The Dark Brown Clock

And ten other short poems by Christopher English.

Index for art work depicting
poems, prints,drawings
and paintings together

Page 13 of 28

The Dark Brown Clock

To my father

The house is strangely empty,
Just as he had left it.
Never seen the place like this though.

He is never coming back,
I still can not quite
get used to the idea.

The dark brown clock that was
Always his favourite object
Still goes on ticking.

I have never encountered
A moment such as this before,
Everything is somehow irrelevant.

Time is forgotten.
He never will be back
To this still, empty house.

JIGSAWS

I remember you
All those years ago
As if it were yesterday.
I would talk to you now
Of things I did not see in you.
I realise now of how you must have felt,
Of what you would have known;
How you could have told me.

I remember you now,
I am where you stood then,
In fragmented affinity.

©

GROWING OUT OF AN EGG

Looking back on what was correct,
And most probably right,
Although who can be certain for sure ?
The hold before the fall was all so important.
Holding on to the precious support at all costs.
The loss of what one stood for,
Turning for the worst,
Seems so little now,
Compared to what was eventually found in its place.

©

TWO LINES ONLY

Perhaps the most bizarre thing of all
Is our own normality.

©

REFLECTIONS

To go out into the World
And then come back,
To remember the trouble
Of our day,
To think and feel
The moment
And wonder why
We acted in such a way.

©

Puppets in the Mirror

Behind the actions
behind the scenes
Behind the concepts and perceptions
Behind all the puppetry
Where the mind wrestles with illusions
I see the joke
Beyond the bars.

©

IN ITS SELF

Sometimes, my soul speaks
To my mind, in the oddest ways,
Telling me who I am.
And my mind speaks back,
Contemplating.
I would be lost without its company.

©

GREETING

You arrived holding flowers,
Wearing a green scarf upon your head.
We had not seen each other for weeks.
I saw you smile as you saw me
And I loved you,
I wanted to rush over
And touch you;
But I didn’t.

©

REMORSE

Fight against self-embittered wounds
In the lucid sight of myself.
Left in remorse
For those hurt in my absurdities;
There is much to make amends.

©

SLAVE TO LINEAR TIME

Too many people with things to say,
No time to listen with other things on the mind.
Too many complexities to comprehend,
Time being too narrow to take it all in.
Perhaps the moment will expand elsewhere
Other than this linear time.

In these moments of distraction,
Leaving behind the meaning and understanding,
Seeming hollow, careless, an easy option,
An insight would know otherwise;
There is an underlay.

©

I HEARD A STORY

Children in the spring
Of a new generation laugh
At the funny face and voice
Of a man
Who came out of the earth,
Having left his comrades behind in the ground
As blankets of gas covered the trenches
In the battle of Verdun.

I heard a story,
Fathoms deep in decades,
Of a man
Who remembers laughing at a man
As a child in a new spring.

©

Page 13 of 28