Christopher Cotton, poet

18/06/2026

Thursday 18 – 169/365
Conveyor

Timeless and rolling
The weather conveyor
Bringing the rain and the breeze.

The barley, swift growing
Agriculture forever
To fulfil humanity's needs.

A monoculture of our time
The endless belt of human need
Consumes the landscape line by line.

17/06/2026

Today, I took steps
They needed to go
Twisted and unlevel
As old as the boat

So then I stepped up
Replaced the old steps
Now level and true
Much better than new

17/06/2026

Wednesday 17 – 168/365
Crossing

Ah, the drudgery of the M25
Where far too many
Spend so much of their lives
The traffic, congested, pinched and slow
We forget the waters far below
Or even take pause to register
The architecture that we now traverse
The QE2 bridge, a monument
To blinkered life –
Passing the river, but seldom seen.

16/06/2026

Now fully painted
No longer turquoise, now cream
Puddlefish belongs

😊

16/06/2026

Tuesday 16 – 167/365
Bill & Coo

Well, I called him Bill
And named her, Coo
A very human thing to do
As we love to
Anthropomorphise
And draw parallels
With our own lives
Maybe we see
An ideal here
Of how we'd like
To appear
A purity of love and life
The idealised husband and wife
But birds, you see, are not like us
Their reasons need not mirror ours
Not thoughts of love
They just want to make
Some little doves…

Perhaps it is what we all do?

15/06/2026

I made another video for TikTok and Instagramland... So, thought I'd share it here...

15/06/2026

Monday 15 – 166/365
Large Heath

The commons stretch
A large heathland
And the eyes scan the edges –
Sweep the skies for wildlife grand
A deer, perhaps, a raptor swift
The creatures that give days a lift
But pause, dear traveller, cast your eyes down
For here, the wildlife is quite profound
As a matryoshka, you see,
Upon the large heath dwell
Large Heaths like these.

14/06/2026

Very glad to announce this thin volume, now available on Amazon. A co-production between me and the missus. 🤗

"A poetic exploration of humanity’s recurring patterns: seven virtues, seven sins, seven ages, and more…Rendered with warmth and wit. The Book of Seven gathers Christopher Cotton’s reflective verse and Mandy Jones’s illustrations into a single meditation on the rhythms of our consciousness."

Seven chapters, of seven, seven line poems & seven sonnets... All with illustrations!

What's not to like?

And yes, the cover is deliberately like that 😊

A poetic exploration of humanity’s recurring patterns: seven virtues, seven sins, seven ages, and more…Rendered with warmth and wit. gathers Christopher Cotton’s reflective verse and Mandy Jones’s illustrations into a single meditation on the rhythms of our consciousness.

14/06/2026

Sunday 14 – 165/365 – 24/52
Pack it in…

The spaniel trusts her special nose
And where she leads, the others go
The sniff, she picked up on the land
Led her here, a stream – quite unplanned

And now the molecules disperse
She hunts around, not lost, but worse
The pack follow on, trusting their lead
The game now gone, but cooler feet.

Once wolves, with ruthless hunting guile
Now softened over an evolutionary while
We might mock as ‘clueless’, laugh and grin
But the behaviour seen, is a hunting thing.

13/06/2026

For some reason, I can't get this to post on TikTok so, a bonus for you all on here!