Curdle

Curdle

I like nothing better at night or on languid afternoons

than to curl up on the couch with Tessa Hadley

reading me one of her tales,

familiar yet fresh, cozy yet curdling at the core

like a Victorian murder mystery

1 Minute Dash

No, I’m not buying new slippers just yet.

And no, I’m not getting my dressing gown out.

Nor my pyjamas.

Boxers will do.

And my cozy murder mysteries can snuggle against each other

on the bookshelf for another month.

So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Sherlock Holmes.

I’m riding Autumn out till Winter arrives.

That Person in my Head

There’s someone walking around

inside my head

padding around in his slippers

wondering

what to do with himself:

should he write a poem?

read another chapter of ‘The Freedom Circus’ ?

write a witty comment

on Beth’s ‘Wild Sounds’?

What?

Another episode of ‘Father Brown’?

it wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t flush

the toilet so often

or go to the fridge.

Look, it’s ten o’clock, I say to him,

could you please

settle down

so I can get some sleep?

More Lamb than Hedgehog

My mentor told me how to write a poem about slippers. Make it easy, he said. comfortable and cozy, warm, no prickly bits. More lamb than hedgehog.

I had a girlfriend once who forbade me to wear slippers: ‘Next thing  I know”, she said, ‘You’ll be wearing a dressing gown, reading cozy murder mysteries and shuffling around the house like an old man.”

My dogs when they were puppies took a violent dislike to slippers, tearing them apart with a vitriolic zeal of which my girlfriend would have approved. For years I walked around the house in loafers until the puppies grew up and out of their habit.

Whenever I hear Bing Crosby sing White Christmas over the PA system in his hush puppy voice I think of slippers. Slippers are like bean bags for the feet.When you slump into them they have the feel of home.