Anatomy of an Answer

The sound of your senses
Breaks over me
And I drink your waterfall words
With it’s torrent of charcoal images
To the last drop
So others may never know
How you, of cinnamon soul, sell poisoned dreams
Manicured with epidermal perfection
The rag doll fantasy
Of jazz love
To strangers in quiet bars;
Those people unaware of the everyday almanac
The self-help lies written on bruised pages
By every Adonis who felt
Being closer to you
Would suffice

But I watch as you walk on water
Just so to show you can
And laugh
At all those speechless spectators
Now followers of your riptide wisdom
Pledged to play their heartstrings
So you may dance upon their demise
Dressed in funeral face
And be beautiful
Like a child on Christmas
Suffocating
With joy

The wind it whistles
Swallows and sells
Your perfume; twigs of spring broken underfoot
Ashes in the air; this midnight snow,
And still figures, lifeless statues, staring in envy at
The echo of our footsteps
We walk, in discord, my toe timed to your heel
Crude judgement
Capricious
To mock the pedestal born
So frozen in time that a grey hair
Succumbs only once in a millennia

You see, I see
The lights red and yellow
Bleeding fireflies
Resting upon rooftops
In mechanical merriment
Happy at the thought of being happy
And you now know you cannot see more than you know
And thus you cry
At the anomaly of your eye
And I do not have a handkerchief
To spare
For I care no more of your other face
Or the one within
That exists only to dream
The desires
So I leave you at the crossroads
Knowing sooner or later
An Adonis shall pass
Dressed in angel dust
God forbidden

A Lifetime

If all the nights
And all the days
Of my life
Condense
In one epiphany without end
Then friend hear well
That the clock, when it strikes midnight,
Will not be pointing at twelve

Fault of the Flower

Would it pain
She asks
Knowing all too well that it would
But I said No
As if saying thus shall make it so
And watched
Drifting in the lap of the night
Horror’s hand take hold
And smother
The last filaments
Those final particles
Ruminated remnants
Hers and my own
Settle on the dying petals
Of the flower we painted
But forgot to plant
If only we had not been
Part myopic, part colourblind
There would have been gardens to tend
New flowers to sow
Some fragrance to find

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

Nothing to Dream

Image by Atlas Green @unsplash

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…

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

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…

Sleepwalker

All I can think about is dust and dusk
And drowning in a shattered sea
Made of glass
Like a photograph of a falling man
Who is never truly falling
But eternally trapped
With a suspended scream
In an endless dream
Like a dreamless wraith;
Weightless and wordless
As an orphan in death

But sometimes the night is too strong for me to sleep
And the dreams I have are too dark for me to keep
So I become a cobweb on the far wall
Or a three pin plug lost in a socket
Some crumpled paper on the floor
Or a faded face in an old heart shaped locket
A catharsis of cause
Building prisons to be free
An empty ship sailing
An emptier sea

Where there is fog in the air
And yet I stare
Like a blind man blinking
Without thinking at the sky
Wondering in my own vacuum
About the mute purpose of ‘Why’
With voices at the edge of my vision
And footsteps at the back of my mind
I am dreaming of being asleep
And afraid of losing what I cannot find

Thus, in this black and white world
In this sharp and smooth world
In this loud and quiet world
In this bitter and sweet world
In this dull and fragrant world
I shall remain awake
Till a different tomorrow

Hubris

I am just another
Diluted human being
Strained with whetstone thoughts
And rhinestone dream
Tracing the echo of my footsteps
In silent halls
Sans any walls
Was I born to burn
And cling to life
Like cigarette ash
Dying and dying
One breath at a time?
I can hear the puppets talk
At night
Their voice
Made of wood and string
Mirrors of what the violin sing
My tragedy and ivory
A comedy and ebony
My face is falling apart
Like wallpaper
And what’s beneath is no longer me
It’s a different shade
This bruise beneath the bandage
I am alone
And awake
And I know
That I ache
Somewhere deep inside
Where those things hide
Which I keep
So not to weep
At every pain that passes
Like needle through my arm
For I am just another
Diluted human being
Strained with whetstone thoughts
And rhinestone dream

The Ash Blanket

Last night
In dim light
Of half closed fridge
My pale skin
Shone
Like snow on fire
And the blunt desire
To bruise
And break
These filial bonds
Of flesh and bones
Rose, untainted
Like waves on sea
Like a dream disguised as a memory

I was sleeping
Under the cold warmth
Of the ash blanket
Till people appeared
By my bedside
Beings sulphurous
Silhouettes of silver smoke
Which spoke:
‘Come to us
You child of gravity
There is a world beyond the world
Shaped by chaos and clarity
A latticework of lyrics
A synagogue sans any saint
A cosmos acclaimed by cynics
A painting without the paint’
And I alive in tenuous thoughts
Of nevermore and forever
Could only see and be
A shadow of a reflection
Unborn thus free
And so those excelsior people
With ghost hands bore me away
Astride the light they had saved
Back from their leftover days

What I saw thence I cannot say
There is nothing to remember
Between the first dawn of January
And the last night of December
But there are those half dreamt moments
When I seem to know
The truth breathed upon me:
That Soul is what the light don’t show

But last night
In dim light
Of half closed fridge
My pale skin
Shone
Like snow on fire…