Outside, Inside, Inside-Out.

Swallows carve the sky in cascading waves,

Whilst flickering eyes follow hay-dust specks

That dance in honeyed May-day heat.

In an airborne symphony, birds dive and plummet,

Reminding us of lost minutes, lost time -

Of lives lost, of lives in flight,

Of lives of joy and those of spite.

Meanwhile the moneyed air of the fat-cat city fades,

Turning dusty immorality to a dusk of recognition

For the eye sees in upon itself.

A health crisis ensues:

Its all Isolation

And Despair.

But out there the swallow dives as the heart sinks;

Reminding us of ancient misery

That blinks itself out in heavy tears that bruise.

A girl screams to the world out there,

Where the crisis peruses empty streets.

“It’s all mad out there” they say

But out where?

I forgot the world existed

Our world out there,

Where the chaos glares and shakes the news,

Where the jazz band on the corner plays the blues,

And bars on streets fizz like the tide’s sweet hues.

That place

Where poets muse with inspired eyes;

I forgot that world existed,

That world outside.

Outside, out there, they are fighting for health

But inside, we are turning from health to self-crisis;

Isolated, reflective, lost and in doubt,

We start looking inwards and turn our inside, out.

And so,

Mellow marmalade melts into the day’s toast

Like it always does, every morning.

Dull repetition spreads itself butter-like

Over the waning ammunition of teenage life.

A troubling peace wanes dryly like a hanging cloth

Bringing with it, stories of people, piece by piece,

Rag by rag,

Peace by pieces.

Thus as another heart-rate ceases into dust in the moonlight,

He mourns his wife’s death in the house next door

And one door down from him, the toddler snores

Whilst wide eyed, her parents grieve her future.

What a time to be alive

But barely living.

What a slice, what a cut, what a poisonous suture;

What a futureless future,

What a cut, what a leak, what a -

Way to feel I guess,

The future looks bleak.

Oh, what a mess.

“Let the weak die!” they protest

Oh, it’s all in tatters;

Black Lives Matter.

We’re weak

Yes, it’s our humanity,

Not the future, that’s looking bleak.

Week after week after week

Monotony reigns with ferocious banality,

Yet an inward geography shows me new places

Where streams of thought reel in sinuous splendour

And as this May day rusts to dewy dawn

A new thorn of self-understanding is engendered

Which draws blood in painful merriment.

What a time to be alive and to be thinking,

What a time to be barely living but to be sinking into self;

That self I eclipsed with work and play

Each and every happening day.

That was before, and outside,

Now, I’m just inside, with my inside out

And I dance for my freedom,

O, I dance with my doubts.

Wait -

We dance when we’re free

And yet here I am in my chains

Watching the swallow in flight

Whilst standing immobile,

On a plank over loathing seas.

Yet I dance still with my buckling knees

Because I dance with the joy

That my mind is free.