Freedom

Take time, Take time

Take time to look around you

Take time to look around you

We need freedom

Yeah, we need freedom

If everyday you wake up

the sky writes poetry onto your palms,

bends into your hands with the kiss of daybreak,

who are you to refuse it with a dip of the shoulder

into the soft of your mattress?

The morning’s news cocks its head

in the grey of another London day

another London may well be possible -

We rebuilt it after the war, after all:

Others in their droves returning to Mother.

They had just as much heartbreak as us.

We are not the first to pine over lovers

on the other side of the world.

We are not the first to be separated.

I hear a response in the flutter of a net curtain

across the grass between my window

and the block of flats opposite:

the glimmer of a face computer blue –

but we are the first to visualise the distance;

stroking screens like bodies creates a different kind of yearning.

The magpie agrees.

Till death do us part, he sings

atop the roofing of the rubbish chute.

He’s waiting for his one true love,

but saw through double glazing on the TV,

news that winds over the channel

had become a Bermuda triangle for birds returning home

and she said she’d be back by now.

Freedom, hmmm

We need freedom

Yeah, yeah,

We need freedom

We hail him with the knowledge

that our conflict with the land

is culprit for the sorrow in his beak.

My morning’s yarn unravels

the more thought I put into it;

image of a Llama spitting at an Oak tree;

Foreign leaves puzzling the floor.

I, I deserve a softer carpet to lie in,

for my back’s sake.

Looking up at a room without a ceiling,

a sky without a drop of rain,

a ray of light without a speck of dust