I focused on my poems to blot out unwelcome thoughts, searching out words and stroking them, releasing some back into the wild, taming others. And in that way, the picture in my head that I’d created of the three of them gazing up in awe at the Sagrada Família only surfaced every twenty minutes or so, and I was able to bat it away.

And now I have finished my poems for the day, I look for other distractions, like there, through the window, where a blue moon shines out, and lights up the sky.

It is big and bright and oblivious of how utterly extraordinary it is.

April

Sunday April 1st

Brian Ch.16 vv.1–6

And very early on the first day of the week,

when the sun had risen, he went to the cupboard.

And he said to himself,

‘Who will open the door to this cupboard?’

And looking up, he saw that the door was already open.

And peering inside, he saw a young man sitting inside,

dressed in a white robe, and he was alarmed.

And the man said to him,

‘Do not be alarmed. You seek the chocolate egg.

The one that was here yesterday.

But it is not here.’

And he trembled and was much afraid.

But the man said, ‘Do not be afraid.

For he who seeks the chocolate egg,

Must first seek inside himself.’

Is it wrong to buy yourself three Easter eggs and eat them all in one sitting? I am unsure of the ethics surrounding the whole issue, unschooled as I am in Christian scripture. But, in the absence of a prevailing opinion, that’s what I did, and I shall wait for the theologians to correct me.

Monday April 2nd

I sifted through my poems to figure out which ones to read at this month’s Poetry Club. I considered ‘Emphatic Love’:

You’re outstanding,

Just my type.

I’m filled with admiration.

LET’S CAPITALISE,

if I may be so bold

and you have the inclination.

I read it out loud. It didn’t quite work. Vocally, I was struggling to convey each typeface style as it looked on the page. I tried shouting ‘LET’S CAPITALISE’, using a deeper voice for ‘if I may be so bold’ and then leaning to one side for ‘and you have the inclination’ but I was concerned that the combined effect might simply be to make it look as if I was having a stroke.

I looked for another one. A strong, powerful rhyming poem to put Toby Salt in his place, perhaps. I gave ‘Po-em’ a go:

If your rhyme is stuck and you can’t get by

then you may need the use of a hy-

phen implanted at the end of a line

and soon your poem will sound like a Stein-

way piano in a grand concert hall,

its notes floating in the air like a ball-

oon. So what if the words happen to spill