Pizza

An acquaintance is like a crust 
but put a little tomato sauce 
on it and you have formed an 
ordinary friendship
Adding cheese gives you a good
friendship while toppings like
pepperoni, mushrooms, anchovies,
sausages etc. make for a relationship.
You and I are like a pizza with a
topping but its not mushrooms,
pepperoni or even anchovies but
more like extra cheese lots of it
which forms a very dear friendship
I cherish you like our pizza filled
of extra cheese but at times I wonder
how it would be if we were more like
a slice of pepperoni falling on our
extra, extra cheese of pizza at times
its weight busting the crust

Late night lullabies

Hiding here, nestled beneath 
the new leaf that i turned over 
I'm waiting for my example to set 
Like a windmill, my mind spins
the thoughts of happy times
and the memories I'd rather forget
Lingering like late night lullabies
a sweet mesh of sordid cries
Shrinking like shadows in the shade
crumpling like a bed unmade!

Morning

A new day begun, 
No need to turn and run, 
Feel the sun on your face, 
Take you away to another place,
Imagine walking on the shore,
Free of pain forever more,
Keep your mind free,
For things you long to be,
You can make it real friend,
I trust you till the very end,
Just allow the morning light,
To take away the darkness of the night.

Teacher's Day!

Roses are crimson red 

violets are ocean blue
sugars are candy sweet 
so are teachers too
you push us high up
no matter the cost
you gave us hope
when we were lost
Through thick and thin
and when trouble is at sight
you came to our aid
and help us find the light
Let us all celebrate
Now that it is the day
We wish all the teachers

A Happy Teachers' day

The Poet

To be a poet is an incredible gift, 
into the rhyming world you begin to drift. 
Laughing and musing the words that 
you find, taking notes as you travel
the streets of your mind.
Poems for doggies, friends and the season.
Poems to be written you need not have a reason.
You pick up your pen and begin writing away,
all the million of ideas you want to convey.
This is the gift a Poet can share
His words and his thoughts telling the air.
Scooped up and unscrambled to put down on the poze,
to be enjoyed by all people no matter what age. 

It's Not That Kind Of Love

Snuggle down beside me under this tree, 
let the hot sun shine on our toes 
and cool grass tickle with the breeze, 
and intertwine our thoughts
speak of memories and futures yet to come.
Yet no professing will prevail,
feelings are kept secret
afraid to speak of an ultimate bond
that would bring our hearts together as one
with fear of what we have
leaving for eternity....
It's not that kind of love.

Lost But Found

There are two states in this so-called life. 
You are dead or your alive. Somewhere in 
between we are lost. We search for it's 
meaning the price the cost. Traveling all
night and all day. We pray to ourselves we
find the right way. Life is gone now and now
no more. Hope and dreams fall to the floor.
When we are lost we'll need a guide, but
what we'll find is what's truly needed inside.
A partner to help us one so true.
You know you're close when you get a clue.
Life is death and death is life. With out
one there is no other. They work together
like two brothers. So when it's your time
just don't forget, that if you're lost
there's no regrets.

It’s got good age

Antiques is one of the few areas where it is celebrated to be old.  The older the better – the greater the age the more forgiving we become.  You see pieces of furniture going up for sale and the vendor expecting hundreds and hundreds of pounds because it came from the Georgian or early Elizabethan age.  Yet, a similarly knocked up piece on the High Street is being sold for fifty quid and that comes without knocks or scrapes or handles missing. 

The first argument in defence of the OAP of the furniture world is that craftsmen really knew how to make good cupboards.  The mere name “craftsmen” invokes a romantic image of a man with his chisel labouring over a cornice, shaping the perfect curve.  We become wistful and we yearn to stroke the shapes created in the mind’s eye of a genius at work.  Exaggerated tone aside, there is something uniquely pleasing about a well-constructed joint, like a castle turret, inter-locked in perfect symmetry.

Then, there is the idea in the buyer’s mind of the history of the furniture.  It is wonderful to imagine the rooms the furniture has lived in and the hands that have reached into drawers – searching for the little black key to the hidden garden that lives behind the ivy. You can almost hear Thomas Hardy in the corner of the room reciting verse about the hay in the field or the pollen in the trees.  The furniture belongs to a gentler, kinder time and some of its delicacy is transported into our lives.  Then, in times of pure fantasy, we imagine ourselves as heroes, saving some of the past for the future generations...

But, then there is the truth that for the furniture to have lasted so long means it is made by the best hands in the best material and therefore its cost reflects the product.  Gold inlay, rare woods, ivory carving: it is likely that antique furniture is more than just old.  Plus, with inflation and the changing value of money, there is every possibility that these pieces did cost less more then than they do now – it is just that our wealth has increased and our understanding of what money means is different.  Investing in furniture is a highly speculative business and with passing fashions high prices come and go.  Therefore, maybe the value placed on age is merely an illusion we create to justify buying something that has captured our heart.

Still, when we listen to the auctioneer and he says the immortal phrase: “Come on now, this has good age!” we know this is a rallying cry to covet something precious and raise our hand again and again.

Saving the world with style

A few years ago a new verb came on the scene.  To upcycle: to reuse a discarded object in such a way that it is of greater value than it was before.  Upcyclers are people of vision.  Where mere mortals see piles of rubbish, they see the next piece of cutting edge furniture or decoration.  Not only do they sprinkle inspiration over ugly objects but they save the world as they do it.  If only U-man didn’t sound like drain cleaner, you could almost imagine them as superheroes!

Let me take you through some examples.  First, in the back of the garage you might find an old box filled with spanners – rusted maybe, certainly never used.  Throw them away?  Not our intrepid hero!  U-man would carefully clean the rust off (use coca-cola – seriously, it does the trick!) and then bend them in the middle.  Our hero of the rubbish bin would then scatter them with haphazard flair on a wall, screwed in place, and call them coat pegs.  Genius.

Got yourself some old tyres that have no tread to grip the road?  With a whisk of a super-human hand the upcycler would transform them into plant pots, or a garden seat or a coffee table.  The texture of the rubber retained but sprayed in vibrant colours or lifted off the floor with carved timber.

The all-time favourite upcycle moment comes when you look at the humble tennis ball.  Your fast smash serve has rendered the ball useless – no bounce, fluffy, half chewed maybe by the dog.  To upcycle merely takes a pair of scissors and a marker pen.  Cut the ball in half, slice a cross into the surface and draw on a smiley face.  Glue these little yellow faces to the kitchen wall and they become the perfect storage device for your tea towels!

If you spoke to my Gran, which if you do you will always find entertaining, she will tell you this is all posh nonsense.  In her day this was called thrift – you had to reuse items during the war – rationing don’t you know.  She finds this idea of charging the earth for a bit of elbow grease and a smudge of imagination a bit of nonsense.  But, in all honesty, to really upcycle you do need something of that super human vision that only a special few have.

Once upon a time a humble cable reel…

I’m sure you have seen them around building sites: huge reels with wire or chain rolled around them.  Circular wooden slats joined by a cylinder; they are made with second rate wood badly scarred and stained.  Surely, these are no good for anything once the wire or chain has been used up.  Just good for firewood or to be recycled and reused to hold wire or chain?

But the humble cable reel had a dream, a dream to go out into the world and become something bigger, something to be admired, something that the neighbors would peer at and think: wow, what a genius invention.  It didn’t want to be merely recycled, it wanted to be up-cycled!

First, it set forth and transformed into a garden table.  Wood-stained in green and with smaller reels used as stools.  Once weather treated, this garden table can become a feature that will attract attention.  Someone thought to put an ice bucket in the centre hole and now even the beers were cool.

But, then, the cable reel had aspirations to be more.  So, it was transformed into a table that could grace the lounge.  Glossed in white, with the bottom reel transformed into a book shelf.  The centre hole filled with a glass bowl, filled with glass baubles.  The old industrial look is long forgotten in this new, dramatic dress of the quiet cable reel.

The cable reel began to grow in confidence and transformed into an industrial size clock, just one of its disks hung on the wall as a feature in a New York Loft.  The distress of old screws and the stain of its serial number kept to give an authentic sense of the reel’s previous use.

There are thousands of cable reels that have taken the step towards up-cycling.  The moon shape rocking chair… the double height cable reel used as a bar table with a handy shelf half way down for dead glasses… the triple height cable reel used to hold cascading plants in the corner of a conservatory… the children’s play table painted with a road or with the shapes of a farm or the details of a mushroom.

Old rubbish it once was, but now the cable reel is worth something and everyone is looking to the next big project.  This is a true story of up-cycling. Check out Pin-interest if you don’t believe me.