25 July: of Leather & Weather

a journal

10:33
Ode to the Repairman Who Mistook ‘Noon’ for ‘Never’
You said “morning” —
which, in the dialect of hammers,
must translate to:
I’ll arrive when the moon divorces the tides.

11:14
He arrived three hours late,
bearing the holy wrench of redemption.
Fixed the Quooker with a prophet’s calm,
then drank three cups of tea,
as if each sip was a sacrament
to time well wasted.

13:17
There’s a hawk in the tree, watching that cat — the same one that strolled through my house yesterday like it paid the rent. It didn’t. I do. I’ve got the notarised papers to prove it, signed in triplicate and inked.

But that cat moved like a toppled tyrant still expecting tribute, tail held high, gaze flat and imperial.
And the hawk? It perches like a gargoyle above a church, convinced the tree is its sacred right.

But the tree remembers.

It recalls when deeds were written in root-sap, not signatures. When boundaries were drawn in lichen and argued by the slow, shrugging clauses of Section 8, The Lichen Laws.

15:54
The tomatoes burst —
not with juice,
but with confessions.
Vine-ripened vengeance
for soil neglected
and sunlight stolen.

Their skins crackle
with the thumbprint of summer,
still hot
from the crime.

20:41
The socks pair themselves — not by pattern, but by the way the wind knots them together in its rush to leave. Shirts hang like drunkards, heavy with sky, held up only by clothespins and memory. Their seams hum with the echo of old storms.

There’s no thinking, not really. Just the pull of fabric, the fold, the smoothing of one edge against another. A ritual shaped by repetition, not reflection.

Let the towels remember the shape of my hands. Let the wind keep whatever secrets it wants. The laundry smells of everywhere I’ve been today.

It's Still Life