THE HUMAN ANVIL

The Silence Along My Spine


It is a dream I do not remember 
But remember all the same
Like those faces I desire 
Without knowing their name
As if in the grand scheme of things
Wherein a million stories unfold 
I am just a chapter 
Of a young man who grew old

These oceans which are open
These skies which are blind
These forests which aren’t silent 
These mountains sans a mind
Are mine to behold and break
To bind and to find
For the similes to be kept never similar 
And metaphors ever one of a kind

You can call my claims childish 
Or let my words make you weep
When you see the vacuum in my voice
Hover upon my lower lip
Where the broken wind balances 
Those desires and despair 
And life in its likeliest form 
Is heartbeat at the end of a hair

If only I could myself see and show 
What I have lost in my pursuit to know 
The allegories of living 
Without wanting to grow
Alas, I have my own 
Reason to bear the blame:
For to the man who shall leave no footprints 
The dust is all the same

Filaments

Have you been silent for so long
That you wondered if you belong 
With the people
Who left
Listening to all that could be heard
Whilst wondering about each word
As if the carcass of it’s meaning 
Will somehow survive
Those ages spent playing dead
Trying to stay alive

If I could be free
From the echoes of other people
And be something more than
A traffic light thought
Winking in the dim halls of their tragic mind
I would prefer being a butterfly
Frozen in ice
That way
My beauty though long lost; euthanised,
Will live still
In regret
That beautiful cancer
Common to all men
Drooling on sad lips of time
Like honey gone bad;
A tasteless parable for
Once a good man now gone mad
From the cold touch of metal people that I meet
With their eyes upon my river back, my other face and feet
With yellow leaves gathering
In a dry rage to drown
My steps towards the hilltop
Within the noise of a dead town
Asking me to surrender
Asking me to still
For being born amidst wrong angels
To die right under heel

On nights like paraffin
When shadows too burn
I curl into concrete
And cease to ache
To be deeply awake
Of all the things I am not
As sought by those carvers
Shaping my form into chess pieces,
Dull black and off white;
A crooked king, a broken queen and two quixotic knights
To be kept alive and conquered
Or cast into the unheard
Age of borrowed sentiment
A proud brick in a ruinous monument
Should I now pray
To whetstones
Wet with sweat wounds of men
Pierced alive
With the worms of their own wisdom
Or within the confines of my
Diluted divinity
Fall prey
To the sinful delight
Of being right
And fall asleep
With this winter as witness
And awake when the dying dream
Is truly dead
And the sound of turning wheels
No longer praise
Destinations remembered along forgotten ways…

Some Lotus Are All Roses

I have spent half my life
Looking how I was wanted to be seen
Powdered to the tip of my nose
Accurately thin
With anklets on my feet
That laughed alone in night
And a locket round my neck
Buried out of sight
I had flowers on my frocks
When I was a lotus bud soft pink
And roses in my hair locks
When I was allowed to think
As if my beauty was just a face
Without a wish or voice
As if being born the way I was
Had something to do with choice
If only I could have told them then
The thoughts I had in my mind
Of my mantelpiece existence
Of being beautiful but kept blind
Alone as my own mirror
Echoing solitude
Days spent dressed for the world to wonder
And nights being ashamed to be nude

In The Heart Of What We Know

The Sea reminds me
Of falling in love
With a shadow
Of a Dove
Who, having slept in flight
At the stroke of midnight
Awoke falling for
Dewdrops of sunlight

But the Sea is sadness
And her roots are all songs
Left by sailors
Too eager to sail
Alone into oblivion
In a hope to live a tale
Written by some abandoned watchtower
Laughing beside the dock

And the Dove, crystalline in her virgin whiteness
Covets the Shore;
With his silence a song
Played by the sand
Unaware that only the lost
Will be found
In the seed of his sound

Thus they remain knitted
The Dove, Sea and Shore
In search of another
Forevermore
So blind in their yearning
Of the love they cannot find
That none waits to see
The one left behind

Mosaics

I wish to speak with myself
The conversation
Neither a monologue nor a soliloquy
But I am afraid I would not allow
My own confessions
This heart knows far too much
Of envy and hate
And much too less
Of chance and fate; those dark mistresses
Pulling and pushing
The tide of each rebirth
Should I excuse myself within reason then
And let the age that passes through each of us
Sunder me to atoms
Annihilating; once and for all
Each kingly cause
And gangrene dream
Festering upon the thin skin of mind;
For the soul in the end is nothing more
Than a shadow aware of it’s own existence.
Or should I in opus thoughts claim
The Midas Touch
And let the pleasure and pain
Every loss and gain, ravage me alive
Into my own version of heaven and hell
Beyond resistance and repercussions
Or time and it’s tale
And dare to be free
For once all of me?
Alas the soul cannot know
Of which the mind did not sow
Thus I remain here
Within this blindness which seek
The mirror left behind;
And await my reflection to speak.

The Men Behind Monuments

In this sudden stillness
A final silence grows
From beneath the dead branches
Enveloping ants and Angels alike

The dry mist of purpose
That once haunted men
Now haunts their monuments
The mindless mortar
Made and remade
For each thought
And every contour
Which seeks in itself
The forever form
That everlasting aspiration
Of becoming a being

But the Promethean promises
Are but promises
Just as the silhouette stems from the shape
So does the shape is rooted in the silhouette
Like a circle trapped
Within its own circumference
Sans a seen beginning
Sans any unseen end

There is a witness
For every arrival
Till no one arrives anymore
And then the fishes are left alone in the desert
To drown in the mirage of memories
The breathing carcass
Reminiscent of living
In an abandoned womb
Never to awake
Never to walk
Like ages unspent
Upon the faces of the rock

In the Light of the Darkness

I believe the night to be beautiful
And polite in its quiet understanding
Of letting people be
Alone with their monsters
That others would never see
For the dark cannot differ
Between the shape and its shadow
Nor cast colours by their causes
Or ask more of friend and less of foe
To night all belong
Both the dreamer and its dreams
The silence of frozen lakes
And the songs of eternal streams
But here in the deep
Within the halls of man’s own mind
The dark reigns ever awake
In hope to one day find
The answer all eyes seek
Yet doubt to ever know;
If the soul is but a seed
That once then shall never grow…

Remains of the Rain

I saw my children standing in the rain
Their faces lined with age and late reason
Watched the abandoned bicycles
And broken seesaws
Being pulled down by the weight of raindrops
Their hands, long and thin, like dead seaweed in the summer wind
Their legs green and gold, like new leaves suddenly old
Seemed painted
In the moist color of quiet
The abandoned delight
Having dissolved
In the lament of the rain
They turn; the motion a sad song
An unfinished lullaby
To look at me with eyes
Half awake but never asleep
As if I with my window earned wisdom
Would know
Why all things grow
Only to die
If life in the very virtue of living
Is a lie
But they know the answer
As well as me
It is better to forget than to believe what we see
In the everyday aftermath
Of the daily demise
Of choices left to chances
And promises made before goodbyes
For in the end all paths
Shall return where they began
Even the oceans with all their eternity
Are but remains of the rain…