On the Brink of Change

Poems From the Tipping Point and More

Myself and

Moon Arica

have hosted a collaboration this month, The Kaleidacope Challenge, with the aim being to inspire writers and creators to come together to tackle a common topic to see the breath of results that come from the same theme.

January 2025’s theme is The Tipping Point and I took the mantle of being co-host seriously. Because of that I wanted what I wrote for my own entry to be “perfect”, because if the host half arses it, why should anyone else take it seriously?

I mention this because I spent so much time trying to get the following three poems perfect that I might just have made them worse. The law of diminishing returns came in to play and because I wrote them in my notes app, the undo button only goes back so far, so a lot of the lines I liked better are sadly gone. There is most certainly a lesson or two in this.

I have written three pieces of poetry especially for this challenge and whilst I am posting poems I have collected several others I have written so that this has become a compendium of sorts.

Read what you will, I thank you in advance and would love to hear any comments you might have.

If you haven’t checked out the challange and would like to, you can view the launch post here:

Introducing: The Kaleidoscope Project Monthly Challenge

Anyway, on with the show.

---

The First Grain

It begins almost unnoticed,

a single grain of sand,

falls silently onto the scale.

Nothing really changes,

life goes on.

🧱

Then a flicker of guilt,

of hesitation waved away.

“Just this once.”

And it was.

🧱

Until it wasn’t.

🧱

The next grain falls quicker,

then another, and another.

Each one easier to accept

than the last.

🧱

You tell yourself it’s fine,

the pressure, the weight,

the small concessions,

stacked like bricks,

in a wall you didn’t mean to build.

🧱

Your hands, once clean,

Become the tools of compromise.

Now placing bricks,

instead of of falling grains.

🧱

Adding weight.

“This is survival.”

“This is how you win.”

“This is how the world works.”

🧱

Until one day,

the wall becomes a prison.

The choices you made,

now trap you inside.

🧱

The face in the reflection,

shaped by surrender,

is someone you no longer recognise.

The values you thought unbreakable,

now buried beneath the weight

of everything you chose to ignore.

🧱

What would you now give

for a single breath of freedom?

To tear down the wall

And find yourself again.

🧱

The tipping point wasn’t the last grain,

it was the first.

The one that made the rest inevitable.

---

The Hourglass

The hourglass stands, unyielding,

its narrow waist pulling at time.

Grains slip through in quiet procession,

a rhythm older than memory.

⏳

You see the bottom clearly,

a growing weight of moments lived.

Each grain an hour, a choice,

a breath taken and exhaled.

⏳

But the top,

the top is always hidden,

a shroud over the mystery of what remains.

⏳

You strain to see it,

squint through the haze,

and yet it denies you.

How much sand is left?

A fistful? A lifetime?

⏳

It doesn’t matter.

The glass is the same for all,

yet some fill theirs barely an inch,

before the grains fall silent.

⏳

And when the last grain falls,

when the balance finally tips,

what will you leave in its wake?

⏳

Death is the tipping point,

the moment when time runs out,

and all that’s left,

is the weight of how you lived.

---

The Edge of Affection

It’s the small things you notice first,

the way their name becomes a melody,

rolling off your tongue with ease.

🖤

Then you notice the details,

the almost invisible freckles,

how they use a sniff as verbal punctuation,

illustrating their words were chosen with care.

🖤

And then,

there’s the way they laugh,

not at the joke, but at you for laughing too hard.

🖤

Your heart trips over itself,

a clumsy dancer finding rhythm.

🖤

You’re teetering now,

one foot on solid ground,

the other over a canyon of questions:

Do they feel it too?

What happens if they don’t?

What happens if they do?

🖤

It’s in the ache of absence,

the unspoken pull to share every mundane detail,

that your teabag burst,

that the sunset looked like a painting,

just for an excuse to talk to them.

🖤

The tipping point isn’t a single moment.

It’s a series of soft collisions,

a gradual crumbling of walls,

until one day,

you look at them,

and you are home.

🖤

And you wonder,

how long you’ve been falling,

and how far there is left to go.

---

If you enjoyed these I have dabbled in poetry in the past and so I’m going to use this opportunity to gather the ones I like together.

This post has the first poems I wrote as an adult that didn’t have a rude rhyming couplet in them:

From Reluctance to Revelation

And here are some notes where I was inspired to write a poem by other writers, click through to read them in full.

The Invisible Man inspired by

Benjamin Antoine

’s note might be my favourite.

This one about brevity vs depth, inspired by a conversation with

Moon Arica

after quoting her post.

This one inspired by

Faux Firuta

after reminding me it was Poetry Break Day, on looking for the extraordinary in the ordinary.

And this one, which contains the two lines I like most of all from anything I have written so far.

This one I wrote when my son was ill and I thought there was a possibility I may have given him food poisoning! Luckily I didn’t, it was a bug the rest of us got in the week to come!

If you reached then end, thank you, which one is your favourite? Why not link in the comments to the favourite poem you wrote.