Day Tickets

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I don't like to think of day tickets as poems, because poems are sacred, and these are throwaway. Each one contains a single line that never made it into a song, from which I have formed short passages of text. I call them day tickets as I often find myself writing them to provide me safe passage through a dreadful day, of which there are more than I'd like. Below is the most recent dreadful day in which I could muster the strength to write.

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Teak Crickets

Teak crickets in a marble fog,
the old branches creak, break, rock.
Within a minute hove, a little mouse squeaks,
whilst the bullfrogs, they do hop.

In the garden outside, I see my escape,
for the world isn’t as bleak as it seems.
No bodily decay from hopeless nights
could distract me from this white, this yellow, and this green.

For, today, the great sun can burn the flesh,
and there’s more lemons on the trees than normal.
I’ll come and go from this place, until only I go,
and cease laying blue ink in this journal.

It all ends with me, in this body, this mind,
these writings that this paradise can stir.
I only hope one day someone else takes this pen,
and plucks the beauty from right out of the air.

- Elijah James
Written: 08/12/2022Published: 26/05/2023