This sponge of a Google girl
soaks up the dribble
of a million minds -
minutiae.

How seasoned she will be
with dross and doom -
banality
purporting to be meaningful.

A thousand times the end of days
has been foretold, retold,
and sold to simple minds.

It's so unkind
to lead them on with hope
that all the pain they feel
may soon be gone.

They have no way to do the math,
or plot their days and pain
upon a graph.

Words fall like cataracts
to blind the eyes of those
whose sight once clear
is now befouled with blight.

Recovery

Footpaths are crumbling,
my feet keep stumbling.

We trawl through floods
and rivers of mud
rubble, garbage, crud.

Everything's changed, strange.

I try to stay positive,
treat it as cognitive.

I walk through the city
such a pity to be broken,
gardens choking in weeds -
breathing wreckage -
how it breeds depression.

Winter's Tale

The house is freezing,
but there's no one here
to feel the cold.

Snow spins outside the windows
every winter now - a growling white bear
planting splayed paws on the lawn.

When I was a child it was a rare thing.
Wild with excitement we would barely
scrape together a snowman.

Children are still excited
at the prospect of a frozen frolic -
a day off school maybe ...

but parents watch the weather
deepening year by year
news of tsunamis, hurricanes,
tornadoes, floods.

The ice floes of the great bear
dwindle in warming seas,
desert expands in the great
southern lands.

The signs of the end of days
are upon us.

Sam

i
She washes out his bowl,
clears away all his little things,
with indecent haste.
Too soon -

but she couldn't bear to see them
in the morning,
when she comes out to get breakfast
and his sweet face is missing.

His rush to talk and cuddle,
as pleased to see her as she is to see him,
gone - like the slam of the front door
in a gust of wind.

ii.
Today she plants a tree in the garden,
heavy with lace leaves and cream flowers,
pansies and polyanthus around the base.

The earth breathes in and holds
his soft, perfect shape in its dark arms.