Venetian blinds slice the Manhattan skyline into bite-sized pieces, each one feeding distant memories of when I lived here.

Postman’s parcel presents
Two digital memories,
Now printed and framed.

Two thousand silent words from home.

Unexpected, unsolicited, unprecedented.
Tactile treasures add to the album of
Family portraits that live in my heart.

Glistening yellow islands –
Ovals shining in their solid-white sea.

So lovely on a fried egg.

Notsomuch when
it’s a toilet rim
that needs
cleaning.

Blissfully quiet in the flat, the occasional car dopplering by to remind me there’s an outside world when I choose to re-engage.

The kittens are growing too fast,
having just made the leap from kitchen table to counter.

Stalking sustenance that doesn’t exist,
I’m torn between searching for the squirt bottle
or sighing in surrender.

Two of them vs. one of me.

At least they can’t type.

Yet.

Dirty jeans and tattered hoodie,
wedges himself alongside me on the Central Line.

Pulls out a pen instead of the penknife I’m expecting.

A pocket-sized notebook, leather-wrapped, about two inches thick.
First empty page about 80% of the way through.

He starts scribbling.

Intently.

Beautiful handwriting on unlined pages,
words more cramped than the rush hour commute.

The mysteries in his book
infinitely more compelling than
the mystery on my Kindle.

Arrive home from the gym,
an ink spot blooming on my jeans.

Try to decode Rorschach’s message on my thigh before stepping into the second shower of the hour.

Two eyes and a smudge of a smirk, chiding —
‘your resolution should have been
no more cheap biros.’

A pink plastic boomerang sleeps on the freezing pavement, waiting for someone to pick it up and send it flying.

Maybe this time they’ll wait for its return.