Breathing Just a Little

is there anything more boring than a poem about a strange dream where the house is sold but you forgot, and you haven't  started packing, but you must get out next Tuesday also the house is not actually your real house it's a trick mirror version, all weird angles and hidden rooms decaying walls, brick dust and everyone still here, even those who moved out no one gone and you can't find or can't remember  where all the paperwork is at and no one wants to help pack and when you try Googling "packing services" Google just gives endless hits of sad poems

across the world bombs are falling fire is raining down in Persia, and who knows what ends will come of it the plain truth, now: no one ever knows or can know where war will lead, to what destruction to what crush of empires and of women and men  stories swallowed whole in the sunlight, only the bones spat out to grow dry in the unshielded sun falling into dark like the Incas did, and also the Picts like the Etruscans when Rome rose bloody and teeming like the Hittites, and the Phillistines like the great city of Carthage, tamped out as a candle flame razed and sown in salt  and here is our age: sliding towards disaster, run by billionaires and idiots and, here, tucked up against the tailbone of the earth fretting against civility, is a country that does not seem to know its fortune so far from bombs and battle and, still, fractious, chafing, and the sky looks heavy, today grey and gloom-soaked, with rain in its face and, here, the pigeons croon to the burdened light still, an...

  The mornings of ice have roared in suddenly now. The breath of autumn turning from summer memory to winter herald in the space of a few short days. No time to acclimate, if that were even possible; the long warmth vanished into the pale clear sky. Woodsmoke rises and mushrooms creep across the grass and getting out of bed has become a matter of will rather than instinct. The first morning tasks once again to set the rice pot cooking  and put on both the heaters, while my toes curl imploringly inside the not-enough slippers. Rousing cat and dog for their morning medications is a difficulty, as they wind their bodies into helixes, bolstering against the chill. Today is a day for thermal vests and lambs-wool socks; for heatpacks and finger gloves, scarves and puffer jackets. A little later, the warm rice and fresh egg, the hot tea, provides a moment of comfort before the run to the station for my daughter's workday, shivering from door to door let's take the big car today , I s...

 (Part 1 of this story can be found here ). My office is cooler than station-normal; I keep a vortex chiller in here to soothe my Martian skin. Callie’s already there when I arrive, sitting straight up in my Mars-wood chair, her exuberant dandelion-fluff of silver hair adding another head’s worth of weight to her frame. Callie Durrant. No-one could’ve been kinder, to the resentful, wounded person I was, when I left Mars on her mining boat to come here. That her particular form of kindness involved keeping her crew off my back, providing me with ample stimulants, and feeding me at regular intervals did not make it less potent, or real. I’ve never resiled from owning the debt I owe her; not then, and not now. I sit down behind my desk and say, “Are you going to tell me straight away, or shall we dance around for a while?” She flares her nostrils slightly and focuses her sighted eye – the lavender one – on me. “Hmmmmm.” I shrug. My thoughts are already racing ahead to the ...