Looking Clearly at my Sadness

A stream is not the same as a dying animal;
and in a similar vein grief does not account
for the kitchen clock’s tick tock panning, bilateral
and moving through the room with no scent

like a Disney animation clock. And so I see
my sadness clearly and sing my heart’s song.
We remediate the immediate predicament with tea.
We dream of a kingdom where nothing’s wrong.

A crow is squawking on a tree in the garden.
Crows, dogs, horses, trees, these are our friends.
To Nature I turn for solace, her truant compensation
while a lonely winter’s new fag-end burns.

Grey like a pencil is the new day dawning
here at the foot of the Lakeland’s oldest fell,
grey like a rabbit, full of puddles blinking,
templates in the Periodic Table starting to swell…

day is an abeyance that dissimulates the vacancy
of fish-eyes sipped on. Monastic mist
flies across the fell. Everything is so watery.
You have to live here and now, not in the past.

I dreamed that we went swimming in eyewash.
Then I ate a breakfast of every snooker ball colour.
To trollop I turned, then to niceness, then balderdash.
As for the poet’s role, nothing could be duller.

John F.B. Tucker



If you have any thoughts on this poem, John F.B. Tucker would be pleased to hear them.