Day 275 - Gravedigger

Day 274 - Former People

1 Poem in Former People...

http://formerpeople.wordpress.com/

Day 273 - Storm

The night the clocks went back

A storm unwound itself above the roof

Till the gutter broke from it’s fixing

And everything ran away.

I lay listening to the mice 

Make their manoeuvres beneath the floor,

Stacking sugar packets as tiny sandbags

While the rain brushed back and forth

Like a widow sweeping  out an empty attic

Some time around dawn it grew so quiet, 

You’d swear you could hear  the spiders 

Re-lacing their webs in the dark.

Day 272 - Pumpkin

Day 271 - Poe

Day 270 - Tools

The worlds too full

I cannot talk,

Inside the work shed

The words of love

Hang high upon the wall,

I take them down

And wipe away the dust,

Then step outside

To hunt your heart

In the tall grass.

Day 269 - Self Portrait

Day 268 - Rain Street 2

Day 267 - Rain Street

Day 266 - Work to a Calm

2 Poems in Work to a Calm...

http://worktoacalm.wordpress.com/issue-6-october-2013-2/poems-by-tom-harding/

Day 265 - Unwritten Letter

"...Marianne what did I do to you? I tried to use you against the night, I tried to make you my audience, Instead I should have been watching you. If my exterior interests weren't so few I could have let you breathe. Maybe you would be thinking of me now. Marianne do you think of me now?
It's hard to see things from the eye of them, at the time I might have written your name on every passing door and it would not have seemed unusual. No wonder you left. A man is supposed to be silent. Being alone is not that terrible. It’s nothing more than a trick. I used to practise it every night whilst you slept. Marianne you made me forget so much. Before I met you I had learnt to play the guitar. I’d forgotten this. I found my guitar the other day sat beneath the bed. It looked like like a clock without the parts. I half expected to find a a cuckoos nest inside. When I tried to play it my fingers bled. You forget the pain of trying to master something that just won’t come to you. It has been so long since I mastered anything. My hands became primitive around you;  useless but for closing doors, doing up trousers that sort of thing. I was once a painter too. Or did I dream that? I tried to paint you but gave up when I couldn't find a colour to match to your hair. I have a collection of aborted portraits of you hidden beneath my bed. Each perfect in some way, failed in another. I tried to paste all the perfect parts together but it scared me. No, in fact I'm trying to get off you completely. I want you to know this. The absolution begins some time now. Is absolution correct? The world knows me as sane. That’s the face I bring. Many would take me as dull, well off course, it's a sign of the times, every man has fallen into love with his story till his face has healed of all character. We try to rise above but too often we find our dreams impaled in some way. Certainly yours couldn't last. Not after the way I abused it. I was like the sort of person who locks a dog in a car during the summer. Too much nothingness is cruelty. If you saw me now you would laugh, or you might find it hard not to cry. There is nobody else now, no audience. I drop plates on my own at midnight and tread the broken pieces into my feet. I have a cat that won’t stop urinating under the stairs. We grow lonelier everyday. All I have to think about is your bathroom. It was so immaculate I could always find what I was looking for. How do we understand finality? Death, the beginning of nothing. How do I resolve that I'll never see your bathroom again? That there maybe somebody else sat upon your toilet? It suggests a life without meaning. The age old problem. The grim, ghastly, blunt truth that leaves nothing to be said except that time leads to recovery. So far I have put faith in the human mind as a muscle,  like the heart there’s hope it will heal and reformat to a new logic. We are just machines after all. Just like this leg; the leg that’s broken will mend. The body doesn't lie. The body can break, but like an old clock it can be rebuilt. A clock holds it’s own reality. It can break, it can mend..."

Day 264 - The Next Line

She looks at you expectant,

A cup teeters on the edge of a table

A man raises his hand

As if to laugh but doesn't,

A waitress approaches tentatively,

Like an a extra waiting to take the stage,

Clouds descend as if on a winch,

While a shadowy man

Stands in the wings

Mouthing words that you recognise

But for some reason won’t come.

Day 263 - Apples Print

Day 262 - Afterlife

Day 261 - Scrap Poem - Greece

how will i relax

when it’s time to relax?

how can I drink coffee

and sit in the shade

and read the poems of Adonis

and draw with a thin pencil

the olive trees that

stand like gnarled old men

in the shade,

each one waiting for

the next olive to fall.

Day 260 - Scrap - Revolution

i remember the night

they threw all the tables in the harbour.

some mornings I walk down there

looking for broken plates

or a chair leg rising from the silt

searching for some evidence

that night existed.

Day 259 - Pear

Day 258 - I've Cried Enough For You

Day 257 - Drummer

Day 256 - Blues

Times are tough. The people on the bus look increasingly desperate. Just yesterday one was using a pen knife to remove the rubber sealant from around the window. The bus driver didn't say a word and just kept his eyes on the road, looking like the prison van driver in the The Fugitive Kind.  

Each day at the same stop a man climbs aboard wearing a knit cap and carrying a brown paper bag that smells of sour milk. Each time I make a transaction to place my rucksack on the empty seat beside me to ward him away. 

It’s not healthy to start your day with an act of deception to your fellowman but these are desperate times. People are living in fear. You can see it in their faces. The hardships are starting to show. It draws lines to the face and makes the cheekbones apparent. In some ways we’re becoming more beautiful.

There was a time I used to be good at misfortune.  I could act it out so well I could have made a living from it. I spent my nights listening to pre-war blues and drinking beer in the bath.  Those times are over now- days like these the knives are out for fakes like us.

Day 255 - Black & White

Day 254 - Blue 2

Day 253 - Tokyo Marathon

Day 252 - Speck Alternate Scene

Day 251 - Aftermath

What’s happening now?

I wish I could answer,

Everything of value seems to drift before me

Like the pieces of a shipwreck in the dark.

Sometimes I wake in the early morning

And meet the cat enroute to the toilet

He looks at me as if to say

‘All this torture and nobody Is spared.’

He has not been the same since

We bought him the collar with the bell,

Now even the blindest mouse

Can evade him in the dark,

We’ve robbed him of his great skill for death

It’s residue lives like a fever in his skin.

When I come crawling to find you in the night

It is because you’re the only living thing

That’s yet to desert me.

Day 250 - New Jumper

Day 249 - Bus Station Face

Day 248 - Cut

Day 247 - Birds

Day 246 - Thought

You are very beautiful

And I see you sometimes walking this way and that

And I think maybe you once looked at me

But I couldn't be certain

Not that it matters anyway except that I wish to say

You have an interesting way about you and

I don't know but perhaps

We could have known at each other in another time,

We could have spent time together

Doing nothing more than drinking coffee

Or walking through a city neither of us know,

Do you know how good it is to walk somewhere unfamiliar

With no other intention but to get lost?

Stopping to get a beer knowing that you’re not required

To be anywhere else that day?

Yes it’s good to take the time to get to know a place like that,

Just as a person,

But I'm afraid we're both too busy for that

And it’s not like we've ever spoken anyway.

Day 245 - Puddle