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