I first encountered you in ceilings,
in wallpaper patterns, their imagined shapes;
lying on beds with open books, with time,
with The Planets Suite as background.

You, who watched erstwhile friends
playing and laughing, cycling madly
along lanes of cow parsley and smoke,
through an old peeling window frame.

You are the same person still — alone;
free, yet unheard and misunderstood,
unwilling to think, or bend like the rest,

still staring but from double glazed glass,
thoughts blowing among trees,
within the space of this room

Copyright Francis 2021