Just so you know that I can drag myself away from certain subjects and indulge in some silly verse for kids ….

Here’s one I mashed out for Esther

The animals all gathered

For the party of the year

Though what they had in common

Not  exactly clear

Coyote doing backstroke

Wearing lycra in the pool

Giraffe is sipping lemonade

Goat just acts the fool

Zebra seeing therapist

Monkey is to blame

Can’t see seem to see things black and white

Tiger is the same

The vacuum jammed with bubble wrap

And bits of Horse’s mane

And Aardvark in a quandary

Did I misspell his name?

I tried to write something a bit cheerful. An antidote to the times. I’m not sure that it really worked out that way.

Anyway ….

*
Please don’t worry
Please don’t cry
Forever there’s a lantern
Hanging in the sky
So even in the darkness
Way up in there on high
The sun is always shining
Rising by and by

The sun is always shining
And when the sunlight fades
That’s clouds just making shadows
Making shades
And even when it’s raining
There’s sunshine there above
The sun is always shining
When you’re in love

Please don’t hurry
Don’t run away
Why such a flurry?
It’s just another day
When the sun is always shining
We can chase away the rain
Just wait here for the sunlight
To chase away the pain

The sun is always shining
And when the sunlight fades
That’s clouds just making shadows
Making shades
And even when it’s raining
There’s sunshine there above
The sun is always shining
When you’re in love

So don’t be angry
Don’t be sad
Remembering the memories
The daydreams that we had
When the Sun was always shining
Even when the raindrops fell
Underneath the blankets
We could never tell

*

And I tried to get the band back together to put it to music. But that didn’t work at all. Sometimes they just don’t recognise my vision …,

Something came into my head this morning as I lay on the pillow and tried to sleep. So I got out of bed and wrote it down before it vanished. And then I posted it here because I hadn’t posted anything here for, like, ages.

****

I remember us getting out of bed in the morning before sunrise, and that by the time we had dressed and had left the house, the world had rotated to such an angle that the first little hints of sunlight were spreading like diluted paint through the trees and were drawing strange pictures in the grass, and that in the air there were little rivers of both cold and warm air that mixed as we waded through them. There was a lifting fog. I heard an aeroplane pass not quite overhead but somewhere to the south. I saw the shape of a man walking his dog.

I remember noticing how perfect her hair was, after eight hours of sleep. And how white her teeth were. There were certain sorts of things, like that, that she could do without ever being noticed. She never coughed, for example, or sneezed, or made unpleasant noises in the bathroom. She was what my mother would have described as ’a quiet achiever’.

The police asked me how long I had known her and I couldn’t remember. Two or three weeks, I told them.

When we reached our favourite little bench in the park and sat down, she produced a small packet of biscuits that she had baked the night before and had wrapped in greaseproof paper. She unfolded the paper and offered me one and I ate it. It tasted of sugar and almonds. It was very good. There was a brightly coloured bird in a tree about twenty metres away looking at us and we were both looking at the bird and for just a second nothing in the world moved. Nobody took a breath.

My mother swallowed twenty-three sleeping tablets on a Wednesday night and didn’t wake up on Thursday. I guess that’s what sleeping tablets are for. Sweet dreams, mum.

Anyway, there we were in the park eating biscuits that tasted of sugar and almonds. The sun was still coming up. The bird was still looking at us.

I became aware of a certain presence around us. A kind of invisible glow. I told the police that I thought it was probably an alien spaceship of some sort, but when they asked me to describe it I couldn’t. I don’t really know what alien spaceships look like. Nobody does.

I could tell that the police were very frustrated by the lack of detail. Who could blame them? I was a bit frustrated myself. What had I seen, they asked me. I hadn’t actually seen anything. I had just felt it.

Here’s the thing though. When the spaceship was gone, so was she. Even the biscuits had vanished. I think the aliens took the bird too, but it may have just flown away.

I filled out a form, and somebody asked me where I lived. A nice lady organised a taxi for me and suggested that I go home and rest.

Everything would be alright, she told me.

****

This merely in response to Nan, here.

The last few days …..