These days are a work in progress

Breeze, and a chill in the air that murmurs of autumn though we’re not yet done with July. Tram-sound hums through the open window, the whine and crash of the garbage truck, a trill from one of the coal tits flickering through the damson. I’m lucky my window faces the garden and not the street, our little patch of rented green: flowers, brambles, the sagging washing line, the unpruned tree. I wonder if any of my housemates remembered to put the bins out… I forgot, despite going out onto the street late last night to greet my friend arriving after a long journey; I wasn’t thinking about bins but about The Space Poetic, about the community that’s building around it and how fucking gorgeous that is, about writing before work in the morning, about friendship and food and the pressure of time’s onward thrust.

I pushed myself to get up early this morning despite yesterday’s late night. To look at poem submissions before the end of July, to go over my folders and make sense of what I’ve writ…