Free to read: Song Book of lyrics to 37 songs recorded with Billy Johnstone

Here's a Song Book of 37 songs. I wrote the lyrics and my uncle, Billy Johnstone, wrote the melodies, added some lyrics and sang on them! It was an accidental partnership that started in lockdown and turned into one of my most prolific periods for poetry and song writing - I'd never tried song writing before. The actual songs can be bought online - see the links in the book.

This is free to read. 

My faves are The Joker, Bird in the Brain, The Dark Wood, She blows in with the Tide, Cold Cardboard Sky and Sea of Broken Glass... And Billy's singing is just amazing. There are links to his videos.

Cold Cardboard Sky is a charity song, raising money for Shelter.
The Cage is a charity song, raising money for Animals Asia

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1My9VtLeWved40Hi5zGWIYrTWZqxT5Uuc/view?usp=drive_link

A Poem a Day (748): I on repeat

 
I on repeat
 
I spend a lifetime searching for the imperfect perfect muse.
I treasure everything as if each something I’m fated to lose.
 
I consume as if this could be my final meal.
I am oblivious to the agenda behind any deal.
 
I sleep as if sleeping is an Olympic sport.
I pay all the bills, secure my space in my living fort.
 
I read with a microscope digging for inspiration.
I walk in fine rain feeling a washed-in elation.
 
I turn up early as if it will make a difference.
I cry at every ending and then hope to bounce.
 
I read menus a dozen times before choosing.
I hold on too long because I’m too scared of losing.
 
I worry I might regret choosing the wrong thing.
I greet everyone with the same shy, lopsided grin.
 
I end up picking the same thing every time I order.
I live in uncluttered spaces, try not to be a hoarder.
 
I pluck stray hairs as if anyone notices anything so small.
I live it, love it, want it to last forever, but forget it all.
 
I collect empty boxes because oxygen is the most precious thing.
I buy simple things, avoiding the loud, too glossy and bling.
 
I breathe deeply, inhale slowly, blink three times for luck.
I wish I could relive every earthmoving, heartbreaking f-ck.
 
I sit in the shade in case the sun burns away truth.
I rethink, re-evaluate seeking the undeniable proof.
 
I colour outside the edges to feel more free.
I wonder at our struggle to be what we want to be.
 
I count the stars just because it’s impossible.
I know my failure to make time last is laughable.
 
I rule the 3mm space around my own contours.
I learn from closure and look out for held-open doors.
 
I bed down to keep the chaos and noise at bay.
I listen to silence because it has the most to say.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, July 14, 2026

A Poem a Day (743): Poems from a London bar

 
Wisps
 
High on the level, fire on the pedal,
metal cleaves in ever-descending miles.

Set a record in the waking night
to an audience of blighted stars,

where trees seek to leap chasms
of fire played, indifference plagued.

Insomnia streaks the skies in wisps,
grips the moon in a silver boa,

dances the pitch into pink dawn,
a lonesome kiss melting upon the lips.
 
 

Seek something to devour
 
Let’s dance where the earth roars to its outer limits,
echoing all our yesterdays in one voice,
one phrase the whole world can recognise,
a full tilt of every dream we ever had,
walking different paths, telling the same story,
rattling each phrase in its empty cage
until every emotion leaks out as water.

A spiral of words, glittered and true,
spent, unspent, wrapped, unwrapped,
this parched bark etched, leaking dew,
its lifeblood resurrecting the earth.

 
Tarmac

Criss-crosses of tarmac sear the earth inside out,
scour lines so deep we forget how to breathe,
dirt so red it seeks to bleed
an ocean to eclipse the sorrow you feel inside.

A restless spirit haunts every refraction,
every shattered shard stripped of hue,
leaving a kaleidoscope of black and white,
missing every rainbow chained to dark.

 
Paint

Paint leaks off the page,
faces reflect in window flecks,
light shadows walking
steal a slip of sunlight.

Time strides back sometimes,
freezes in order to release,
leaves imprints in sunken sand,
shies backwards into the waiting sea.

 
Surrender

Give up everything to be free,
to search for yourself in blue sky,
the magic of the dreaming,
where east devours west,
colours you gold in retrospect,
reminds who you never were
in this fight to stay you.
 
 

Slight

Light strips, detects,
resurrects forgotten details,
faces painted with a white brush.

We rename ourselves without thought,
risk abandoning our disguise
to walk an invisible tightrope,
deconstruct ourselves to fit a box
only to smash it with both fists.

I sit waiting for the stars to lift,
for the earth to be rewatered,
for ruin to bury itself again
between all these moon rises.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, 8 February 2026
 

A Poem a Day (633): NaPoWriMo Day 6 - 20 pages

 
NaPoWriMo Day 6 
 
Prompt: write a poem rooted in ‘weird wisdom’, by which we mean something objectively odd that someone told you once and has stuck with you ever since. Need an example? Check out Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, Making a Fist. www.napowrimo.net

 
20 pages
 

“I resent having to read 20 pages of something that even you didn’t find interesting,”
he wrote.
The words sat there and shouted. First year of uni, first piece of homework.
I can’t remember what grade he gave. There was a hell of a lot of red.
I was staggered. What could he mean?
To write 20 whole pages on one thing, you had to find it interesting,
and that didn’t include the myriad ‘boring’ bits I chopped out,
to cut it down lest he thought it a bit too long. 

I was trying to write my response to a Shakespeare play,
explain how it made me feel (I can’t remember now which one,
but I went on to read every single one, the sonnets too),
but they wanted you to regurgitate other people’s views.
So maybe we weren’t really supposed to have our own,
or at least you had to back it up with the accepted thought.
We just needed to hoover up what had been before
AND NOT WRITE 20 PAGES…
maybe just stick to one, which someone ‘big’ had already said.
 
I fondly missed my A Level years, when your voice was heard,
and your take on a piece of writing was valued and cheered.
It was something I heard said many a time, so it wasn’t just me.
We all had our shy dreams, and somehow they got battered,
maybe a little, maybe a lot – it depended who you asked.
I guess we wanted some kind of 60s-style literary commune,
where we sat around peering at the stars, relating stories,
getting drunk on cider (well, I was teetotal). You get my drift.
 
He was thin, he wore a beret, some girls said he spent time in Paris.
Perhaps he missed the croissants.
The room was very small. Lots of brown. Lots of wood.
I guess the writing was on the wall: you can’t win them all.
Maybe he was trying to say, ‘you’ll never be accepted’,
‘you’ll never be a real writer’, ‘you just don’t have it’,
whatever ‘it’ is. I don’t know.
I’m still hunting for the rainbow.
 
On this journey, my first time away from home, I was expectant.
We were all expecting things: to feel inspired, supported,
feel a connection with all these writers we admired, all these pages.
We were faced with a mountain. An obstacle course of deadlines.
Go to sleep and a breeze of papers chased you down the street!
“A proper reading is to read a book three times.” When?
I kinda needed a hologram, being a person who loved to sleep.
Yet somehow, we did it. We found a way. And sailed on through.
 
But still, I had the time of my life. Loved the craziness of it,
this freedom, the learning anew about every single thing,
the conversations, the people, so so many people,
more than I’d ever met in my life. My little book opened.
 
Vickie Johnstone, April 6, 2024

A Poem a Day (564): Down the rabbit hole

This poem was written in September 2019, but never published online. I just found it wandering through... Alice and the White Rabbit...

Down the rabbit hole

Mary 4 Jack forever, kiss-kiss,
Ian woz here, Lucy heart Dave,
Jane is a user and she’s going down.
 
So the graffiti bog sings…
 
It’s a little thing,
what are you thinking?
I’m writing.
It’s a little thing.
I’m listening
 
Rabbit 1: Come on, you could sort her out.
Rabbit 2: …
Rabbit 1: She’d be ugly then, ha ha.
Rabbit 3: Well, maybe just break her arm!
 
It’s a little thing,
'Death and the maiden’,
so it goes.
Have you read it?

I’m listening –
Frasier?
The doctor isn’t in the house,
so who’s listening?

He spins riddles out of pools of shit
in this white-tiled house.
Windows are eyes.
 
Is it a little thing?
He’s ex-military;
he can take care of himself.
 
Rabbit 4: I was told to stay away.
 
The maiden’s sinking into time.
 
Who is throwing daggers at closed doors?
Where does the missionary sing?
But it’s a little thing.
 
Rabbit 5: He wanted to knee-cap her.
Rabbit 6: He wanted it to look like an accident.
Rabbit 7: Or a mugging.
Rabbit 8: She could be paralysed.
 
It’s an invisible thing,
this thread,
spiralling,
dragging everything with it.
 
A simply crazy thing to do,
walking bridges in collapse.
 
The Tower brings a warning,
blazing all to the ground.
 
Talk in echoes, shadow silence.

The mud is sinking,
pus is rising,
the cistern overflows.

The white room closes in,
a code of silence obliterated.

Sliding doors,
hours
to
crawl,
caressed by claws.
 
We reimagine,
imagine
a freefalling thing,
but then it's real.
 
Julie loves Jason, Yvonne woz here,
Mark wets the bed, Lisa is a go-er.
 
So the graffiti bog sings…
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, September 15, 2019

Flash fiction (27): Off the latch

Written for 2minutesgo, JD Mader’s writing blog. Head over there to write, read, comment. It's open all weekend. So go do your thing! Have a groovy weekend.

Off the latch

John never said where he was going. He didn’t dare. He didn’t want anyone to know the pull of the thing, the shadows twisting in the moonlight. The claws making zigzag lines in air. They were his alone. They followed him out, trailed him. They knew his scent by heart, and they had been his playthings since he was a kid with cut-off shorts and a string vest, skidding in the dirt, coming home with holes in his knees.

Boys will be boys, his dad always said, as his mum opened endless packs of plasters. He still carried the scars. He’d roll out a list of names to his parents, same old, and they never asked questions. His dad was the most antisocial man on Earth and his mum was too embarrassed by their poverty, their sparceness to ever want anyone to venture inside their home. So the shadows never had to meet them. They’d take him places and show him things, and he never had to tell, unless he wanted to, and he never wanted. 

So life went on. He became a loner as a teenager, the weirdo at the back of the class with the oversized clothes and skinny frame whom no one spoke to, but some secretly stared at in awe. He seemed to know things that were beyond most people. He excelled in maths without revising and just sat there in class staring out into space. A prodigy. That’s what they said when he went off to university far too early. And it was a relief to leave.

Now he was a professor at that same building, teaching in the exact same rooms he once sat in, stuck at the back of the class, the loner. It didn’t matter now. It was almost expected that he should be a person apart. He was too intelligent for the rest of them. And he didn’t want to engage. The shadows had moved with him. They never left him alone. And now it was time. They were pointing outside. At her. The girl walking. And they’d already told him what they wanted him to do. He didn’t need to tell anyone where he was going.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, May 16, 2020

NaPoWriMo Day 11: The language of flowers

Hi, I’m doing NaPoWriMo on napowrimo.net. The challenge is to write a poem a day in April. For Day 11, the prompt was to write about flowers, where they have specific meanings.

This is the prompt for the April 11 poem:

The Victorians were particularly ga-ga for giving each other bouquets that were essentially decoder-rings of meaning. For today, I challenge you to write a poem in which one or more flowers take on specific meanings. And if you’re having trouble getting started, why not take a gander at this glossary of flower meanings (Language of flowers)?

The language of flowers

He sent daffodils in the spring light to show his regard,

Their upturned faces two tones of delicate silken yellow,

Petals perched on stalks of dark green tied with twine.

Their horns smelt not sweet but of her father’s meadows

And the dry, brown earth before the onslaught of rain.

The girl returned his favour with water lilies, pureness of heart.

A wooden stile straddled the mid-point of their father’s lands,

Where the two young people could meet, but it was brief

For summer blew the scent of dead leaves across the fields.

Her father died and the farm was sold, her mother tied by a promise

To remarry while her widow’s threads were barely two months old,

The dismal perfumes of harebell and marigold still fresh upon her.

For the young couple, yellow tulips captured their hopelessness.

The distance would prove too great and the girl’s dowry too small,

Now the habits of her mother’s new husband poured it all away.

The lad remarried in time to a lady from the neighbouring town.

The girl later did the same, burying a husband within three springs,

Their only child the following summer – a time of blood-red roses.

The woman’s house on the hill came to stink of cypress and mandrake.

Thereon she chose to live alone, sharing her life with the fairer sex,

Her visitors always greeted by a vase of daffodils, faces turned to the sun.

In hope of better luck, she plaited Holly Herb and Enchanter’s Nightshade

While curing her heartache with crushed cranberries. So time passed,

And gradually she swept the stench of dead leaves off her porch.

In the final quarter of their lives the couple would meet again,

He still bearing the hue and marigold of three years in mourning;

A wretchedness she understood, having endured its eternal cloak.

Whether they met by enchantment or design, neither would know.

This time he would leave a single Gnelder rose on her doorstep.

Now the summer of their lives had passed, it held winter’s hope.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 11, 2020

The meanings of the flowers from Language of flowers:

Cranberry – a cure for heartache

Daffodils – regard

Water lilies – pure of heart

Harebell and Marigold – grief

Dead leaves – melancholy

Gnelder rose – winter/age

Yellow tulips – hopelessness

Holly Herb and Enchanter’s Nightshade are used for witchcraft/enchantment

Cypress – death and mourning

Mandrake – horror

NaPoWriMo Day 9: Wastepaper lives

Hi, I’m doing NaPoWriMo on napowrimo.net. The challenge is to write a poem a day in April. Day 9’s poem is a concrete poem in the shape of the object.

This is the prompt for the April 9 poem:

Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a ‘concrete’ poem – a poem in which the lines and words are organised to take a shape that reflects in some way the theme of the poem. Your poem can take a simple shape, like a box or ball, or maybe you’ll have fun trying something more elaborate, like a Christmas tree.

Wastepaper lives 

A banana skin adorns the circular rim of my bin,

Sunshine coat, lemon-squidge nakedness.

I pause to wonder where it has been,

Why I spurned it and left it here to ruin.

Empty moisturiser, an ode to sensitive skin.

Sheer sweet wrapper, fruity bit eaten fast.

A panty pad stuck upon the curve of the wire

In memory of my back and belly’s hot period fire.

Dash of a phone number, bystander of a friend’s last lust.

Toilet roll cellophane – proof I salvaged some in Lockdown;

Who knew the Holy Grail would end up down the loo?

Empty box of earplugs, cardboard dented and blue.

Crumpled receipts, all that maths making a fuss,

Stub of a pencil hiding out in a toothpaste box.

On colourful squares, torn plasters tending

Scribbles of writing bereft of an ending.

Cotton wool balls and gatherings of dust,

Hair and spent tissues screwed up and worn.

Suspect sock, holed up, with a lost tale no doubt

And a pen with no ink, where time just dripped out.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 9, 2020

A Poem a Day (121): Skulls

Skulls

Black skull bag glitters

Neon-green in the night,

Offering dark a light

As you drift off to sleep. 

Full moon hangs heavy,

A silver cascade

Lifting the ground upward

To meet the sky’s eyes.

Branches swing, creaking,

Played on by the wind

In a rhythmic chorus

Only audible by the air.

Creeping roots bore down

Deep into Mother Earth,

Shifting senses lower and lower,

To the heart of sound. 

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 6, 2020