It's Still Life

a journal

26 July — The Road Trip Prelude

04:something
The sun arrived first,
prying open the day with gold-tipped fingers.
I gathered dew from the garden — tiny pearls of morning —
then let sleep pull me back like a tide reclaiming shells.

07:30
Bamboo.
Not a sentence — just a word.
A baptism by syllable.
It struck the silence like a monk’s mallet.

The veil thins at dawn.
It lets through what it cannot hold.

07:41
Science calls it hypnopompic —
the moment between sleep and certainty,
when the universe drops a postcard in your skull:
Wish you were here.

Why bamboo?
Maybe the roots are listening,
even where none are planted.

10:29
“How many lotions?” he asks,
as if skin speaks in arithmetic,
as if borders enforce moisturiser limits.

I offer Denmark’s shelves as truce.
He retreats, outmanoeuvred by emollient.

14:20
The suitcases yawn, stuffed with a heatwave.
The car snarls — thunder in its teeth.

Reims waits,
with Hemingway’s ghost and a waiting table
where wine will unspool our tenses —
past, future, all drunk into now.

15:16
Tomatoes blush, untouched.
Cucumbers cool without witness.

The neighbours shrug —
their indifference a quiet riddle:
Why refuse green gold?

Even the soil seems offended.

16:24
The eggs hold court on the counter,
fate tipping between
omelette, fridge-limbo, or pizza.

I let the yolks decide.

Nightfall
Tomorrow, the road will unfurl its tongue.
Tonight, the house rehearses how to miss us.

Pack the bamboo word.
Forget the lotion debate.
May the road taste of
untranslated poetry.

Postscript: We never know which hour becomes memory. Only that it came quietly, unfolded like linen, and left its creases behind.

Imagery and poems/prose ©Misky 2006-2025.

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