Dear Reader

for my pocket instead of all the tissues  I have shredded then needed. The smoothness of it warms to my touch. This will carry me through. It gives me the confidence  to hold my head high in an unknown city, helps me remember  to breathe steadily. The connection to you  across the miles: I will hold you safe in my heart and you can hold this heart to remind you. Day one, my tissues remain intact to be used without inhaling paper dust.  On the second day I find myself just enjoying knowing it is there without even touching it. Letting it work by itself. That night I discover it has gone. While folding my clothes in the hotel room I reach into the pocket to find it, but it eludes me. It isn’t on the floor or in the hallway. It isn’t where I sat for dinner and has not been handed in. The next day it is not on the route I used. I scan all the edges and the gutters to check. Someone else must have it now. Must have been amazed to see it  when they looked down. I wonder how many people’s poc

Coleridge spilt hot milk on his foot and unable to walk in the woods he wrote a poem imagining it. I’ve stepped on a plug while attempting to make a cup  of morning tea in boxers. Now I have to hobble around, furniture-walking in pain. Like Coleridge, I sit in the garden  but it’s getting overgrown and the gardener wants £175 to knock some sense into nature, full of dedicated spiders spinning webs and pigeon poop and the roots  of uninvited trees aiming to undermine the foundations of this house. Nature trying to reclaim the terrain once tamed by lawnmowers and beautified with sheers. I guess I’ll go indoors and live as poets mainly do: by proxy. Visualise a stroll in the country. Let nature return the garden to the way it thinks it ought to be. --- John Short lives in Liverpool again after a previous life in southern Europe. When not writing he still persists in trying to play Greek music. He’s appeared recently in Pennine Platform, Flights e-Journal, Foxglove Journal and the Bosphoru