Those early childhood mornings,
when the kettle would inevitably sing,
an opera singer at the end of an emotion,
steam caught on the window.
Mother Nature has filled the streets with colour,
and we finger paint shapes on the glass.
The squiggles that could be birds.
The circle could be a ring.
The man, a figure of darkness or loneliness,
staring through the windows.
His shape is lumpen, uneven, unnatural,
he could have legs, but they could be the birds,
that peck out their own meaning
with beaks of coldness, passing time.
Like sandcastles, washed away by the inevitably of the tides,
every new day offers a new blank canvas.
A new set of colours, of passing people,
of strangers facing lives that don’t go
the way we think that they should.
Like the children that we once were,
we look to make familiar shapes out of the unknown,
so we draw squiggles of birds in the condensation,
with fingers of coldness, passing time.
-- Ben Macnair is an award-winning poet and playwright from Staffordshire in the United Kingdom. Follow him on Twitter @benmacnair