Baby screamed as the polar bear leapt across the ice. “Hush,” said Mummy Penguin, “it’s just a dream. We live at opposite poles.”
Moments
Seaside experience
His slow black car was spattered with green-white gullmuggings and smelled of fish. The thuggish depositor eyed him and cawed.
Inspired by a twitter conversation with @ropoem and @TangledFox
I swam fast
I swam fast, knife held tight. You lay on the mattress, eyes closed. A single strike slashed. Now the tide would not take you.
Kelly was waiting
J whispered “My heart it beats like a drum”. “Boom boom”, K answered, “boom boom!”. They cyber danced and, later, they married.
Skin salt, sweet lips
The taste of the sea stayed with Steno though he washed his mouth with wine and ate his meal of honey. The night would be long.
Stano’s garden
Stano’s garden had fed his family all his life. Now the walnut tree he sat below would give its first fruit. He closed his eyes.
In the cool grey land
In the cool grey land, the hot season rarely was, nor warm – a few days, a mayfly’s life in May, more a summary than a summer.
He knew the steps
He knew the steps but not the heart that caused them; she was wild, and spun and kicked. Thoughtful fire danced through them.
Realistic, real
I thought her tattoo was very realistic. But as people saw the tanned Jesus on her shoulder crying tears of blood, they began to cross themselves. Some knelt. Some hissed as she reached her towel and her friend wiped away the signs that she had scratched herself on the lava rocks as she climbed out of the water. His eyes were blue.
Changing the guard at the sea
At the Marina bar an hour after sunrise, early sunseekers with their cappuccini and cornetti swirl and eddy around the nightclub exiters, cold water, give me cold water. The two tribes mix like suntan cream and seawater.
An hour later the tattooed late-night swimmers trail up from the rocks, eyes red with salt and sleeplessness, beer bottles half full of cigarette butts and ash. The greatgrandparents distract the children with promises of coloured fish.
