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December 01 2025
The Man Who Walks Through Smoke

Lines on adversity, trauma, resilience and healing. Plus a tribute to jazz legend John Coltrane. Poems by Joseph Hickman and Chris Bird

The Man Who Walks Through Smoke
by Joseph Hickman

He was born beneath a roof that forgot how to sing,
its rafters sagging with unshed rain.
Silence raised him –
a cold nurse with splintered hands –
and fed him shadows for supper.

His childhood was a locked orchard;
the trees bore fruit,
but every apple bruised itself in falling.
Touch became a language of ghosts,
and trust was a candle trembling in the wind.

In his teenage years he chased the reflection
of warmth in other faces,
but love, for him, was always a mirage:
a well that turned to dust
as soon as he knelt to drink.
He kissed like a drowning man clutching mirrors,
cutting his lips on the need to be seen.

At 18 he opened his veins to the night.
Liquor and powder wrote hymns
where his blood should have been.
He danced with strangers
in the hollow between heartbeat and oblivion,
each one-night stand a prayer
to forget the name he carried.

Now, in the dim hour between yesterday and never,
he sits among his ruins.
A man built from echoes,
his reflection fractured into a thousand silvers.
Identity drifts through him
like smoke through the ribs of a broken house.

He asks the dark, “Is there still light in me?”
and somewhere, deep within,
a seed: small, stubborn,
still dreaming of green,
turns over beneath the ash.

For even scorched earth remembers
the shape of what once bloomed.
And dawn, though late,
always finds the courage
to touch the burnt horizon.

One morning,
he finds a feather caught on his windowsill –
white, soft, trembling
as if it, too, had survived a storm.
He does not know why he keeps it,
only that it hums
with something like forgiveness.

Days stretch into cautious hours.
He learns to breathe
without apology.
The bottle gathers dust,
its mouth a mute witness
to the quiet work of healing.

In the mirror,
his eyes begin to thaw.
Ice melting into water,
water remembering the sea.

He walks beneath trees again,
hearing their whispers:
“You are not your scars.”
Their leaves fall gently on his shoulders,
like hands that do not want to hurt.

He does not yet call it redemption.
He calls it trying.
He calls it waking up without flinching.

And in time,
when the night presses close,
he no longer hides.
He lights a single match,
holds it in his palm,
and watches how even the smallest flame
makes the darkness
step back.

John Coltrane
by Chris Bird

Midnight glimpses round,
Smoking down,
Dripping from his skin comes the shade,
The cigarette haloes blow away,
And the saxophone glistens,
Like a sharp smile of joy.

He breathes,
Cool as dusk, soft as ashes,
Blowing crystal, glinting, scolding,
Streaming against drumbeat pour.

New night sky colours flowing,
Riot blossom of light,
Scattering jade and turquoise.

And the man,
Like a statue in spellbound blue,
Just looks,
Silent and distant,
As the cloudy moon.

< A load of bother Scratch that >
February – March 2026 : Progress

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