Dusting Off

Who here remembers those 'contractual obligation' LPs that some groups used to put out in the 1970s and 1980s when they still owed the record company an album but didn't have any new material? Consider today's Dust blog one of those! 

I haven't had time to write anything new, so I am dusting off a poem that I've shared before. In my defence, I think it's rather good and I doubt I could have come up with anything better even if I'd had the hours to spare and the inspiration.

a dust storm

Here it is:

Dust Never Sleeps

There's a lazy part of me thinks

'let sleeping dust lie'; that by
not over-agitating those motes
but allowing them to softly coat
every domestic surface
like a token powdering of snow
the air will be somehow freer
of pollutants and cleaner to breathe.

Nonsense, of course.
Not just the tenuous justification;
even the original notion is flawed,
for fugitive dust never sleeps.
It's always in motion,
empowered by the very spinning
and spiralling of the universe.

Too soft to register on the Mohs scale,
this quintessence of hair, lint, skin,
spiders' webs and dreams worn thin
shifts constantly across the boards,
aggregates insidiously under beds
into colonies of dust bunnies,
spumes out of hearths
and car exhaust pipes as soot sprites,
marshalls itself in every corner
where decaying empires crumble,
before migrating in plumes
around the earth.

But it doesn't stop there.

Borne upon solar winds
it rides shining on comet tails,
mixes it with the gases of galaxies,
dances along the cosmic highway
to the tune of the Djinn of creation,
truly star dust, on its destined path
to form new worlds over time,
new lands, peoples, homes, hearths,
new lazy domesticities.

It was published in my collection 'From the Imaginarium' (Three Piers Publishing, 2024), copies of which are still available direct from me (as I didn't want to give any more business to Amazon). The collection consists of 120 pages of my poems, many of which have appeared in the Saturday Blog in recent years. 

Email: deadgoodpoets@hotmail.co.uk for further details. I'll happily dust off a copy for you.

Thanks for reading, S ;-)