you can’t extinguish
when you seek me in the dark.
Cords
A rhythm made of light,
it sounds cordless,
builds a pattern
out of glass,
works itself out in moments
broken in time with waves
beaten into submission.
An emotionless moon draws you in,
mimics night’s drunken hour.
Only a gull will steal,
only a crow can use a tool,
yet you see them indivisible.
I cross lines, mimic propositions
only you can draw.
I don’t look back
cos I showed you the door.
Snippet
Walking in walking in turning,
in beginning in returning
to wake without waking,
a balance out of balance.
Now that’s old outside of old.
Bereft of pleasure we unwind
to rewind without end,
this dependence on independence,
being fragile without ever feeling fragile,
being outside of being without really being.
You can smile without even smiling,
feel lost when you were never lost at all.
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, October 27-29, 2025
