Vignettes – Closet Poet

Perfect Tai Chi in the Park

The Closet Poet — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 01:30:14 +0000

A stranded vision, buoyant on deep green,
transferring weight from blade to blade
his effortless spirals cricking my neck
following his perfecting form:
Correcting angles, squaring hips
centring the trunk
he’s gone!
Now I’m lost.
He’s blended
transcended
become one
shifted self
eternal, internal
alchemist,
tamed his heart
reached his God
in a park
in a city
on
a wet Tuesday.

Listen

https://closetpoet.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Perfect-Tai-Chi-in-the-Park.mp3

View of a Tortoise

The Closet Poet — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 21:01:38 +0000

I didn’t expect a planet untethered
but there it was, atilt, oscillating
wildly, primordial against
the vivid-green inflorescence
completely out of time…
Unnerved, I grasped the carapace
smooth and dense, gently
turning, I glanced his hoary
face, as if just exhumed
I quickly placed him down
gravity resumed….

In the garden

The Closet Poet — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 14:22:26 +0000

A cabbage white found me
as I sat in the sun
drinking beer from the bottle
and watching mice mutate.
He settled on the ornamental
rusting chair and rested
his wings. I greeted him quietly
offering him my forefinger as
soft repose but he ignored it,
wavered for a while, strikingly translucent,
then carried himself off on the breeze.
I watched him disappear and
wished him well. The mice
swelled.

Listen

https://closetpoet.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/In-the-garden.mp3

Wellington Street

The Closet Poet — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 14:21:14 +0000

Not a Duke in sight, but these streets are paved with gold.
A Range Rover – vantablack, parked like a carrion crow.
There are bones to be picked, from the rotting and the old.
A drawn face approaches; a window descends, real slow.

A tattooed arm, thick as a bible appears, a fist unclenches.
The drawn face picks like a sparrow, and then is gone.
Kids’ wheelie past, a road worker on haunches quenches
His thirst and life deliberately, unabatedly goes on.

Here Hare Here

The Closet Poet — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 00:37:50 +0000

As I walked out one winter’s morning
frost clenching the frigid ground
I heard the fracture of nature, of things
breaking and closing down.

Beyond the distant hedgerow, blurred
by the pink sunlight, I caught for a brief
moment a still grey ghost
shadowed in God’s candlelight.

Listen

https://closetpoet.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Here-Hare-Here.mp3

I found myself there

The Closet Poet — Sat, 20 Feb 2021 01:15:38 +0000

In a half-made bed of a house
most hair was shocked.
There was a potty full of piss
in the corner and conversations

in headlocks. There was death
on the television – loud door
knocks – no answers – a dancer
then to avoidance…

She shook her stuff, till
her clothes collapsed in a
heap beneath her – ether
she cried as she collapsed

deeper into the folds of
herself – no room for fat
dancers, romancers, melters
or chancers, no room for anyone.

Listen

https://closetpoet.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/I-found-Myself-There.mp3