Poetry

REMEMBER

It is easy to forget that there are no missing pieces;
all that is incomplete is perfectly whole.
Perception lacks nothing
and requires no clarity
to exist in a state of belonging.

See the world for what it gives you,
no matter how finite or abstract the gifts.
Your soul is incomparable to the next –
what you need
and what will be delivered
will always be enough.

RED

These letters spill over our pages, aerosoled
in featherstorms of raised voices and wastepaper thoughts,
needlessly bereft of a cushioned farewell –
disposable, bruised, and de-winged;
the final chapter flailing its arms in a vastness of space
so inspiring
were it not for the rush of an ending approaching too soon.

Rain falls (tears, perhaps)
and our story now rusts itself closed,
finally embalmed within white noise and salty waters, and
blush-coloured fragments of doe-eyed corrosion; red,
as the deafening lips
that decline to author any surrender.

ONLY FOLLOW

This time, I will not allow Karma to hardwire
its endoscopic reign and prevail over my lives
with archaic inflection. Here, there, and
everywhere it attempts to vacillate and coerce,
but I exist to carve it free of our entanglement.

This time, I have purpose, and it is freshly made
by these hands that carry an almighty burden.
This time, I bare fruit, as the saying goes, and the
fruit holds its own seeds that bare further
fruit, and yes, Karma will follow, to be sure,
but this time, it shall no longer lead.

HOPE FULL

Your love is like a winter icecream
and my funeral pyre tongue
knows only to lap it up.
Snow forms in my eyes all the while,
though I left my shutters open to fan the flames.

A warm breeze still dances its way
along the finery of my deepest thoughts,
sidestepping icepick arrows – the
drawbridge of kindling that spills from your throat garden.
Impossible not to swallow,
yet the aftertaste burns like a forest fire;
all the drowning promises now an ocean’d moat for your castle walls.

A drawn bridge might just as well be a goodbye on this canvas,
but the artist within me paints in colour.

UNHEARD

Look at me, my pages are written in gold thread
and bound by the ancient skin of my past.
My library W-A-I-L-S in whispers of conspiracy and truths –
of desire so outcast it finds itself homeless;
a thief
carrying life upon its shelled back
turtling its way between crowds of ears
too muff’d to care or to listen.

Look at me, my story is the grand facade
of my penniless home.
My memories spill like curtains
from the sills of these eyes
into lobeless tunnels where I chase for tails;
drawstrings
that I will to capture for a moment’s audience –
a re-telling no soul might ever stay its ground to hear;
my name on this leathered spine
not enticement enough to be considered.

Look at me, my tounge-pen dribbles with needled letters.
My lips foreplay with top-stitched finery,
archiving yesterdays in self-distress like ageing wine;
time
and all its silence
slipping beneath the presser foot where it cannot be remembered;
where the archives it declines to embroider
fondle themselves alone in knots
to ravish to the last my unheard
and anonymous remains.

TWO PEAS

We had our differences,
and that was the only thing
we could both agree on.

It was almost poetic
the way we left it
without ever really arriving.

DEAD INSIDE

And here we end
word chef-ing mixed media whispers with
tears fought in unison after the war

paperback cuts and empty pages to line our
tongues: a vastness, like stale bread
and un-gardened fence lines.

Here we end our story where
it never began: with hollowed sights
and enemy trenches and
bonbonnieres filled with armories
and dartboard calendars

– riding shotgun with fries to go –

carrying anthrax and V-shaped saliva
in white pockets of revenge

bleating our way
between dichotomy and conflict, where,
in this absence of hope we are just
zombies in a dollar bin –
half the value promised
and reduced to clear.

ENOUGH, AS I AM

Enough, as I am.
All of me, a star made of silver upon a chest of self-love,
sherriffing whole as I can whilst empty –
lapelled to this shirt like a butterfly with cotton wings.

GIVE ME A MOMENT

There is a power in softness, a rough tremor
weeping through every pore without a
scathing sound – the opacity of white noise
calming the soul with feathery pause.

Release it,
tame at last as passing thunder –
its mane, feline, and gentle,
its belly,
turned upward,
eyes closed.

UNBOTTLED

sometimes
your feelings
have people attached to them

PAPER HEART

paper thin
my wordless heart
mistaken origami art
naked – stark – pristine – unfolded
(chapters lost before they start)
my heaving chest its leaving ark
escaping from the boundless dark
in seas of inkless tears to mark
the day you drowned my
paper heart

COUNTLESS

So many words,
fuelled by everything,
filled with nothing.

STOIC

There is nothing,
short of absence

flocked as well in chasm as expanse;
deplete of all and nourishment
in trance with echoed dance,
which,
farmed as wealth for plunder
wears a cold and faceless frieze;

as lingering and as formless,
it, bequeathed in whole disease
whilst bounded by detachment
mirrored, stale
and faint,
and seized

as broken hearts denied repair
to leak, unprized, uneased

EMBERS

As a rule,
I have learnt to fraternise with dreams for gain,
profiting not from indiscretion,
but in the karma sought within such mindful revenge.

Were it possible
to simply matchbox my raw emotion,
the kindling its casket contained
may encourage wild arson –

but perhaps it is less of a burden
to fuck you while I sleep
than to thank you for stoking my fire
while clothed in its flame.

UNKNOWN

She was not brave,
she was necessary.

LAPSE

She recovered her heart
with yesterday sighs
–
and only her tomorrow smile
knew enough about courage
to forgive the delay

PUPPET

Here comes the addiction again, its
whispering lips disguised as passion, the
touch of its hidden hand tap-running
way beyond the weave of my skin
and I
soaked to my core, allow it to wed me:
these buckling knees and paper mâché vows
impressing the addict impaled inside, and
while it listens
eyes necking everything in raised pulse,
it rolls them back with slack-jawed possession
and I move aside
host to a beaten heart that will not commit to stopping
– a puppeteer’d shell in this limbless silence –
running far without a single step
both of us
gambling with a satisfied purr that only I
once combative
now frail
know as loneliness

I HOPE WE MAKE IT

I have no tolerance for hope. Hope survives
on leftovers and unwilling loss: a soiled casket of
emptiness for every six feet of paragraph
it wades behind. Hope stuffs itself between the words
and the meaning, loudly camouflaged by
gambling and cigarettes, declining to altercate but
lathered by a demand to be seen. It shuns you,
but needs you desirable, a voyeurist: a
lap dancing ghost to keep it current.
Hope is a pimp
and you whore yourself to keep it primed,
shedding your skin like a puree of missing passports,
onion tears soaking sensibility after raw
sensibility, riding hope faster than your hips can keep up,
because, and after all,
there has to be a better place than this.
Time is just an expanse to harness,
a mount for crossing –
and you must wager everything,
from soul to sex
to grind it hard to a halt.

SOMETIMES IT TOUCHES

They all write of love.

But true adventure lay between a
frozen boundary of stony words;
between a synchronism
of dishonest friendship
and the cowardice of being alone.

Poetry is animal without tongue or limb
and it bellows wildly in dormant pursuit.
It flowers only to write of
hand grenades that fall like alphabet stars;
pollen, like acid rain.
It flourishes in drama of silent depth
as wound commits to scar.

Sometimes it touches
and perhaps we might call it rape
but all it ever seeks is our forgiveness,
an atoned pardon for not arriving
– for not stampeding us –
any sooner than it had.

WHO ART IN

I might have confessed

were it not for the blanket
of second chances,
assumption oiled at the hinges
by forgiveness –

a permanence arriving
to shuttle me beyond
the gates of my first

Suddenly, it’s stage fright
that trumpets me an usher –

it bleeds me
a carpet call of thin red lines
and I tamper with the packaging
of cause and effect –

two quality seals,
the loose embodiment
of error and apology

I might have confessed

were it not for the bible’d cancer
of my second coming

PERMISSION TO RISE

Am I brave enough yet to emerge
to escape the regret
to dismantle
forget
to demolish the surge of this
plundering ache
to curb and to conquer
and famish the quaking
– this suffering silence –
this violent breath taking

Am I whole enough yet
to prohibit the shaking
snaking my flesh with
its mandible gaping –
and I
an invertebrate
sensing
it
raking
its
claws
like it’s tilling a field in my pause.

– I AM –

I am soul enough, rousing to roar
but will this awareness
alone be the door to implore me to forfeit
renounce and withdraw from
this former attachment
to lapse while I stall
while in fragments
I catch myself falling
before
I submit to this whiplash of
“worth less” and war

mauling through self–harm
rejecting my core

Perhaps in my rapture my courage will capture
the thrill of detaching
unlatching
resolving
forgiving myself for my lack of evolving
for dressing tornadoes I’d wade in
– dissolving –
while anchored by nought but
the grief I was holding
by swallowing pain
– almost framing each frame –
as the slower the memories
the faster they came and the longer they’d last
it would tighten their hold
and the closer they’d weave they would blindfold
and frighten
and once I was frozen and broken
– eyes widened –
they’d leave

Perhaps fate will gift me a shift
from my history to bask in my victory
and mask my past injuries
and race to new mysteries
and questions, unanswered
and answers, un–asked
but desperately fancied
as I take on this task to have finally been caste
to have grown from my hate
to have flown past a place
where my purpose was faceless
to race to a moment I have hungered to taste
in a time I had dreamt of
instead of erased –

to a piece of the peace I deserve
and a truth to embrace

Will the aching forsake me at last
and the healing re–take me
its journey as vast
as the path it will trace to re–shape me
I ask
and will it profess to regress to
a time I could heave less
bereaved less
and
survive long enough to emerge
at my boldest and best?

The answer is ‘yes’

IN CROWDS OF PANTOMIME

When it burns, the inferno
turns you into something not
quite finished and not yet
transformed and only
you
know your limits while the world
sits by and waits for its
‘pièce de résistance’ to rise from the
rebirth it gave you
like it had handed you first prize
when you had not yet picked
the numbers.

Your monster wears its party fangs
without asking first:
the current climate
calling for partial nudity and
cluster fucks with strangers who
somehow
drop their unweaned smiles
like crumbs inside the dirty of your lap –
and on and on it goes,
slave
to martyr
to fall upon
deafened eyes and those blind
of learning.

It burns, this puppetry,
in crowds of pantomime,
grappling
for the melting of your heart;
its wax upon the crutches of
every
mistake
you have
chiselled from your chest to bury alone.
It burns, and
you know only how to self-combust and welcome death
for you fear it will one day leave without you –
and where would you run to
without those karmic ties to reign you in
or pull you back
or weave themselves inside to commandeer you.

Beneath this sweltering burst of oppression,
soiled and seeded, and
planted by the ankles in concrete shoes;
beneath the heatwave that rides you like you need an awakening;
beneath you – the hotplate – the hot knife – the hotel
embellished with red-black highways,
and roads of bloodshot weariness
raining from your eyes,

you, in party fangs
and crawling upon dusty knees
sear
all over,
in and out
– Karma’s glove –
for anywhere else
but the squalor of this doomed acceptance.

A GLASS HALF FULL

I am a glass half full of
everything
I feel seems to swallow me
instead of I
it
is not a smooth rush
down my open
mouth
the words that hurt me again
in ways you will never
understand
what you say before
you open your lips to
speak
through your eyes like I am
trying to do in my
silence
comes in thin spaces
between what you say and what I
don’t
know why it needs to be so complicated
when all I feel is
emptiness
fills me like a glass half full of
impotency
rides you easier than I ever could.

ASTEROID

I expect too much of time
in the little I have left.
I am a dinosaur,
and it,
the pummeling to come.

I wait for its whoosh to confound me;
the bending skyward of my neck;
the brevity of my innocence;
my un-vocal surrender.

A wounded animal,
contorted by such clarity,
confronted
by my lack of ease
as I awkwardly live to expire.

TREASURERS, WE

There we were
for a moment
awash with candy’d rainbows that shed
spun-sugar silk
to dress this call for change

It’s a pity
this entree tasted like a sundae of fever and fable

Treasurers, we, to nought, now
but wingless poetry;
of letters, silent
and honest
we’d declined to share

SHOW UP

Show up
with pieces of my name at your chest
and I will promise you
that all its letters
in any order
will write you through this fire
melting both our hearts

METAMORPHOSIS

punishment
in the language of hope
scorching its way with splintered paddles
down to the roughs of my hungry feet
and teaching me
equally
of steadfastness and self-love
through the blanketing challenges of escape

NO EXIT

I fight rough
– healing you –
to turn truth
into your new home

Sharp edges
for the smoky silence
of a rear-view mirror

TASTE

I breathe you in
— surrender —
and my lungs fill with
flavours unknown
but for the soft sounds
I make of them
as they arrive

RELINQUISH

By and by,
the past, it passes –
date–raping purpose
through peering glasses:
pregnant pauses never lasting

Every vanished thrill
restarting futures
on a windowed sill,
shadows casting mimes
in stills
as long will live the passion
– hungry –
fuelling moments full to brim

Just as quick, another morning
dawning – time to pass
and kill; murder
just another constant,
one more loss on
sudden whim as
whereupon man solders on
to play the night another song
for day by day we carry on
to pass another past
along.