Pareidolia
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 that
could be a ring.
The man, a figure
of darkness or of 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 sand castles,
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
Ben Macnair is an
award-winning poet and playwright from Staffordshire in the United Kingdom.
Follow him on Twitter @benamcnair and on Instagram at BenJMacnair