I wake to find the sun still hid away,
    And wonder where. Begin to search it out.
It’s simultaneously both night and day.
    Question: how are the laws of physics flouted?
    It surely must be somewhere hereabouts!
This darkness grips me, makes me feel entombed,
And isolated, life sucked from the room.

My shrill alarm sounds like a countdown’s end,
    Is this some childish game of hide and seek?
This daily madness drives me round the bend,
    ‘I’m coming!’ I cry, as if I now compete,
    And bleary eyed I stumble, weary feet,
Into the bathroom where I pull the light.
Insipid! This won’t set the night to flight…

Still adrift I sit behind the wheel.
    Ignition turned then mirrors checked and drive,
Into the line of mo(u)rning cars that feel
    Deadened, numb, yes anything but alive,
    Striving to find some way we might survive.
Grumbling that our work is never done, we
Feel the lie that’s sung, ‘here comes the sun’.

I’ve been dipping into Stephen Fry’s ‘The Ode Less Travelled‘ again, a great introduction to the nature of poetry, particularly metre, form and rhyme. Rhyme is something I have generally avoided, in my hands it becomes something twee and distracting, but he’s persuaded me to give it another go. Here’s an offering in rhyme royal form. It was dark this morning when my wife went to work…
(09.01.23)

© Ben Quant 2023