NaPoWriMo has struck again, and this year I’m determined to finish. 2023 was the last time I tried, and I got precisely four poems out of it. 2024 I was moving house, and 2025 I was receiving, then recovering from surgery. This seems like a decent year to start again…
If you’re a paying Patreon of mine, you’ll see all of them (and only Patrons – paying or free – get to hear recordings of me reading them). If not, you’ll only see the ones I have no intention of saving for third party publication.
This was not one of the ones I’m keen to cling to, but then, so far I’ve not exactly produced any immortal bangers on the first day of the challenge (yes, I just checked back through all of them, shhh). I looked for an image to do some ekphrasis with and the first lines that came to mind felt like they belonged in an end-rhyming, common metre poem. Often enough, style informs substance, so this is not the poem I started out to write, but it is the poem I finished, which is, after all, the point…
 |
| image courtesy of picryl |
Down here the cracks are crevices,
and all the streetlights stars.
These details where the Devil lives
are written in the scars.
Marred tarmac, paint, and metal struts
are sutured by the stains
of diesel, gum, discarded butts,
the residue of rain.
Every puddle is a lake,
each divot is a dale;
arrivals conjure earthquakes,
departures summon gales.
But here black has a thousand shades,
up close, grit scintillates;
this patch of moss a pleasant glade,
a single breadcrumb sates.
The miniscule holds treasures
if you’re prepared to look,
and what you thought half-measures
might just contain a book…
