Poem 14 - Looking Out

Photo: Sally Douglas

Looking Out

The moon is like an unwashed plate.

The stars creak in the sky’s tight skin.

I don’t remember coming in.

Morning girl’s still in the glass,

smiling like a broken window.

How slow the minutes pass.

Her eyes are big as sand and cold as worms.

They cast a searchlight beam.

Too bright to let me dream.

I want to see her smile, her sleek-slack smile,

watering the blackened railway tracks.

But only for a while.

Sally Douglas

Recently I've been looking through old notebooks and abandoned bits of writing on my hard drive. And I'm amazed by how much I've written that I'd completely forgotten. This poem has its roots in a bit of prose I wrote years ago as an exercise in surrealism. I thought I might be able to use some fragments in a poem, but I didn't really know where to go with it until I saw The Poetry School's prompt for today. This mentioned writing about what you don't remember rather than what you do. That notion of not remembering gave me the hook I needed, and the poem grew from there.

I've gone for a shifting rhyme scheme and uneasy rhythms to reflect the content of the poem.

And you might not believe it, but these are not the wildest images that were in that original piece of prose...