A warm night and a blunt knife...

‘The night is warm. I may take off to the moon and embroider the universe with a single poem.’

That’s the status I stuck up late last night on Facebook, just before winding my way up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire. Bacchus brings thoughts like that to me all the time, usually late at night, usually as the red wine is finished, usually as I sit pondering just who I am and what I am meant to be doing. Pity I don’t have the soul to live up to the grand statements that he drops into my mind.

At the time they seem important, the detritus of a tired, befuddled, mind struggling to make sense of another day – well, at least this one was sunny, and who knows perhaps they really are of importance. Perhaps they are the knives that could cut away the wool that encases me, if only I could sharpen them and make them last.

So, with this in mind it’s off to bed, struggling up that wooden hill, and as I flop the words come, pretentious and self reflecting, annoying and over sentimental. Like a silly sixth form student who has read too many poetry anthologies, noticing the rhyme, missing the meaning, but still managing to get a verse or two published in the school magazine because his English teacher knows that he can’t do any better. Probably out of pity for a stupid blunted boy.

Maybe I should never have been encouraged. Perhaps then I’d have a useful trade – an expert in double glazing, a mechanic, a salesman, a knife-grinder – anything other than this. I grind my knives to utter bluntness it seems.

Oh well, this is my blog. My dumping ground for all the rubbish of my life. I can chuck in anything, secure in the knowledge that if anyone reads this at all they’ll probably skip the poem.

Here’s another blunt knife to grind away on.

Warm nights and blunted knives

The night is warm.
I may take off to the moon
Embroidering the universe
With sewn stitched words.
Simple words made plain.
Small stars to speak my mind.
To convince myself in verse
That I see when I’m really blind.

The night is warm.
I may take off to the hill.
And watch the stars
Compose a dimming song.
Hummed upon the air.
In pattern hard to find.
The answers are all there,
Lost in a drink dulled mind.

The night is warm.
I may take off to the sea.
To watch the waves paint rusted foam,
Salt water dripping through me.
Stretched and pulled as paint
Of splashed and splattered kind.
To an end I knowingly await,
Still keep deep dark in mind.

The night is warm, not going anywhere,
With coldest nights yet still to come.
A warm night and a blunted blade
The moon, hill, sea will soon be done.