Roads are bruise-blue.

Poems

January.

The air knuckles down, blunt and bare,

each breath a fist,

and the year,

fresh as a whitewashed wall,

leans into the wind’s frigid rattle.

Roads are bruise-blue,

cars hunch on driveways like stray dogs

dusted in frost.

Every tree, stripped to its skeleton,

clutches at the sky

with brittle hands,

while hedgerows mutter secrets

into the crackle of ice.

Morning breaks reluctantly,

dragging its boots through mud and ash,

and night,

an eager trespasser,

pushes hard against the hours.

Inside, we stoke the old rituals –

fire, stew,

the creak of a staircase

echoing through a house too still.

Somewhere, a clock coughs

as the minutes settle in their new skin.

January asks for patience,

a steady hand on the tiller,

as it carries us across the coldest tide.

We count shadows

on walls and windows,

measure light

like it’s rationed,

and wait

for the thaw.

---

Cy Twombly.

His hand speaks in murmurs,

a stammer of lines

that unravel thought

like loose thread.

The canvas isn’t blank;

it’s a battleground,

a palimpsest where language

falls apart.

He scribbles the ghosts of gods,

Apollo tangled with a child’s scrawl,

Venus blushing beneath a smear of red.

History crawls through his fingers,

ancient whispers

caught in the thrum of graphite.

Nothing is neat—

love bleeds,

time spills,

desire leaves its fingerprints everywhere.

The sea crashes

in streaks of white,

while words—half-formed,

barely breathing—

hang like smoke

over the ruins.

You stare and feel

the raw pulse of it:

art as heartbeat,

as unfinished sentence,

as the infinite,

always just out of reach.

---

Vapour Trails.

The sky bears scars,

white threads pulled taut

across the blue,

a fleeting geometry

etched by engines

that have already

vanished.

Each line is a story

you’ll never know—

a seatbelt click,

a tray table rattling,

the quiet calculations

of altitude and arrival.

Down here, they seem permanent,

sharp as chalk on slate,

but watch long enough

and they blur,

ghosting into nothing,

as if they were never there.

Maybe that’s the point:

to leave a mark

that only the sky remembers,

a bright stroke of longing

too high to touch,

too far to hold.