First, you must get rid of absolutes:
Those Sundays you had as a kid
When you watched dust oat through sunslats
And into net curtains;
When you were bored,
And had nothing to do.
It was always sunny on a Sunday
And still you were indoors
And mum was Hoovering and you had a headache
And you didn’t want to go back to school
And yet you wouldn’t move off the floor.
Nothing. You picked the beige carpet. Always
Nothing in the floating motes
Nothing through the window.
Nothing on the TV and nothing to do.
You felt like nothing,
Like it was all over you
And it stuck to you
Like sea spray on the billowing curtains.
Mum said, You’re a good for nothing.
You thought, I have to stop looking for nothing.
You thought, I want to see everything.
And so you took up star-gazing,
Bought a cracked telescope from a friend of a friend;
Learned how to put it together
One rainy weekend.
But by the time you got up the hill behind the street
The night sky had clouded over.
You forced the smudged telescope back into the box
And told everyone at school you Saw nothing,
Like you expected,
Slammed your locker shut
And ignored the wretched thing.
Mum was furious.
All that money, and you saw nothing?
You kept your mouth shut,
Thought of the thick black cloud
Like a curtain pulled tight over some mess.
I saw nothing.
But how can you see nothing?
Nothing is not there.
Get rid of absolutes,
Pull back the curtain with care.
See something.
An ivy vine picking through brick
Or the clickety clack of the train track The clunk of my keys as I write Something in everything I think, I type.
There is something beyond nothing
And it sticks to us like whitewash on our fingers.
It spots freshly-painted walls
And dots the sky with stars.
Holly Howitt is a writer and lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, where she leads the MA in Creative Writing. She has written a novella, a collection of micro fictions, and has edited several micro fiction and prose poetry anthologies. She has just completed a new literary novel, Beyond the Moon, and is finishing a collection of poetry.