Poetry

LOVE RAPTURE

Love Rapture

my fingers
trace your outline;
every
hardened wave
and liquid curve
the perfect shape
to precisely enclose
my rapturous heart

LIGHT AND DARK

Light and Dark

There might be darkness
where there is no light
but there surely
cannot be me
if there is no you

BACK POCKETS

Something
in my damaged whisper
from within begins to roar
and your secrets
– as I shake –
fly far from where you left them

I watch
vocals shredded
limp and newly sane
as they tumble
– like a silent movie –
into the back pockets
of sweet revenge

1,000

p l e a s e t e a r m e
i n t o a t h o u s a n d p i e c e s

for your silent destruction
will be the womb
that nurtures
my growth

FROZEN

if i were the ice and
you were the sun
i would

drip

til

there was nothing left of me
but a reflection of you
in my puddle
.

HOLOGRAM

you could be
nothing more
than a hologram
and I would still
feel your touch
upon my soul

APPETITE

If I starved myself of food
I would never feel
e m p t y
because someone
with a taste for beauty
made you delicious

SOCIETY

We
rush recklessly forward
in awkward sentient colonies
blinded
by self-preservation
and fragility
consumed
by regret
and indecision and
burdened by lust
(shadowy voyeurs that we are)
and
in unreasonable haste
by misunderstanding.

We awaken

sleeping
powered
(faultlessly)
by emotion and media:
desperate
to get ahead of change
before change changes.

We push
almost silently alone
– forgivably selfish –
and factory bred to be unaware
of what to ignore
drowning ourselves in excuses
and reasons to find them
and
searching for peace
but harbouring nothing
– absolutely nothing –
of the sort.

We survive
possessed by impression
and ruined by greed.

We launch
propelled onward
and up
finding any description that fits
to fit
calling it ‘destiny’
(the time we have left)
oblivious
that time exists
nowhere
but in the moments that we hurry
now
(society, that is)
in droves
to pass on by.

SHUTTERS

shut me out
all you like
but the windows
to your soul remain wide open
and i
the great visionary
see everything contained within
beyond them

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

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.

ABOVE

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

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