Poetry

SUPPORT

I
despite my distance
refuse to let you drift alone
morphing
in my own subtle way
into the very raft
that keeps you dry

DESTINY

Without your eyes
to fall into
and your mouth
for me to desire
this soul
would still
find a way
– like a compass –
into your center
and you would
still
find a way
like a magnet
into my dreams.

I KNEW

I Knew

i knew
that i would let you
swallow me whole

so i pretended
not to notice
and enjoyed
you watching

JIGSAW

part of me
is lost
in a jigsaw puzzle
where the image
i am putting together
is looking more
and more
like you

LESS ONE

Every mistake you make
is one I will own
with you
because
every one I own
is one less
you shoulder
without me.

HAD

You had me
at ‘yes’
–
and I didn’t even know
I was asking

CAUGHT

you captured me
with nothing
but your very
existence
and i
didn’t even notice
i was escaping
mine.

MAD

each of us
as insane
as the other
– you, more so than I –
we both repeat
at once

THE CHEAT

I may believe
that you
and I
would be loyal
but
in truth
your job
is to
prove me wrong

COMMUNICATE

both high
– desirous –
in the space
between
our connection

waiting
with a nervous dream
for the red line
to be crossed

NIGHT LIFE

somewhere
beyond the outskirts of my dreams
a Sentry
distant
– marking time –
watches as my soul escapes
eloping while I sleep
– awakened –
with my fictional
and very real
desires

SECURITY BEHIND INSECURITY

Instead of foraging around making connections
with cables and wireless systems that
bluetooth and sync their way
into our pocket technologies
and portable screens

(tablets of which we self-prescribe
and regulate through overdose
and comatose seedlings of stillness
and waking dreams)

why, instead
don’t we fool around
making connections
with others of like mind and brainwaves
instead of radio waves and
the mastered minds of computer waves
and lift an arm and
really wave
beyond our windows to
real people
in real time
rather than peeping
like a holographic Tom through
tabs and browsing windows,
multi-tasking time in a state of mime
like it’s about to expire

(like the wireless wires will break)

and all that we’ll have is
all we can physically take
from this moment awake we call ‘life’
– a mistake.

What else is left now
in this vegetative
one man / one woman state
where we live to close our eyes
and shut our minds and wait for
the modem-router to re-dial and
get our avatar back online and
our friends back into our
multi-dimensional realer-than-time
time?

Pseudonyms solving identity changes
emerge without birth with designer non-faces,
as
now that we no longer need imperfection
or meaning or privacy
or even perception
we alter ourselves to impress our connections,
to bond in the moment like a drug we’re ingesting
while hiding as one almost fearing detection,
and tip-toeing straight past
concern or reflection

– invisible firewalls at our protection.

Where IS the affection we actually share
in this digital age
that we turn off so rarely?
This internet craze has become a new God
that we dial to be saved far more often than not
while we race without feet
over networks in haste
with the spambots and viruses
to infect and defile us
– and not without mention
the ads, and our logins, and
passwords impassable if ever forgotten.

And yet
we grow fonder
of pics and of pixels and
texts of expression
(the emojis by which we select our impression)
– and all of it
coded to task like an errand:
the reality of which we could lose in a second

SOLDIER

The Man who never brought hell home
was wise beyond his years.
He suffered long
but lived it loud
imprisoned by his fears –
and those were thus:
that those before him
came and went
with nothing left but
pain and name
and more of same
who went and came
from seed in soil
to root and stem,
to fallen branches, time again:
a family tree to fuel the flames
on cold and lonely nights.

Embodied by the coat of arms he wore,
this Last to hold his name,
he swore,
– in vain, perhaps –
to stand at ease no more.

The Man who never brought hell home
encased himself in spite and spirits:
ghosts of generations gone,
encroaching deep within.
He sought for answers,
fought for reasons,
questioned why his bloodline grew
to fall and rise
and curse and kill
with secret lies
and stolen rights
and ties he could not sight.

The Man who never brought hell home
had died
the moment he arrived
– or so he thought –
he always said,
with eyes in search of something else . . .
perhaps that love that once he’d felt,
despite the years of crime he lead.
And what is left, again, but holes
to fill with buried woes and
broken war-like games and
shattered dreams
and darker still yet, nothing.
Nothing, as it always seems.

Not a sliver shall him by, it pass,
of hope,
of love,
of peace –
not until the very last,
this Man who never brought hell home.

And so, this Man, with blind belief
declared his story would be brief,
atoning for the sins he cast
in other’s lives
in years that passed,
and spent his days in self destruction,
free from want, control, and need,
biding time with bated breath
like men, before, who longed for death,
entrained in mind and soul,
until one day,
the hell that never came,
came whole.

For every man,
and son of man that once there was,
who sharpened knives
and counted tools
and cleaned his guns,
and polished pride, his moral compass
by his side,
who now lives to wake and wakes to die,
repelling faith, repelling truth, and
cussing lies –
this Man has died.

MUCH TO MY DESPAIR

this ice cream love
– sweet –
and filled with cold desire

drips

through the hole
in my sugared cone

the very thing that
once had held my love within
is now partaking
in the letting go
of its own contents

HONEYBEE AND FLOWER

Opening my soul,
the petals of its
soft, pink, silken flesh
become a mirror,
beckoning all and any
to the gateway of my swollen, naked heart.

And oh,
how does the honeybee suckle,
I remember,
approaching with a mask of raw intention,
innocent, but for the ravaging purpose
it knows only, yet again, to – here – ensue

. . . and so it does.

My blushing fortress sways and tempts:
a feathered
floral
nudity, as,
in you float,
oh honeybee,
in pregnant pause
to share my perfumed freedom
as I blossom
with your tongue inside my lap.

Crush me not, but leave me torn
– yet, just as gentle.

Your organic levitation swells my fancy.

HALF WRITTEN

burning
these eyes
fear what I see

– incomplete poetry –

a part of you
unfinished
yet alive
becomes lost again

half written
this frankenesque fate
seals your mystery

locked within
a writer’s typed notes
– and unaware –
I sense you feel
the end
once more
encroaching

ABOVE

Clouds drift atop the stimulus of life
– mindlessly numb voyeurs –
blindly present
yet
vaporously absent from blame

WOKEN

I swam in the dream
that drowned me
– once –
but I swallowed its soul
and floated away

THE RIDE

Faced again with options,
– I am –
thumb sore,
from hitching a ride
to any direction
I’m taken:
partial nudity
framing the high risk
beneath these threads –
allowing nothing
but neglect
to course through these veins,
closer than a man’s knife.

Nothing but dis-ease
can stain like old graffiti:
stubborn and unwelcome,
and impossible to wash away.

It beckons to take my life
– this weed that chokes me –
but I know better than that:
it’s already gone.
What little of me remains
is always outside searching.

– red lights –

– red eyes –

– bloodied hope –

So I’ll take their word
– these men who stop to ogle –
and their banter,
and I’ll take the seat they offer
while I push their oily hands away,
just to sink back
for a moment
into the stubborn stench
of leathered history –
into the cosy
but broken seats
of the ride I’m taking now
– not the ride of my life,
but the pick-up
to another stop.

And as I sleep with eyes wide
and ears open
I search within

for freedom and peace

– an end to it all –

But it’s their cigarettes and coffee
that keep me breathing.

A TIMELESS WAIT IN MADNESS

Life’s sweet promise coats me like a varnish
wrapping my sticky desires
in an airless, human
skin-tight vault

Fatally sealed, this
timeless wait in madness, this
paused intent of craftsmanship
–
one un-stepped frozen foot ahead
–
contains me like a parasite and
I, far from drowning
hibernate within

Eons of time bereft of touch
pass me (imprisoned) by
but
wide awake, alone, insane
inside this vacuumed husk, I
quench my heart
– reflection –
while my hunger
(still unfed)
provides the popcorn
and the trailers
to the feature film
that scratches at my
fading, timeless
statuesque, and stunted soul

I wait (believing)
baited and entombed
for the next civilisation to unbury me
and
recreate a reason for my being here
that parallels an excuse
for their own

WRITER STIMULUS

Your perfect lips
speak volumes,

an outline of their own

creating a story
of a thousand possibilities
straight from the mouth
of the beast,
the hidden tongue
of the devil,
and the mind
(digesting this author)

– the mind –

of
a
GOD

Your eternally paged fiction
stands alone,
(unseating its writer)
awaiting more images

– square jaw, naked mouth –

– bedroom lips –

to express the next chapter
of my printed vision
processed by a
hungry and
adulterous
need.

LIQUID LOVE

some of us
melt like snow
on a warm morning

others freeze

at the chance of love

PRISON

say no again
and you will build this love
with weakened walls
– a prison –
standing only to fall
as kindling
for slow revenge

RUSH

The school girls
with the messiest hair
are my daughters

The ones with the
fallen socks
and the untucked shirts

So concerned are they
with getting there
so they can come home later

That nothing but
Armageddon
can stop them in their tracks

MISSING ME

A little birdy told me
that beneath your eyes
you house a nest
of promise
filled with eggs
of fortune
that contain your golden secrets;

but that they will never hatch
without the heat of a woman’s touch.

MY OWN

belittle me
and like a singularity
I will become dense
and invisible
and drop from your space

i will gravitate
inside my own world
(my owned world)
– my mass, not yours –
and use my volume
to prove your theory
is full of holes

– black holes –

that only carry purpose
like a stain
that cannot be washed
from its own fabric

TO WANT ONLY SOME OF IT ALL

The sometimes
of the most of my always
ensnares me
in its often trap
and though by I pass
in silence
I cannot blind
the all seeing knower
that fondles me
with sweet maybe impressions
and tickles my soul
with partial bliss
and otherworldly
here not there
allowable temptations
that only so far
have shaken my distant senses
with semi-translucent delirium
more often than not ever
but much more than
an inexcusable
not quite nearly enough!