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You turn off the light and sense the room rearrange itself around you like a different space where you yourself are different. So simple to leave a world. So simple to stand still. Now you are here, now gone. Turn it off and walk, keep walking.

You’re awake so long you’re falling asleep. A year is just a night’s sleep. So your life is shaped. You feel its edges closing as you turn in bed. Since life is finite you wake and wake to the light at the edge of sleep, falling out of light.

SPECTROSCOPE The ripeness of pears is measured in sweetness. Count the increments on your specially made meter. Every micro drop is registered there. And as for skin, touch the peeled almost white surface. Use a spectroscope. Now taste. Taste again.

Spring waits on summer Spring waits on summer like an enthusiastic bride properly dressed for the occasion. Hawthorn, apple blossom, whites bobbing in the wind in mild excitement. Weddings are in season now. Surely something good is in the offing.

SOMEWHERE IN LANGUAGE Somewhere in language there is space for the world. See! Stand there and watch it appear then vanish. In script, in the yawning gap between parts of speech, there is a house, night, dogs, vicissitudes, murder, delight, the absurd or that’s what we say.

How late it is now. is it us, the world, or time itself? I listen to midnight traffic slipping ever further back into a file called The Past. A light breeze shifts past the window. The moon is thin. Something is eating it. How thin!

Come on the Palace!

Ely - a grey ghost from a gothic novel.

- Are you the silence? - At times I am quite silent. - How did you get in? - Through gaps in silence. - But you speak every night through hours of silent noise. - The tautology befits you. Speech and silence both at the same time, but more of silence.

End of the season. There ought to be an anthem, a Lord dismiss us with thy blessing song as at a school assembly where we are schoolboys still kicking a ball in the growing dark of days, still oafs, still muddied, still Victorian.

Oh it is raining, small flowers of rain opening on the roof. Hear them running off in tears of joy, dripping and dripping into widening pools of flowers. Splash! Enormous petals vanish into darkness. Night blooms into more rain.

Square bracket haiku (1) The rose in the wind [shifts, holds for a moment, blows] Full blown, blowsy, clear.

Square bracket haiku (2/7) Under the window two children are running [who are they, where going?]

Square Bracket Haiku (3/7) Then the sun came out [clouds folded, fleeting, piled] on its brief business.

Square Bracket Haiku (4/7) A certain panic among the poets. It must be [Monday? Tuesday?]

Square bracket haiku (5/7) The cat flap, flapping. Job well done [feathers! feathers!] Death curls up and sleeps.

Square bracket haiku (6/7) Now you see it, now you don’t. [The map of Europe folding, unfolding.]

Square bracket haiku (7/7) Hard winter. Moscow. The Cold War just got colder. [Bring the iced Guinness?]

Cafe Writers committee member Julia Webb has a new book out soon! 🥳

Archbishop Gyula Márfi’s association with the extreme-right Mi Hazánk (‘Our Homeland’) party is a new low for #Hungary’s #Catholic episcopate.