Spring usually arrives in poems with daffodils and birdsong. In Michael John Pickering's poem it turns up more like an uninvited visitor in an office building, and the language has to scramble to keep up. The title already sets the terms: work is the normal state of things, and spring is the interruption.
The first two stanzas borrow the vocabulary of transport and paperwork for the weather. The main street "takes off on schedule", and "sunway" sounds like a coinage built from "runway" (an inference, but the verb makes it hard to avoid). The street becomes an airfield and the wind a timetable. Then comes "the doorways' draft / is being looked over". A draft is a breeze through a doorway, but it is also a piece of writing waiting to be checked. The asterisked *please wait* reads like a message on a computer screen. Even the air seems to be waiting in a queue.
In the third stanza spring stops being the thing described and becomes a character. It "skulks in every place" like a loiterer, then "even checks bathrooms / which ladies are excused to." The hard, clipped sounds of "skulks", "checks" and "excused" give the lines a sneaky, rattling edge. The phrase "unwritten up" works two ways: spring has not been reported, as a rule-breaker might be "written up", and it has not yet been written, so the poem is chasing something it hasn't caught. The humour comes from the prim, polite phrase "excused to" sitting next to an intruder who respects no privacy. That stranded preposition at the end of the line comes back later.
The fourth stanza gets stranger. A gull, a seabird, is "pioneering the forest", as if it were a settler in new territory. It "fakes an observant newspaper / reading windows", pretending to be a commuter absorbed in the news. The syntax is deliberately slippery, so the reader has to assemble the picture. Then the stanza turns on a pun: "Some characters / don't appear on the screen." Characters can be people or letters, and the line suggests both a missing cast and a glitching display. The poem seems to admit that its own text is losing pieces, and that the world it is reading is as unreliable as the screen.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular metre. The stanzas run three, three, four, four, three lines, and the short lines make the rhythm stop and start like someone glancing around. Stanzas two and three begin in lower case, which gives them the unfinished look of a draft, and punctuation is sparse until full stops arrive at "excused to." and "screen." Enjambment is used to surprise: "Some characters" hangs at a line's end before the sentence swerves.
The final stanza is the payoff. "A sneeze, gathered behind my face" is slow and physical, with the pressure building in the line. Then "shoots out through the branches -" releases it, and the dash feels like a held breath. The branches can be the trees outside, and the sneeze, a natural response to spring, travels through them. The last line, "the instant I'm word-blind to", leaves the sentence hanging on a preposition, echoing "excused to" and ending the poem the way a sneeze ends a thought. "Word-blind" suggests both that the eyes shut at that moment and that language fails to capture it.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it is witty without being a one-line joke. Its central idea is that our perception is now so full of office and screen vocabulary (schedules, drafts, waiting messages, characters, windows) that even spring has to be described in those terms. Yet the season still gets through, by way of the body, in an involuntary moment no draft can hold. The poem doesn't win the argument and doesn't pretend to. Spring stays "unwritten up", and the poem is honest enough to leave it there.