–

THE SOUND OF SIRENS

The world is round, the world is round.
Grip a hold, secure yourself.
Flowers bloom in these bones.
A bedding of chalk and soul.
Humming on this planet.
Ringing in the ears.
A silence of absence.
You, no longer in the atmosphere.
Broken, that miracle was not enough.
Heaving as we go, waiting for the buildings to crumble.
For the moon to fall.
Surely, this is the apocalypse.
This noise, this pain.
Must be the end of the world?
Cut out the plants from my skin.
The decay from my eyes.
That taste of death from a last kiss.
And set alight to this terrain.
Where sirens only indicate another wave of chaos.
As I crawl through my current calamity.

DUSTY COMETS

Lost compass, sliding off a map.
The ends of the world, as the world ends.
Jettisoning everything of surplus.
Keeping only what is sacred.
What is precious.
I leave a trail, across the sky like a distant dream.
Exploded into nothing, vanished as the night rolls over.
Yet locked in the DNA that rains down.
Are memories and fragments of this soul.
Particles of god and echoes of love.
Like you I am no longer.
And without you, I am nothing once more.

HYPERVENTILATE

The twitch of an eyelid.
I could hear it in your veins.
Powdered desperation to exonerate.
To manifest.
Disintegrate.
Lacquer up the wings to make the exit harder.
Push on towards the climb.
I hold your hand and whisper.
The only way out, is through.
Breathing stutters, shifts and surges.
Gaining momentum for ascending the gates of heaven.
Crashing through walls put in place by god.
Take the air in my lungs and strength in my blood.
The words that swirl in my stomach.
Burn them all for fuel, and escape.
Don’t look back and don’t forget us.
Shake off the coils of concern.
This is an expected state of hyperventilation.
Dislodged dyspnea.
A panic and a consequence to this sudden departure.
Rush.Fear.Dread.
A reduced state of being, seeing you leave.

FALLING BACK DOWN TO EARTH

Opening eyes that weigh like destiny.
The light snaking across my pupils.
Dilated and deliberate.
Here again, in the now.
Shaking the dream which clings like reality.
A sudden realisation that it is.
Where have you gone?
Ghost-covered and longing.
Needing you more than ever.
I cup your spirit into my arms.
Breathing empty air and memories that I pluck from yesterday.
Maybe longer back, when the drugs hadn’t taken hold.
You, smiling at everything.
Lost in nothing, yet all so important.
We peel you back onto our lives.
Hoping you transfer.
Coat and remain, like precious DNA.
Hoping, against hope, that you can stay.

OBLIVION

Everything arranged, just fades away.
Washed by a black sea.
The shiver into nothingness.
While eyes above watch.
Grief picks its place.
Planting rotten flowers that scratch the eyes.
I Move away from everything I knew.
Death coming in with the tide.
Staining my ankles and heart.
Taking what is most precious out with its salty inhale.
Sorrow settles in.
Showing up, now hope has lost its way.

SHADOWS ON YOUR EYELIDS

Scraping away the amnesia.
The skim of a time longed to be forgotten.
Yet not a distant past, but a painful present.
Gifting nothing but sorrow.
The lights have begun to fade.
Twinkling and dimming as if being submerged.
The chalky depths capture you now.
Tiptoeing you towards your apocalypse.
Towards our regret and loss.
If only we could drown the weight around you.
That poor thing that sinks in teeth as fragile as salvation.
Weak as the gap between us now.
Yet these acts of love now pepper the sky.
Like dying stars that fill your eyes.
Shuttering and flashing,
Remembering a time when you were winning.
Tomorrow looms now like the Nullarbor.
Endless and lonely, threatening such unknown.
It sets into your bones and destroys your reason.
A tsunami to wash away dust and life.
The hand now clasps for hope and healing.
Pulling away just empty feathers.

HOPE UNDER SKIN

What process is this?
Little daggers of ice, piercing a beating heart.
Oh mother Mary won’t you help.
Sweep away the pain and apocalypse.
Drive out the devil and chalky residue of consequence.
Time collects now, not in a bottle.
But in the carboard bowls, slightly full.
Mostly struggling.
Preparing for the collapse.
We pray it all away, but still it flows.
Coming in with the tide and with trauma.
Maybe we need holy water.
To wash.
To burn.
Stinging the sins and the scene away.
Raising our Lazarus once more.

GOVERN

You wrapped me up in stars.
When I wanted to slip into the dark.
To dissolve into an abyss.
You smack me with diamonds.
Making sure they cut and imbed.
A constant constellation to light my path.
You pour gold into my veins.
When I wish to drift away.
And teether me to this material realm.
Showing my what beauty I surround.

FOREVER MIGHT NEVER COME

Somewhere someone is dying.
A last word stuttering from lips.
Visions imprint on eyelids.
Forever.
The tins of the past stack up.
Filling space in your mind as they rust.
Tumbling from the attic like heavy Christmas decorations.
Some shiny, others cut where the edges hurt still.
Somewhere a soul is born.
Breathing it’s first breath as a mother shivers.
All this while the earths spins in continuum.
Caring not for the specs aboard.
Now, that is all that matters.
The imprints of gold beneath your feet.
As you make your own journey.
A destination in mind.
A port of departure behind.
But now, as the wind blows through you like a ghost.
And your skin turns towards the sun like a plant.
Now is what truly matters.
Who knows when the world will stop spinning.
Or when we cartwheel off into space and nothingness.

Lazarus

The memories had settled, like a layer of dust.
The sediment of life.
All quiet, only snow making a descent to disturb the spirit.
Time washing their feet.
Soaking it in like a golden virus.
Lining the lungs with platinum.
So easy to remain unmoved.
To close the eyes and drift away.
For the birds to lift the life out through the window.
But it was there still.
The pebble in the mind.
The needle in the side.
A notion of incomplete.
A spot of milk on the sideboard of the soul.
The eyelids flutter dustily.
The mouth parts slowly like the red sea.
A miracle come in to being, of a body that moves with hope.
Of a yearning to do, what it still does not know.
Lifting out of the dream.
To do what it was put here to do.
A completion, before it moves on.
And knows what it does not yet know.

HORRIBLY PERFECT

Tasting the warm breath.
Tickling the skin beneath.
God kissing you into death.
Taken, over thirty times the moon dying.
Thirty-one suns burning into your eyes.

I’ll be your winter.
Chilling the bones that crumble and collapse.
And I’ll always be yours.
Silently, as the bird inside stops beating.
Suddenly, only feathers and space.

FIRMAMENT

There is no difference in what is happening here.
As above, so below.
You catch the sparkle, your reflection off a million diamonds.
Twinkling in the heavens.
Radiating your truth.
Do you blur with movement, or by the lies that cough up like dust.
I was once unsettled.
Once covered with earth.
Repositioned by the hand of fate to a terrible place.
The blood in the diamond that knew my face.
Yet it is more precious now, the life I hold in my hands.
Why ask the sun not to shine.
For the moon to course through the years.
You ask for simple but wishes.
Which disrespect God who has it all planned.
Unstitch the heavens for me.
Open up your veins for him.
All the same yet convinced in its difference.
If you want to bring the heaven and the stars down to earth.
You must rise at least to meet them.

HOPE AGAINST HOPE

The blood settles, as if time holds its breath.
Cupped in a hush, frightened to flow.
The rest awaits.
A shuffle in the mind.
The attic of the body, like a restless Dorian Gray.
When the eyes reveal the true horror of the ordinary.
A Day, much like yesterday.
Comfort swallows, the needed search forever longing.
Secure and safe.
How else do we move, if not shaken from the spot.
The mountain beckons, a summit that seems never conquerable.
A defeatist voice that echoes in your ears.
Humming its way through your muscles, reversed intent.
Until a swing of the pendulum, a signal fire of age.
Of time wasted, sand spilling from your hands.
Dust in the blood.
Your time is now, it was actually then.
We enjoy the blessing every day, to start again.

SALVUS ERIT

A coldness there.
Darkness, placing a hand on my skin.
These eyes close, transportation to a familiar place.
Touching me, the lonely.
Wanting to make an everlasting connection.
It swamps my lungs, and cradles me in arms of hollow bones.
Comfort in this awful place.
A room where I chose what fits, what goes where.
The ghosts mingle and float with intent.
Then a call, a gentle pull.
Like a vein slipping across a bone in motion.
The sounds of the desert, a shofar calling.
It’s triumphant song barrelling over my eyes.
Calling me like a flame.
God needn’t reside in the hand that pulled me out.
Nor in the eyes of the person offering hope.
For they are the same, they are myself.
Smiling and pulling on the little red thread.
Lighting the way forward with tiny sparks.
Saving me from the depths once more.

THE GIRL WITH THE TORN GARDEN

It hurt to breathe in.
The cuts in her lungs, little origami slices.
Stung and hung like bloody stars against the grey sky.
To weep, was to be weak.
The voice echoed from a childhood memory.
Tangled in the box of her mind like Christmas decorations.
The machine whirled into robotic life.
Its own circadian rhythm forcing all to breathe in and out in unison.
Rings banished, symbols of love and connection threatened.
No god here.
Empty souls shuffled into pale suits.
And children forbidden to smile.
The anaesthetic now killing everything inside.
Feelings of escape being buried alive.
She came across a memory, shiny like the Christmas star.
Dusty too after much forgetting.
Falling from the oak tree, while the summer sun glistened it’s caramel.
A thump, and pain. That reaching for breath that struggled to come.
The world dancing, blurred into psychotropic haze.
Until she burst through the surface of pain, and gulped fresh air.
The gold was in the overcoming, and the gentle rub on her back.
Spreading like ivy.
From someone who had already gone.
Swallowing fresh razors she breathed in once more.
Hugging that memory.
Strength coursing through her bloodstream to her lion heart.
Meeting them again, or making them proud.
The fork before her was beautiful and beckoning.

A ONCE BEFORE AND YET TO BE

Words were meaningless then.
Arrows and honey lost in the storm.
Traveling so far, just to find a home.
I gave everything I had away.
With broken bones I crawled.
Like octopi coming out of the sea.
A starfish, growing back.
My world is not littered with diamonds.
Those words, once so meaningless, do not sparkle still.
But they do feather my nest.
A poet, a teller of stories.
Some long, others gone.
But sadly, and shockingly.
My own tale of loss and redemption.
Yet it echoes deeply into my other worlds.
And rings out in a life yet lived.

BULLY

Never ready, aching like a muscle in the heat.
Tired and silent, hoping for it to pass on by.
To float through like dreams of change.
Holding my breath.
Catching my heart.
It always comes, they always do.
Those feelings of love that split my cells.
Love. Love. Love.
Even when solitary sense surrounds.
It doubles down.
Attacking where I’m weakest.
You know how to make me feel.
Punching the darkness out of me.
Leaving halos around my heart.
You come on with your disease.
Spreading like an immunity that I will never possess.
Tasting the trauma of before, I hesitate to move.
Watching while the soul dances the dance.
Bones that break with ease, cannot protect a heart that bleeds.
For you, seep on through.
Forcing me to love you once more.

BLACK BOX

The block box held a human heart.
Clothed in bone and skin.
And within, through poked out holes.
It watched the world come and go.
Locked away for their own safety.
Hidden from sight to save the pain.
For love had ruined him time and again.
Threatening and early grave.
It hides a world you would not want.
Nor a state you would ever wish to be.
The eyes, maddened, would bore a hole.
The heart, saddened, choked off from love.
Source of its life.
The black box sits in the corner.
The insides slowly rotting.
But the mind, never forgotting.
The one that put him there to begin with.
And the one who would join him there in the end.

FALLING ON A BRUISE

Engulfed in sweet delicious fires.
The needling and licking of moments in time.
Spread out and traversing dimensions.
That lead me ever closer to home.
It shook us momentarily.
A pain that marched along the spine.
Crumbling each vertebrae.
Making its way to the heart.
A fall for the nine thousandth time.
Crumbling the scabs not yet healed.
A rise, for the nine thousand and one.
The bruise, disappearing in the dark that surrounds.
It all felt distant.
Told perhaps, by someone else.
Yet lonely births space and freedom.
And the marshes and reeds whispered an awakening.
The pain, transformed to knowledge.
The bruise, fading in light of a new dawn.

BEST NOT TO THINK ABOUT IT

[You can close your eyes] He said this as the dark clouds above converged.
The smell in the rain had shifted.
[But it won’t change anything] He knew now that all they had was each other.
He pulled them in closer to him.
[Put your arms around me and hear my heart] It drummed and thumped.
Banging against his own ribs.
[I can’t cry, does that make this less real?] They asked him, their eyes damp but still.
They had such beautiful eyes.
[I think it makes it better that you don’t] His own eyes on the verge of cascade.
Pain, grief and surrender balanced on his own interior ledge.
[You know I love you though?] They turned away slightly, ashamed in the honesty.
The words looking for a shadow to hide inside of.
[I know you did once] He replied, wishing for the sun to burn all this away.
The darkness now clawing at them both with wicked intent.
[Once much less than now] They gripped on stronger, finding the muscles contract.
Feeling the soul within slosh to a gratitude that had been frozen.
[I love you more than love] He said, knowing it sounded stupid.
He could not explain how he felt, words seemed useless.
[But this is the goodbye] Such power in the ending, the fall of Rome.
No treasure to be found in the rubble, just dust and damaged bones.
[You think it’s over, that’s why it never will be] Not here, not now they thought.
We are more than this material world.
[So be strong, and be you] He prayed they wouldn’t let go of him.
But pull apart they did and must.
[Best not to think about it right?] And with that, death came on swift wings.
Yet the light can never die.

veins on the eyelid

ROSES UNDERNEATH THE PAIN

Whispers in the light.
Tiny voices hurrying me towards.
This ledge of existence.
Karma crawled over me, covering me like a blanket.
Blocking out the vision which haunted my mind.
I moved beyond winter, down deep into the stomach of an ice age.
Cold and lonely.
My hope flickering like a dying flame.
While nothing came.
No coconut breeze to bring me back to the shore.
No memories, once buried, rose up in a Lazarus tableau.
Indeed, there was no sound but the wind.
Which tore at my rotting flesh like little daggers.
It was then the warmth came.
Inwardly, the calming chemical concert that played in my veins.
It washed over me a picture of you.
Crimson and metallic, hammered into my skull.
For you would be the last thing I ever saw.
A bridge over to the other side.
That final freedom giving goodbye.

Goldfish swimming around head

IN-BETWEEN THOUGHTS

Oh this heart has witnessed such unimaginable things.
Beating into yesterday, hoping for tomorrow.
This renouncing of a god served a purpose for the hour.
And birthed such maddening overwhelm.
Apocalyptic daydreams that swung in the breeze.
Hanging heads like melancholic flowers.
Plant it here, neatly and quick.
The thought within, itching and humming radioactively.
Around it salt was strewn, forming a circle like a halo around the moon.
Wolves howled, and seas stormed.
The mind asunder, ravaged by the absence of purpose.
Of hope.
Trying to join the dots in the empty space.
Acrophobically conditioned to fail.

Sparkling skull xray

GLITTER IN THE CEMENT

It thronged and thumped, vibrating in the earth.
Echoing the stamps of dinosaurs long since departed.
Within and captured, like watching eyes, it waited for the moment.
For the fall of the moon.
The death of the sun.
A complete blackness that inked all over, choking out life.
It needed to be hidden, it waited to be revealed.
The power that dwelt inside could only ignite by the fuse of a fall.
The complete shattering of a heart, life and mind.
It began to sparkle.
Breathed upon by the lips of such angels.
Pulsed and sparked.
Vibrating through like the whispers of a distant time.
It turned the gravestones to dust.
Set the ravens a flight.
Filled the veins once more with milk and honey.
It lived in you, all along.
Always knowing how to win, when to begin.
To never banish the darkness.
But instead, to transform it to light.

yellow in the eyes

CHAMPAGNE AFTER A FUNERAL

How fast things change.
A moment, caught between the movement of an eyelid.
The disintegration of life.
Forcing me in that space to grow up too soon.
The safety, dispersing like clouds.
As the flocks descended.
Earth shifted.
Moments and memories placed now into glass jars.
I steal myself away from the perpetual motion of this life.
Retreat to the bottom of my garden.
Where the weeping willow silently sheds no tears.
But dapples me in shadows.
The soil is disturbed, much like my soul.
Yet buried beneath, little treasures are hidden.
Broken china and a pocket watch which never tells the right time.
I can hear the wind.
It calls and hurries like a ghost.
Your voice echoes, a tear from childhood.
Where I was safe in four walls and your presence.
A Christmas morning.
Perches now in my mind like a raven on a grave.
Tinned sweets and snow, Jesus born on straw and beneath a star.
As I tear at sparkling wrapped boxes.
Put down by loving hands.
I lay yellow tinsel on the grave of this shift of life.
And remember not what was printed in those itchy leaflets.
But what was written on my heart.
Words to fill up my soul, clouding out the sun.
As your ghost now hovers over me.
I drink you in, like champagne and pain.

blood hands and feathers

AN ASTONISHING INDIFFERENCE

Weighted, not by gravity.
Or the tear that hangs like lead on a golden cheek.
But pulled and suffocated by a lack of understanding.
A love you swept underneath those neatly placed rugs.
Pushed me to the back pages of the book you barely read.
Maddening words and itchy eyes.
The scratch on your heart you cannot itch.
You replace my thoughts, pull them away like calendar days.
Leaving me wandering in a limbo with ghosts as friends.
Familiar now, to those empty souls.
Who roam and moan in a void you will not listen to.
But the love is there, I saw it fly like a sparrow into your ribs.
It flutters madly, though you clipped its wings.
Locking it away, with your tiny golden key; kept under your tongue.
Behind all the masks on your face.
A world now sees only callousness and indifference.
But you are so different.
Underneath.

kiss silhouette

PAPER CROWNS

Metal hearts and paper crowns.
I anoint you in the night.
Deep when the blackness washes the walls.
That’s when no one can see.
No eyes to validate or void your divine right.
Over me.
Under my benediction which tiptoes into your skull.
Preciousness weighs on our fingers now.
Consequence hangs in our soul.
And as the yokey morn cracks over your eyes.
It may all disappear into the dream.
And buried by the burdens of the day.
I shall lay, to be haunted and spent.
Your prince, left in a pauper’s grave.

hands slipping away

SOMETHING THOUGHT ETERNAL DIES

It pulls you to the ground.
Rips inside you.
Plunging into your soul like skeleton hands.
That fear of a solitary future.
The stain of a nothing left behind.
In the absence of another.
You throw up your love onto new terrain.
Heavy now, with a new solo gravity.
The weight of the world.
The weight of a tear.
Crashing inside you.
An inky wave of resolve and refusal.
For your heart was sewn and stitched to another.
And now the wound is left to bleed into nothing.

girl shooting her shadow

A FORMIDABLE HEARTBEAT

When the light is snuffed.
By the hand of God.
A recklessness washes within.
Out of the black oozes defiance, and a new religion.
A sense of purpose on ledges and lives.
As quiet as the devil is, and as loud as god.
Your own voice rattled and hums.
Can you denounce the logic which spreads like honey across your mind?
Swallow it down, the nasty taste of tolerance.
And set fire to the warning that came in on a fresh breeze.
Who knows where it has been.
Who knows what it has seen.
You know your own beyond the world of your eyelids.
And deep within your solitary ravine.
The slush and sway of the overwhelm.
A world urging you to stay.

cut hands holding flowers

THERE THERE

I taste the powder on your skin.
The remains of the moon and ash of my soul.
Obliterated by the look in your eyes.
The ability to cut me deep.
And tumble my tiny empire.
In spite of everything, there’s still the stars.
And they sparkle now.
Hung up to light my way.
Swallowing galaxies like fireflies.
Tumbling in the dark.
I watch these words as they spirit from your mouth.
Driving new ghosts, to new ends.
Staking claims to old wounds.
Rubbed now with salt from my tears.
Collapsed into years, and habits that can’t be shook.
So let me cover you once more in feathers.
Taken from the bed we shared.
Whilst you kiss the air, and us, goodbye.
I watch you fly, deep into the inky night.
Disappearing into the gloom, like my hope.
Untouchable, all too soon.

Golden clouds

HOLD IT ALL IN

Cocooned in a love that had died.
Brought to life once more in this time.
In a moment, connected not by space or matter.
But by the golden dance of hope and perseverance.
I’m on the verge of ecstasy again.
So I swallow it down, keep it all in.
The smile I suffocate with my lips.
Breathing in the heady acceleration of this future.
Trapping it in amber.
No words come from you, yet I hear your voice.
Within, spinning spiderwebs of trust and delicate touches.
Heaving my ribs to make way for the love.
Expanding.
Melting this iceberg.
Though this moment won’t last.
As I feel the morning rays creep over the windowpane.
Threatening today.
And tomorrow you my choose to go away.
Now is all that matters.
It feels, as I collapse into forever.
Washed in your eyes, the drenching of starry hazel plumes.
Making me divine.
So I keep you in time, trapped like beauty.
Forever.
Mine.

SOVEREIGN SEVERITY MISPLACED BY AN ABSENCE OF FORM

Blood stained and bare.
My fingers smeared the colour of your lips.
Gripping, and clawing onto this love.
White knuckled, they’ve pulled at the loose threads.
Of a tragically imbalanced affection.
Unravelling the clothes of an emperor.
With an iron taste on the tongue.
And cold like the sun, I pull the feathers from my own wings.
Dropping them on the meandering path away from you.
Scratched by thorns, yet tied to the clouds.
Blinded by reason, and the light from surely an early death.
For the further I tread, the less I live.
Growing colder in your diminish glow.
And your indifference to our circumstance.

HORIZONED

A thunderbolt split us in two.
Ripped, the sky from the sea.
Forever apart, yet always touching.
But only in the distance.
God, that distant voyeur.
Watches as my waves slip into your blue.
He peppers you with diamonds.
And sinks stars beneath me.
When broken, mine grow back.
Yours, just disappear.
This reflection of your soul.
Plunges into the well of space above.
Where I see distant dreams.
But God again, never content.
Shakes the earth to see me shudder.
And you, to change with every hour.
Until you forget where we end.
Or if we ever even started.

A TRAGIC DISCOURSE IN A GLORIOUS DEMISE

Tip the ghost honey, it likes to attract the bees.
Distracts from the different coloured tears.
That run on invisible cheeks.
Where were you when I needed you the most?
Negating our history and the whole of the 21^st century.
An incredible void, you chose not to cross.
The chasm left when you moved our luggage.
Years of mangled words and old Christmas ornaments.
Rolling around and cracking, fragile to touch.
Treasured with limitations.
With these thoughts, who needs enemies?
The echoes act like heroin.
Dipped in paraffin.
Taking me up.
Leading me to explode.
Covering you now in glitter and sad reflections.

hands reaching to help

FRAGILE TO TOMORROW

Fill the voids with treasure.
Beauty to banish the dark.
Fill your mind with flowers.
Because you know what is coming.
The fingers around your heart.
Cold as the hope you had for change.
Creaking against tomorrow faintly.
Delicate as god’s trust.
You suck the petals to feel the bloom.
Mother’s womb, and all the dreams you buried.
But the soil and sadness win out.
And the treasure turns to tin foil.
This gloomy dissonance reverberates.

scifi city bedroom view

TRAGEDY ENDING ON THIS

As the city hums, and chokes the flowers.
This mind refracts.
Stuttering like the trains which snake beneath my feet.
Beneath my bones which rot like timbers of time.
Belonging to a place that clouds and coughs.
Surrounding like a multitude of sin.
This is what I wanted after all.
But the magpies pull the treasures away.
Spiriting the sparkle skyward like seasons.
I feel old and rooted.
Yet freshly hewn and tender.
A ghost of a ship stranded in an international airport.
Someone’s lost luggage.
Unclaimed but missed.
What if the cracks and voids are filled.
By only nonsense and the spit of this current time.
Fuzzy images and words that make no sense line my eyes.
And roar while I try to sleep.
This sleep, this dream.
Shaking in and out of a nightmare.
Which I chose to play.

light across woman's eyes

SLEEP SEPARATOR

Found in rainbows.
Black and grey in-between.
Like the darkest deeds to an envious man.
Hidden in plain sight.
Illuminate with the perfume of regret.
Sticky and sickly.
It causes the teeth to itch.
And the dreams to flinch from yesterday’s call.
When will those traumas fade?
Never, replies the well in our soul.

king on throne with no face

ALLOW THE UNDOING

Paradise falls, as we bury the feathers.
A crumbling collection of corroded attempts.
The remains of Babel mixed with the tears of God.
Never for me, only by your design.
Crafted out of an ego that you can never resign.
You lay siege on me with it.
Tapping at my glass heart.
Rapping into my bloody soul.
The storm around bellows.
Shaking the fragile shelves where I placed our love.
Like water in a vase, the love flows over.
Shaken by the ground swell and anger.
The sloshing an slashing make way.
Like a parade of sad elephants from your mouth.
Unravelling the red.
Undoing the gold.
I sit without a crown, without a king or queen by this side.
Eating the apples so justly plucked.
Watching it all swarm and swell.
Rip and rampage through it all.
Watching Rome burn and the walls fall.
Smiling, like mockingbirds in the dawn.
Allowing the earth to suck the air away from me.
Knowing this is truly a beginning.
Seeing the light once more reflected in tomorrow’s song.

PAY THE GHOST

This is what you wanted.
He breathes into my soul.
Sticky air, heavy with the smell of formaldehyde.
Little deers of delight spring into life.
Galloping from my heart to my head.
If only he knew. If only I showed him how.
It is so freeing, no longer living with regret.
Letting the cosmic dance go on without you.
There is still time.
He whispers sweetly, thinking I still cared.
Thinking that what was once, had never shifted.
But inside, it had all died.
Blooms had bruised and fallen to the ground.
The flower water, stagnant now like a swamp of untouched issues.
I smiled a smile that told him nothing.
Letting him think he’d won.
Letting the shadow swallow me once again.
Death hurrying in case I grew new gills.
But it was true, this was what I wanted.
He just never understood, for he could not see.
Trapped in the spectral realm of transcendental adherence.
That this was no longer an ending.
But a beautiful beginning.

corroded sculpture face

INSIDE A LANDSLIDE

Confined and contracted.
Shivering inside a wall that closes in.
You hate it, but you want it.
This is what you asked for.
The quiet falling of silence and time.
Alone with only those voices.
Ringing like bells inside your skull.
Trying hard to forget.
Drowning in regret.
Stuffed inside with gum leaves and liquorice.
Padded and weak.
The future runs across like mercury.
Slipping off your skin that sheds.
Wanting it all to be real, to be over.
Hoping for a climate crises in your veins.
You wished them dead.
Instead, they fed on truth and sincerity.
Hungry are these ghosts.
Licking at such empty souls.
Trapped inside the fall of your ancient Rome.

eyes on a hand over someone's face

I WANT TO SEE THE GHOST

Never let me go.
The skin falling away, sucked at by mortality.
Surrounded by naysayers and sad eyes.
And all was black.
When the light began to prick apart the void.
A voice echoed.
Thundering down the halls in my soul.
It shook the dust from my memory.
Yet smelt of only yesterday and frangipani blooms.
The ones you insisted on, to mask the death that lingered.
A sorrow set the sparrow inside free it seems.
Clattering against the door, then out into the exhales of god.
You cannot kill a dream you say.
As I stand, entrenched and elated.
Seeing you there, a ghost on the threshold.
Not asking to remain in the cold and the darkness.
But to draw me out into the light.
You always pushed me on.
I want to peel back the pale ribs.
And let you take me on, inside and out.
Licking the walls of defiance, beating the death that they thought prevailed.
With those who won’t believe, they don’t have the eyes to see.
Or even contemplate the beautiful dream.
That is you and I.
In the seen, unseen.

bones and death figure in black

ASSUMING DECAY

There is no flesh upon your bones.
Such rays of moonlight only dazzle the naked blood.
You drift through me like a ghost.
Swallowing hungry souls.
The waters relent.
Heaven subsides.
And though all around hold their breath.
Inside the caged bird dies.

black hole, white edges

SUFFER THIS CONSEQUENCE

I see the eye dart to the corner of the room.
The words tumbled too frantically, too concocted.
Emotionally too soon.
Sometimes, is never quite enough.
I can live with never, never is stable.
Structured and tragic.
We pave our paths with bricks of never likely.
Now a sigh follows a kiss, and with this, I know.
The illusion fills out.
Like fog trapped in a jar.
Making my soul opaque.
The eyes that darted roll over then.
They should have gone blinded for all they did.
Such sinners in the sockets.
What was once, is now rejected.
Cast out like needful blood for another.
A life to suckle on the sweet blood of a dying Christ.
Me, crucified here on the beach, which beneath, lays a million stones.
The remnants of angel bones, and dinosaur teeth.
Monsters who lost It all.
But never knew until it was too late to cry out.
Hurtling through space, like a spec in god’s eye.

Man swimming in ocean painting

PALE

Clouds of inconvenience drift over into view.
Casting shadows that scream a doubt.
Pips of truth that stick in-between our teeth.
The cool water of correction I offer.
Flows over you like mercury.
You glisten with your own metallic brilliance.
Pale gold that detoxes the night air.
Sucking out the flow of the moon.
I speak too soon.
The waves follow the clouds and love pushes deep under.
As crests pummel the pallid skin that I long to kiss.
A sea sickness takes hold of my heart.
Turning my skin to cadaver colourations.
Love sick and racked by emotionally violent nausea.
My insides, turning, tumbling and freewheeling.
Pale like a moth.
Dead like the dawn.
Waiting, once more, for your decisions

divine being under moon

OPERATING AS an INDIVIDUAL BEING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

He came to this world, alone. Hoping to find all that he ever wanted.
His eyes were dusted, by moon flecks and divine difference.
The blood that coursed within, seemed shared at first. Red, like the mottled sickly streams he had seen elsewhere. Those rivers of regret he had touched with his fingers. Sticking his hand into their hearts.
Wanting to be their reason not to, or one that forced them on.
He crowned himself, and wore a smile that betrayed the sadness within.
Oh how they came, flooding his eyes like a tsunami unleashed from desperation. Some waved him by, eager to remain on their little universe of self. Not ready to let anyone inside to wreak havoc.
All this crumbled of course, as the crown melted in the light. And the skin was seen to be what it was, paper thin and reading words of yesterday.
So he tried to leave, but they would not let him. They ground his bones into finer feelings and swallowed them in great gushes of fear. He tasted of wine and tomorrow. In the aftertaste of a paradise, clinging to their mouths and minds.
He could’ve stayed there, slipping slowly into the bloodstream. But he knew, as he’d always known, that he would need to leave.
And the wooden stones that now bear his name, in a likeness painted in heady pastel colours, his spirit lingers.
But his soul has long since gone.
Returned, like we all must, to where it belongs.

eyes painted crying looking up

EYES WET AND OPEN

Timid and quivering.
Frightened once more by the darkness.
The cave of self looms and lures.
Hissing out in words spoken from lips.
Those once thought as delicate and kissed.
Cracks appear, and the light vanishes.
Heaving of stone, that misplaced affection.
An internal echo of loneliness.
What threatens was the dismantling of love.
Held behind glass to taunt and tempt.
But never touch.
I love you, though I see the dagger.
And I fear nothing of the after.
Only the fact I shall be there alone.

gods in the clouds

CLIMBING CLOUDS OF SOLITUDE

Feel the day fall away.
The suffocating blanket of night descends.
Blurring the gold into murky grey.
Calling out your name into the world.
Lost or stolen by the sea of stars.
Twinkling and laughing as they swallow the sound.
All stillness awakes me.
The hesitant twitch on my skin.
You rise like the moon on this valleyed horizon.
Cupped in confusion.
I swirl your soul in my mouth.
And taste the sweet sweat of god.
Fragrant, yet full of pockets of nothingness.
Things I cannot contain.
You slip away, over languid landscapes to another paradise.
One quiet of me and my heady malaise of destruction.
A garden which you can walk in solitude and peace.
Where the pools are full of my tears of longing.

black sketch of male

PATIENCE

Little pebbles of time, tumbling in his head.
Grains of moments, swept into the dunes of life.
Patient he sat.
Listening to the creak of tolerance.
He watched as the world tipped over.
Righted itself, then swim off into the cosmos.
God came and went, decrying this and that.
And still he sat.
The paint peeled away.
The skeleton frayed.
He lost and gained everything there in a minute.
In an epoch.
Patiently he waited.
Counting, not the moments, but the heartbeats.
Waiting for them to finally arrive.
And for the beats to stop.

boy on beach watching the waves

WAVES ROLLING IN FOREVER

Elements converging as the seasons split.
The yoke of God dripping down your lips.
Feed once more on this honesty.
As your fingers plunge into my heart.
We see clearly, through sea glass.
Kaleidoscopic colours dancing in my skin.
Soundless movement towards eternity.
Stretched out over the seabed.
This world is nothing without you.
Like the ocean without the waves.
Crest and churn in my soul as this love deepens.
As sugar-spun trust follows.
But never leave.
Never lie.
Tie your heart to this bow and let me slip inside again.
And let me taste you once again in this summer rain.

Abiding to the calls of an immutable fate

Wiping smiles that smear.
Sticky and iridescent on this soul.
Spun up in a tangled web of dreams.
Ones that glowed in the ashes.
Tumbling embers.
The moonlight and sunlight trapped.
Sparkling like forever diamonds of wonder.
We place ourselves in the centre of this covenant.
A vessel, a conduit of hope.
Where you crack and splinter.
The gold of our love drips in and fuses shut.
That Japanese way, all smiles and bowing.
Head towing, heart directed towards the seventh heaven.
Cupped in our hands.
Precious, fragile.
Determined, defiant; as strong as religion.
You kiss, I receive.
I slip inside that familiar soul.
Rearranging the furniture within.
A place to rest bones and desires that flutter like butterflies.
Ones that freshly taste the air of life.
Dipped in tears of God.
So that they fly forever

Ring of light in a forest

Beneath and beginning

Mottled sunlight.
Puncheuring this face.
Hissing away the black and cold.
Into the blinding white, calling me.
Like the air after a storm.
Full of life.
The seeds within begin to rattle.
The oxygen dances in my mind.
Springtime, and thoughts of eternity.
As the flowers bloom once more in my heart.

breath into a butterfly

LOVE IS ALSO HOPE

Breaths coming, like exhales from heaven.
Lapping at me like the tide of eternity.
I watch you dream.
Capturing the stillness, frozen in ice.
Long have we climbed.
Battling ourselves and the elements.
Shouting into the wind.
Now all around is still.
Silent like the first snow.
I taste you like that snowflake on my tongue.
Tasting of winter, and childhood memories of safety.
You whisper out, calling me into your dream.
Puffs of words escaping your precious lips.
Cracked open like an oyster.
The white hurries.
Ghosts vanish.
And you tell me, this was never a dream.

hands grasping underwater

HOLD ON TO ME

Abandoned in the world to greatness.
Whispers from divine lips.
Go seek the light in body.
Numbly I stumbled, feeling the way.
Watching as the darkness split apart.
The yoke of the world bled out.
Covering me in you.
Shake away those lives before.
Reframe a pleasant memory bubbling to your surface.
I was there with you at the beginning.
We intertwine, your hands in mine.
Stroking my heart as it fumbles to a maddening beat.
Slip inside and crumble like every lie.
Hold on to me, as if we breathe the same.
Hold on to me, as my heart is encased in yours.
Hold on. Just Hold on.

suspended in water and light

EVERYTHING (IN TIME)

The earth subsides.
Transient thoughts of escape.
Dissipate.
Pick the petals from my mouth.
As the mourners avert their eyes.
Death, was no surprise.
Yet this extension, a spark inside.
Flutters like a butterfly trapped.
The decades wash over me now in waves.
Heady and fragrant.
Crashing coral like beauty through my soul.
Leaving stains like memories in my eyes.
How long was I there, what was left?
Do these bones show rings if sliced in two.
I feel born anew.
Trembling and naked like the first day.
Yet now, covered in the embryonic fluid of knowing.
That tomorrow is just the beginning.

Hunter

Into your eyes my fate remains.
Locked into that shifting ice.
Beautiful time trapped in glass.
Catching the light in amber eyes.
Hunted while you wait.
A bird in your paw.
Blood on your tongue.
The bones already in your stomach.
As the snow covers your tracks, the love leaked out, marking where we once were. Leaving the trail for others to know our fate, and to never come this way where the wolves are at play.

Light Rays

SPARKLE

In the trees, no; in the sky.
The veins are hiding it.
The light shining like the eyes of God.
It’s there all the time, do you never see it?
No, but I feel it.
Washing in my bloodstream, collecting like wax.
Divine.
Sublime.
Yet I see it now, the great orb above.
We came from it, that far off place.
Its essence coats our skin like angel dust.
A pleasant peppering, are you sure it’s those shores we stole from?
Can you not tell, does the rock in your pocket not breathe like that mountain?
Torn from the mass, yet special in it’s size.
It’s like a pebble in my mind.
Like an egg, beautiful and full of life.
It shines too, like gold.
That is the light, that is what we are.
Then why is it sometimes dark?
Dark you say?
Yes, black sometimes like oil.
That would be your own fears, covering what needs to be free.
Then let it be.
Yes, let it will be.

Hands in a green light

Death deserves a witness

Quietly, lay me down.
Shutting out the light until the fears vibrate.
Onlookers shuffle, whispering like the clergy.
Greasy eyed and apathetic.
Coughing on incense and strings of my childhood.
God strokes me into calmness.
Tenderly, like a plant struggling to grow.
Needing the care.
I whisper grace, and slit the throat.
Letting the eyes glimmer in the dying light.
The ghosts shudder at the demise.
Fluttering ethereal remembering eyes.
The air turns foul, and I gasp into life.
Sucking in sweet alpine air.
Death spirits away such needless past.
Life offers such beautiful future.
Words tiptoe across my skin like those across a gravestone.
They fade in your light.
And you blink away the past.
Taking my hand.

PALPABLE TRUTH

Tentatively, almost like a whisper.
A bloom of admiration crept up inside.
Love had hung so precariously.
Like a dew drop on a paper-thin petal of time.
A confession from fate.
The tumbling of truth, wrapped in time and circumstance.
Here.
Now.
It calls out to you, lifting the wrappings on a moment spun in space.
Call me once more again the name your lips tremble to utter.
Cast me a glance from your eyes that remove fear.
The swirled marbled eyes of god.
I let your lips continue what your fingers started.
Leading pathways to your sacred heart.
And fall once again into the swirling wave of the future.
Securely, knowing it was planned.

CONQUERED

These bones lay in your care.
Fragile, like thoughts of eternity.
You bleed a million tears.
When the breadth of distance smothers.
A coldness creeps when time rushes like ghosts.
You grit your teeth, holding onto a dream.
Burning like a roman candle, hollowing your resolve.
Which voice now echoes?
Which prayer now chants its finality?
Breathing life into togetherness.
Binding us with golden thread, wrapped around heaven.
You know, and you hide it.
Keeping it safe, even from me.
For I have destroyed such cities before.
And crushed the pillars of peace in your mind.
But no more.

space clouds blue

ON COSMIC SAND

Varied in hues, blurring to a view of angelic replication.
Divinity leaking from your bones.
I find you there, holding on to the edge of redemption.
Picking pearls up from our past.
The beach weighs heavy, cresting out from our circumstance.
I had to travel to find you.
You had to forget to believe.
In this peaceful rush of sweet sea air.
Mottling the very face of time.
I have returned, to that place where forever was promised.
Now, as sparks in the sand threaten joy.
The colour of contentment washes over you.
Knowing that the next step will demand such strength.
And in the arms of each other.
We are rock steady and prepared.

angles and globes of light above them

SILENCE AND LIGHT

Between the moments.
Straddling the sigh.
The light there in your eyes.
What seeps into the space between.
Bookended against love and needful things.
What must I give, to receive.
This alchemy on the tempering waves of now.
In the dwindling darkness of despair.
My ego tried to take me there.
To a place where I need not change.
A gloomy existence of languished dead dreams.
But light split the seams.
Silently breaking a new dawn.
Whispering forever.

lungs on an ex-ray

CONSPICUOUS BY ITS ABSENCE

Welcome to the survival.
The nest in the mind, padded with gold and turpentine.
Cleansing the stain of a life lived in regret.
Galvanising all that remains.
Precious in its circumstance.
Your uniqueness burns like a church candle.
Sacred.
Cherished.
Sanctified and blessed by its very existence.
Placed there by someone who cared to care.
What is lost, can be forgotten.
The darkness leaves little space.
We fill this void with flowers.
Where the teeth once were rotten.
An ivory tower of hope now climbs.
All inside.
Built back upon tears and upheaval.
Pulled out from the most terrible of histories.
Yet still breathing, a product of now.
Electrified by the thought of change.
Scatter your sparks into the spaces that ache in emptiness.
And save yourself, for only you ever can.

Golden fingerprint

PATTERNS ON OUR SOUL

Wandering in a time of danger.
Leaves me shaking.
My cheeks all rosy red.
Winter, creeping into my eyes like tears.
But inside, it’s all warm.
All still wet.
Gushing a crimson love that is full of elation.
Utopic movements cloaked in everyday actions.
A sideways look to you.
Words pulled from my mouth like pearls.
A cough to breathe, bringing up sand and seaweed.
Having dredged our love from the bottom of the ocean.
Down in the depths where the wreckage once lay.
There is sand in your eyes, sparkling like gold.
You lick moments over me now.
Silky and familiar.
Once a comforting lie, now this time a truth.
This is now, the place we have crashed and shattered into.
Burning still from the fire.
Fading away in the rain of a thousand lifetimes.
Let me suck that eucalyptus air from your lungs.
For I only want to breathe now, if you are breathing.

Northern lights

FUTURE IN THE RIDICULING STARS

In this weakness, I split a seam.
Pulled like a petal on the winds.
Love crept in before I could find the right words.
Ones to keep it at bay.
And its wonderment that now rushes me like a ghost.
Leaving precious bits of joy between my teeth.
Bits of your soul to chew over.
A deeper thread is laid.
Woven with violets and green tea murmurings.
Heady conversations that drum in my mind.
The universe repeats such rehearsed dialogue.
Playing back, your voice like that of god.
Words I heard before, now more precious than ever.
I left the universe there, captured in a moment.
Cupped in my hands next to your precious heart.
Struggling against the sun and the sanity.
Threatening such a beautiful return of Saturn.
The homeward point of my compass.
We fight the need to collapse into now.
Knowing the future is brighter when the stars in our blood pool.

heart with 'you are here' in the middle

ALIGNED

Words tumbling like teeth.
The gravity that pulls beneath.
Sweet words that wreak such havoc.
Three lined up like stars.
The arrow across the cosmos.
Aimed at my heart, pulled as always by your fingers.
Ones I’ve kissed before.
As they’ve trembled.
Aligned our bones to keep the cold out.
The travesty of dependence and care.
Though you find the words, you seemed afraid to talk.
Looking westward.
Eyes searching for the southern air.
The beach where we used to walk.
Let me cup you in my thoughts.
That wrap around like time.
Bleeding ink into your paper heart.
Staining your soul with love.

red text 'you are beautiful'

EVERYTHING I KNOW, FADES AWAY

A formulaic response to want.
Filling in the void that smothers with blackness.
Empty like the thoughts of change.
In minds that remain the same.
Yet a latent strain of kindness struggled.
Crept out of the soil that covered us.
Sparked by the light in your eyes.
As it crept down in time.
An now the world is fragrant once again.
Washed with colour and vividness.
Alive with flowers that bloom.
For I know, I will be with you soon.

Tear on a cheek

SOMETIMES, ONLY TEARS

Throw it away.
It hangs heavy in your hands.
A broken love all torn and heavy.
Easy to let it slip into the folds of time.
It came there suddenly, the tear in their eye.
Hanging like a beautiful jewel in the corner of the fleshy oyster.
Threatening.
Threatening to tumble, fall and disappear.
Smudge into a cheek or dripped away with fear.
The silence kisses the skin, and darkness breathes upon the neck.
An invasion hurried by the darkest forces.
Throw it away.
Wouldn’t it be better.
The pumping flower struggling to survive.
Wet with dew drops birthed in this moment.
The tears speak of a hurt, unseen yet complete.
A collapse inside like twin towers.
Don’t listen to the breaking.
How can they throw it away.
Something they cannot call their own.
Wouldn’t it be better.
If they stayed?

A FUTURE SPRUNG FROM A MANY THOUSAND WOUNDS

The universe crept closer, seeping into the open wounds.
Its voice hushed like the sound of a million stars.
I must say this to you.
The words confessed, expressed and digested.
Some lost in the confusion of expectation.
I thought you were stronger, I didn’t see the scars that still bleed.
He nodded in knowing, in seeing the everything there in a moment.
Nobody’s perfect, he coughed back, time leaking from his mouth.
You were once much stronger, but each time around you faded a little.
Now the version before me, has too many cracks for what I gave.
He sighed, and closed his eyes, wishing he were as strong as they wanted.
God never spoke to him this way.
He always moved in shadows and light, avoiding the reply like a child ignoring consequence.
He knows that, he knows it hurts. But that is not why he doesn’t reply.
The universe spun out a sentence which made the floor ache.
His heart dissolved in the hearing, and was born once more in the understanding.
I never knew, I had begun to think he didn’t care.
Your strength I see, lies elsewhere.
And with that, it left, letting fate swim across his eyes like coy in a crystal pond.
He once more stepped from the past, onwards.
The future, taking it all away.

AN IMMEDIATE FUTURE

Tomorrow drips in it’s yokey gold.
Offering the treasure of yet to be.
A sparkling beauty of opportunity.
Casting minds back into the dark.
Searching for answers in the rooms of yesterday.
Taking time to pray.
Asking God to push us onwards.
Into the light.
Into the storm.
Too long have I sat waiting for the world to split open.
To flower and bloom like spring.
For the great wings of fate to fly.
Catching me as I fall to climb.
Yet all there really is, is now.
The tear on your face.
The laughter in your eyes.
Each moment a prize.
That should be savoured in the moment.
For time yet to be and been and gone.
Is just another setting sun.

angel's back with wings

READYING RECOVERY

Trying to find lucidity.
Cupping thoughts in my hands.
Fallen from my eyes.
Lost treasure.
Stolen preciousness.
The soul acting like a window.
Allowing them inside to steal, to rearrange.
Feeling lost, yet knowing where I’m trapped.
Ghosts lay upon my skin.
Licking at the wounds.
Drinking them all in.
The moments and memories.
Webs of pain strung up by circumstance.
When was I ever allowed to breathe.
To feel the sun on my skin.
Without the chill from a passing cloud of consequence.
Must we break free from the circle.
Or does it allow us to begin again.
Lighter than before, once all demons are dropped.
Lifting to the sky where we once belonged.

abstract circle sandjar

LIFE IS A CIRCLE

A tragedy laps at this water’s edge.
Dark oily waves.
Flotsam of time scattered.
Moments bobbing in their crystalline freeze.
Like jewels sparkling on the neck of God.
Broken Christmas decorations on a dead tree.
How do you see?
This water, once pure, travelled around the world.
Circled and familiar.
Dipping your mind in to see this all before.
Teaching you again, yet you choose to forget.
Life is a circle.
It comes around, reminding you over and over.
What to loose, what to cherish.
To drop away what pulls you down.
Looking in to see your own reflection.
When you should hope to see the face of god.
For the divine is a alive and breathes through your skin.
Yet we forget, the states we are in.
Beginning at the end, missing the arrival as we depart.
Life is a circle.
It starts and ends in your heart.

DISTANT THUNDERS

The Glittering eternity of the night sky.
Finding heaven as a reference point.
Powdered divinity dusting my soul.
The glowing ebbs of long dying embers
When the fires swept through, it stole all.
Finding hurt as its oxygen.
A great engine of pain.
But my fortress could not be burned.
At it’s centre, a well of strength.
Plumbed by the depths of my existence.
My being.
The only reason, is you.
Why I walk the earth and breathe air once recycled.
Brought to me by northward currents.
The smell of eucalyptus and heat.
Entering my eyes and skin.
Reimaging the smudge of a memory.
The red smeared mark of you.
You.
The reason I battle forth.
Carry on in your unending war on love.
Though these wounds we bleed cry red tears.
I know you will be there at the final fall.
Soaking everything away with love.

Snow covered frozen trees

WAITING WITH WINTER

The oil and the dark.
Pooling and yawning around.
For waiting is the hardest thing.
Stuck inside a circumstance while the world moves on.
Trees stripped of life as seasons pass.
The moon spins on, grinning and fading.
Changing and evading the sun.
What was love was frozen into a moment.
Carved into the ice, and buried until you lived for us again.
I stand, waiting for the sun.
Waiting for the fire to hurl forth once more.
To melt that place and warm my vision.
A place of smashed clocks and flowers.
To ignite our cold hearts.
Trapped inside their cages of bones.
Where we may love again.

black and white statue with rosary

PROVENANCE

How do you not shake, with such worlds inside of you.
Looking into the orbs of your soul, I see galaxies forming.
My heart swims across those burnt hazel pools.
Breathing hydrogen and life, watching comets disappearing.
Love mirrors and love remains.
It flows inside our veins.
Showing up the places that are broken.
Unconditionally we cloak each other.
Covering the scars and bruises of memory.
Cloaked in rose kissed armour.
Light as angel sighs.
Defiant and enduring, like a kiss upon waking.
For love cannot be undone.
Each part of this love is a moment.
Strung together like rosary beads.
Blessed and cherished, but never betrayed.
Clutched close when the darkness threatens.
The light of our love gleams through those cracks.
Cracks which show where we pulled our pieces together.
And I will kiss each wound with a prayer.
Devouring a genesis, as our skin meets.
Collapsing in time.

church spire on fire

CRAVING MIRACLES

She began to lie.
Her fingers clasped in on themselves, feeling the strength and weakness in her grasp.
The church, empty now of all souls except those she had come to talk with.
Tears brimming in the eyes, they stung like the holy water welled in the font.
Singeing the new-borns brought in against their will.
The lies came quick and easy.
Words of living danced from her mind and mouth.
Painting the walls the velvet colour of sin which faith knew all too well.
Her prayers circled her and danced above to illuminate the ceiling of the church.
All gold and crisp like an autumn leave caught in the sun.
Little sparks born from the light that was housed inside of her.
She lied by saying she could cope with this still.
The betrayal to god was that she thought she could go on.
But he knew, and he listened still.
As did all the saints breathing there like ghosts.
She clenched and fumed, crying all the while.
It was hard for her to know someone who knew her better than herself.
But would not wish her well.
For god would not lift a finger in her plight.
He didn’t then, he wouldn’t now.
No matter how many tears flowed in that church.
They would dry all the same.
Those walls would hear his name, again and again.
She lay down, and closed her eyes; using a bible as a small pillow.
Breathing in the dusty time of incense and pieces of flesh.
She waited for the miracle much promised, what better place to wait.
She lies there still, but do not wake her.
For she may still be dreaming.

antelope eating a lion

A HALLELUIAH IN THE VIOLENCE

The anger maketh the man.
Bleeding out the words that my head cannot contain.
Pearls for the poets.
Flowers for the loveless.
Laughter for the cynical.
They laugh with me now, the chorus of hyenas.
Eager to strip the soul in such violence.
And as the lion dies inside.
Little birds peck the eyes.
Dropping iron feathers to strip the goodness.
Tearing the history apart.
Like absence encased in an ice cube.
Swilling in the drink you hand me.
They watch every move I make.
Taking me and making me something which I’m not.
A spilt blood lamb.
A blood boiled Allah, fickle and fused.
Living long enough to become your villain.
Broken in bones and shaking to nothing.
Lying in your desert of love.
To be eaten by the angels that circle.
As my ghost escapes through my chest.
Out through your hoops.
Ending in a sigh.

blue lit bench in the dark

No sound but escape

The last gasp of a city, stifled through individual disdain.
Strapped to that engine of pain.
The eternal clock that moves everyone forward.
The teacup, that cannot un-shatter.
God’s will, the devil’s plan.
Darkness leaking up out of the drains.
Black balloons to cloud our uneventful skies.
Thoughts like a bruise.
Blooming and fostering more on a delicate mind.
They wait around for the heart to break.
The lies to normalise.
The violence to wrap itself around.
Like fingers of priests, going where they shouldn’t.
You want to leave this place.
Crumble the buildings that warren your life.
Cough out the diseases and the dirt and take a train.
Over tracks on water, the straight edges leading away.
To what, you don’t know.
New spaces to inhabit, to sink a soul into.
Uncertainty, the first sign of freedom.
Lighting fireworks in the mind.
Soon the metropolis an old family member.
Seen only on special occasions.
Lonely in your memory, and very nearly forgotten.

blue palms photo

The Blue of a bruise

Idling of the blood stream.
Brightening those nightmares that shudder.
Twisting in and out of focus.
The mind finding reference points.
All chalky talk and eye darting.
Searching the door to find new weather.
Trust seems lost again.
Blue skies clouded like the eyes of God closing.
Tearing in the rains of revelation.
Words struck the vein.
The devil tastes the pain.
What part is called to be diminished?
Swallowing in a rapture, that unpicks the scars.
A lie to curdle the blood.
A pain to feel alive once more.
Do you know the lungs want to sing?
Padded with angel feathers they heave in lament.
The soul siphoned away, bottled like wine.
Death’s most beautiful throw.
Snatching things, before they grow.

man walking into digital fire lave

Occasional ruckus

Wrapped in the 21^st century.
Shattering all trauma.
Which built against little empires.
Punching blindly in this fight for life.
Yet asked not to kill.

Die a little.
Crying happiness.
Lying slowly.
Counting stars.

Face first on the concrete.
Unwrapping the other side.
A tidied dream of destroying how it was.
The questions move me to new terrain.
Setting fires to light my way.

Butterfly face mask on girl

Ontogenesis

Eyes emptying themselves of pain.
Little pearls etched on skin.
Human rain.
I honoured my feelings.
(God knows this)
He watched as I stood for love and truth.
But my survival was determined partly by chance events.
The sound of distant drums that called to me.
The paradox of being set free.
And trapped by circumstance.
As you turned away, I turned to you.
It was all I could, to catch my breath.
Like a swimmer turning their head.
The words landing like bombs on my heart.
The silent words, that you never spoke.
Just letting me depart.
Now I breathe deeper.
With this dignity to drape across my soul.
In the quiet solitude I find it fits me well.
Cocooning my deeds.
That will burst forth.
Freeing this butterfly, from its spider’s web.

up close iris bleeding

WHAT YOU FIND INSIDE

It’s not like they could tell he’d been crying.
Pomegranate tears had evaporated on his cheeks.
Left to circumstance and suspicion.
The usual vulnerability crept in like the cold.
He’d wanted to disappear.
Pull his bones from this earth and take the plane westward.
But that knowing.
That fundamental chorus of doubt kept him seated.
Wounded and defeated.
The table was set for him and god now.
A devil on his shoulder painting the walls in his mind red.
Each word that drifted from his mouth.
Drew out feathered lines of inquiry and distaste.
In the mouths and minds of others.
With that future transparency, walking away again.
It was like, schoolyard mornings and lost mittens.
Passing cares, wrapped in their own silence.
The truer placed words that smelled ugly.
Circling the whole.
An inevitable destination, posing as something great.
Through distinction and the dying light, he now understands.
He was never greater than.

Ampersand symbol in water

RESCUED BY THE ENEMY

Truth hidden in a liar.
Like drowning petals.
Pearls covered in dirt.
Beauty sunken to unfathomable depths.
Those eyes are like black ponds.
Revealing nothing, reflecting all.
Does this light shine back?
Does it tweeze anything from your hidden soul.
You have our love now trapped.
Stored away and silent.
Vanished for all the world not to see.
I know that goodness lies inside your shell.
A bravery that can rise above the fog of this war.
Yet it is impotent and quiet.
Buried in the sand of time passed.
Like those ever-elusive weapons of mass destruction.
It cannot be found.
But I know it’s there, next to your beating heart.
The sea lion awaiting the time to roar.
And break through the waves of this pain.

small bird skeleton

TYPHOID AND SWANS

Summer days with rain.
A tearing at this side.
Spilling petals and ruin.
A Day with the night.
The moon, coming into view pocked and dusty.
Out in the ocean, cast into life.
Waiting for the smile to flow from a sentence.
Communication, then nothing.
Nothing, then communication.
A constant pulse of anxious disregard.
Release now, free of feelings.
Feathers dipped in oil.
Diseases and love that swallow like a lake.
To eat off of chipped china, filling stomachs swollen with greed.
And such need.
To scrub away the blood that stains.
The candy stuck in the tooth.
We are all but sticks floating down the river of life.
Passing through the weeping willows of the world.
Making our way to swamps, not seas.

skull king

LOVELESS COLLISON

A little, then more.
Nothing is ever enough.
In this world, where hate is king.
He’s an angel of sadness.
Watching it all from space.
Seeing molecules and indifference collide.
What remains, what took him away.
Stained with pain and cruelty.
Reigning like unlucky stars in our eyes.
Walking it back in photonic blackness.
We only leave the ground for a minute.
To spin on the atoms.
And feast, on the junk of these hearts.
With mercury in our eyes.

woman in flowers hiding

Island

This fear of limitless emotion.
Washes at the shore of my soul.
I fought a war for our love.
Raging like a storm on the face of time.
And now I fall like an island in the sea.
Alone and bare.
Washed by a tide, a poison of loneliness.
Never more to welcome the sun above.
I can only skim sad pebbled tears out to you.
There on the horizon.
That sight of hope, which will never land on my coast.
I glow, and diminish through this all.
Soon nothing but a shell.
That cannot even echo the sea.

man blurring

Vulnerable

Around our heads.
The flowers fall.
Crowning, yearning.
This history of touch.
Memory of want.
Speckles the skin.
Compressed by time.
Lost by lies.
Rusted and old now.
Tired, like a dream.
Once sold.

girl umbrella on fire

Disturbance

Paper feathers stick to your frozen heart.
Threatening an ink to write your story.
Do my eyes seem empty?
They lost such love for you.
Welling with tears that know the truth.
I’ve forgotten how to dream.
Too much darkness pushed the light away.
You don’t ask me to stay.
When it fell down, you pulled yourself clear.
Watching the fires rage from a distance.
Safe and sound.
As I burned into nothing.

space dust vast

The Great nothing

Eventually it all dissolves into nothing.
A heart full like a crowded house.
Junk filling up each cupboard.
The brain full of Christmas decorations.
Which have long ago lost their sparkle.
It weighs down upon a soul that was born to fly.
Clipping the wings and keeping it upon the earth.
The flightless bird of an evolved life.
Beneath the feathers and failures, the bones will break.
Fossilized then crumbled, in the rough hands of god.
Blown into dust, cast out into the cosmos.
It all fades into the great big nothing.
Little spots on time, that do not register our existence.
Like flies on a windshield.
Butterflies on steering wheels.
Irritating beauty that falls apart in frailty.
We all go back to where we belong.
Unknown and empty.
Shooting up black fireworks.
Into the oily blank space of our sky.

small girl nun

arrêter de tomber

Lies, they kept her from heaven.
A raging ghost of self-contempt.
Is it fake when inside there is truth?
For in the dark, all can see her tears.
Slipping into the cracks of hell.
Crying out to change.

girl with pink rose

Soft like a sigh

Sleep speckles these eyes.
Leaving dreams like fingerprints on my eyelids.
I break that vision of you down, prismed and scattered.
Tasting like crystal.
When the fragrant sound of your voice touched me.
I unfurled like a bud awakening to the morning song.
The sheet of love hangs across my heart, pounding like the rain.
You step inside, feeling the walls to my lungs while you breathe new life in.
Breath like ocean spray and the hint of gladioli.
I mark this dream, for it’s the only place I can find you.
The only place I trust you to be there.
Collected and kept like a shell on a mantlepiece.
Placed for my own enjoyment, and a sign of a well-travelled bones.
Yet the possession bothers you not, for you rise like the moon in daytime.
Defiant against the sun.
Casting long reaching shadows that follow me throughout my day.
Cooling my skin where I touch upon them.
Touching part of your soul, those bits you let escape.
It must be a waking dream that haunts and carries me.
Keeping me contacted and close.
Cuddled against the consternation of being alive.
Being of being, with you so far away.

words on a chest

Applications become the same

This Monday morning evaporates the weekend.
A horrendous hue of change.
Your absence now in my bed, as our bodies break.
Twisting the world apart.
The world, now on show for bright eyes and coffee headaches.
Stretching out the happiness as the day rolls into grey.
For without you next to me, I find it harder to breathe.
The eye blinks of necessity struggle under the weight of it all.
I do not mean to be a burden, of self-serving theatrics.
This production creeps out of the stage you set.
For each time you go, and the curtain closes.
I’m left picking popcorn and ticket stubs off my dirty heart.
Rushing once more for the weekend, to be first in line.
This heart a needle, in your hay.

boy in a war helmet

Tender, the grass of war

A bloody dust covers the eyes of the onlookers.
The voyeurs of life’s sad pageant.
Cattled and rattled they sing the song of war.
A sweet lullaby to mark their intent.
The flag sticks in a body not long departed.
Stretched and lined like the marks of policies.
The bow broke and spilled them into the trenches.
Dirtied their bones and wet the bed.
What cared for them as their moon-skulls broke?
Separated out into the dark sea of regret.
Scaring away the tigers.
Cutting out and counting down.
Piece by piece we cut away the fabric of life.
Stitched into a patchwork of redesign.
Peace and thoughts maligned.
Meet me in the sandbox, the playground, the gulf.
Help me destroy the things I do not understand.
Recess, regress. God bless this mess.
A boy lost in a man’s disappearing world.

blurry woman

Are you there?

Pretty memories slip inside these veins.
Washing you through my blood stream.
You lay over me, thick and heavy.
While I sleep and when I wake.
I hoped to crumble you out of my heart.
Yet you clung on like cancer.
Haunting me.
You evaporate the time when you shook me away.
Dipping our past in acid to burn off the unflattering.
Now you come to me with selective amnesia.
Telling me you love me still.
I smell the alkaloid tinge to those words.
A bruised motive lies underneath.
You were there all along, but failed to hold me.
To reach out when I fell.
When the dogs ripped apart my soul.
Are you there always, watching me?
What did you feel when I cried in the dark.
When the little razor drifted across each wrist like storm clouds.
Would you have moved to mop up the red rain?
Or are you only there for the summer time?
When shadows are your own making.

human heart as a map

Distance and time

Lost, feeling the way out.
Travelling through the veins of god.
Hearing that global heartbeat.
Washing away in the flow.
I want to swallow the moon tonight.
To feel the tidal shift in my stomach.
To spit out the bones of the past.
And the well-travelled memories.
I touch this earth and it feels like home.
Yet when my eyes blink open.
I am crushed by the weight of this world.
I belong here, but a million miles behind in time.
Waiting for the palm leaves and ferns to sprout in my veins.
I wish to return, and also remain.
Eating forbidden fruit.
Running with the beasts.
Perhaps the change will come from inside.
Washing over me like conscience.
Seeing the divine in all that my eyes lay upon.
This is our home.
It is our only one.
Ninety-two million miles from the sun.

rose through the throat

Until my last breath

You hear me breathe.
But you cannot see.
Masked by the skin that makes me.
Inside, a love blooms and flowers.
Rising with the light I see in your eyes.
You are the pull of this tide.
Circling me with your lunar call.
My heart, the lonely hunter.
Howling and yearning for a touch.
For a kiss.
For a word that escapes in embraces.
A love so precious that makes the angels cry.
How you slip inside my mind like truth and temptation.
And you know the worth.
The war that was fought to earn such love.
The battlefield strewn with such bloody parts of this heart.
Now drying in the southern sun.
I want you to keep me forever.
Placed into the pocket of your soul.
Safe and secret.
Dripping with dewdrops of infinity.
Born out of our early morning birth.
I want you to hold tight, squeeze all the love from me.
Hold on to me, until there’s nothing left.

girl sun rays cartoon

Subconsciously motivated to euphoria

Tell me more about this place where the flowers grow.
Darkness, you say, is but a dream spun in fractured states.
That has little place there.
These flowers, they sparkle like crystals under sunlit ponds.
Inviting us to dive for mislabeled treasure.
There was but a crack on my mind.
Nothing really, but would it matter?
If that fracture, grew worse and worse.
Not there you say, that place it heals.
Swaddling all in divine clouds of relief.
Keeping the broken pieces of the shell in place.
And the mind where it belongs.
What use of the heart then?
The heart it seems is praised.
Raised up high like a crown.
The land vibrates under soft understanding.
While love sews tapestries of tales, and memories together.
They are there too, you know they are waiting.
How could an angel not sit at the throne.
Heaven?
No, not yet. The safer place inside your soul.
Where you barely tred.
I don’t want to stain it all with coatings of yesterday.
These things will be washed away, only lessons remain.
Who can go?
All are welcome.
When can I leave?
You’ve already left.

sci fi nighttime city

As the city sleeps

Still waiting for the big revelation.
Be prepared for anything, but do you still believe?
Dreaming of big distractions and carbon copied lives.
Left with diamond headaches and pills to make you sleep.
Don’t sleep, dream. Let it in.
Kick start that desire that you are just as good as God.
Good as gold even. Counting zeros on a monthly slide.
A king or queen of comedy.
Hanging on the end of the line.
Hanging onto anything.
Smear the sugar on your lips and catch the bees.
Be prepared for the sting, decompress and sing.
Close your eyes as your tongue lolls over.
Cityscapes and supernovas.
Mercury swinging in to shift the traffic.
Allowing you to arrive more easily.
Computered to your destination.
Yet missing your arrival.
Sleep another day away.
Swimming in medicated decay.
Remember to set that alarm to wake the city.
Not even giving the dead a rest.

water bubbles micro

Dreaming of entropy

Dreams are never what they seem.
You in diamonds, light pouring from a wound.
Blink.
Breathe.
Repeat.
And when you wake, the world collapses.
A world of grey and full of ache.
Happy to sweep under invisible rugs.
Pushed to the outer borders of a mind twisted into believing the worst.
Not knowing now what has gone before.
Are the plants that grow from the cracks green within?
Or do they cry rubies in the dew drops of dawn.
Born from their charcoal heart.
A particle captures my eye.
Bleeding into wonderous indifference.
The state of being unsure.
Caught within the dream, beneath a reality which goes through motions.
Lies.
Pain.
Acceptance.
Staining my skin like coffee spilt on the bible.
Seeping through sacred cells and existence.
The flower of my heart is scorched.
The edges of my mind feather like angel wings.
Yet it will not fly.
It will not bloom.
It all remains caught, between a dream and that other.
Afraid of time, and of going home.
Strung up and out like broken bones.
Painful to touch, yet eager to feel something.
The chaos is welcomes like a hurricane to my door.
Hoping it rages and blows it all into something new.

mouth full of flowers

Pain is the only useful feeling

It ripped inside, slashing like a frenzied animal.
Thoughts in pieces, history in tatters.
Reborn now into a new day, into a new lonely state.
Half breathing, barely beating a heartbeat that struggled with each step.
Yet alive.
Pain. It hurt still.
Pulsing and throbbing in his soul.
Licking the walls of his existence like a monster greedy for the dark.
How long must I wander here in isolation.
Blaming fate for my circumstance.
For the clouds I am under.
Yet there was a light.
It grew from his spinal cord, sparking where it snapped.
Growing back something else.
The hope he’d swallowed had bathed it.
In god’s hands he’d craved it, once before.
Lessons learned scratched now across his eyes.
The tears of acceptance washed them clean.
Pain, it seems, was his teacher.
To choose a different way, a different road.
Perhaps less travelled.
Inside his hope chest the latch flipped open.
And flowed a feeling, one of many, which dazzled his eyes like stars.

bathtub flowers man

Paralyzed

Your tissue and bone, like hammer and stone.
Lay me down with this poison.
Counting heart beats, the frenzied heat of your touch.
Leads to my defensive corrosion.
Strychnine, and baths of turpentine.
Which strip away all doubts,
In a sweet sublime watery grave.
Your kiss. The dangerous list of a vessel.
Aching to be near you. Pumping to please you.
And sinking with your tide.

Angel wings blue

Origami razor blades

We lost some strength we can’t replace.
The soul was bared, in places unprepared.
Fate slipped across our wrists.
Eternity flashed across our eyes.
But no demise.
Those feelings won’t ever fade.
Memories now scorched into us.
Illuminating our real selves.
I saw what I wanted to change.
And where to now?
What siren call, or ocean tide beckons.
Nothing here wants to remain.
Yet we cannot leave just yet.
Until the broken is repaired.
And the sacred is shared.
We must climb in place.
Plastering the walls with pretty views.
Painting our souls spiritual hues.
Ones that glow a beauty from within.
Showing us fragile and divine.
Folded out of angelic paper wings.
A product once more of god’s design.

human heart and flowers

The Death of the heart

Through hollowed tears that paint the walls.
Cries a thought, uttered more in lament than desperation.
The lights fading.
A love abating.
The prayer for a heart on the edge of nothing.
What demons and ghosts stole it away.
Which angels plucked it from the earth.
Has god really written the last passage in its tale.
Or has the other heart deserved a second chance?
These questions lick at the mind of fate.
While others close their eyes to possibilities.
They lost the beat, the rhythm of love.
Those roots that went deep, tangled and clogged with mud.
Twisted with happenstance and rode the whispered jokes of time.
All beneath the silent wings, and bells ringing out a new era.
While eucalyptus air fills the lungs.
And we cough up the oil of yesterday.
For heaven can wait, while paradise before us blooms.

girl with a ship in her hair

Adeline

Adeline, why do you trouble me so?
Why do you pull down the stars and the moon?
Chalking up these eyes with lunar dust and wonder.
Oh Adeline, do not speak my name.
It crumbles my ground and shakes my resolve.
Moving my inner mantle with volcanic changes of heart
Oh sweet Adeline, keep those lips the distance of the sun.
Rising from my eastern treasure like the dawn.
Blinding if I look that way.
My Adeline, I wish I knew you then.
When my world could make a house for you.
In the forest of fidelity when we were both young.
And hope was still a pearl in our eyes.
Goodbye Adeline, you will always dwell in my hope chest.
Covered in gold at the bottom of the fathoms.
Locked away in time by a key you will never own.

blossom tree in a cave lighted

Unconditional

Your love breaks these bones.
Though a hemisphere divides us like land and sea.
The weight of it impacts and splinters me.
A turn from you, blankets like an ocean of space.
That cold contempt you have for those you care for.
Always hurting the one you love the most.
A million miles always makes me cry a million tears.
A river of bleach stings the skin.
Carving a way down to an ocean of pain.
Unconditional.
A love over ripe and never plucked from the tree.
Blooming and baring in abundance.
There for your taking.
Mister sweet tooth.
This tree of life and love, grew from such wretched earth.
Out of mud thrown from lives ago.
It will always offer you shade and sustenance.
You would be the snake, in this garden of ours.
Yet it will remain.
I shall remain at the place of arrival.
With a heart and soul open for you till time collapses.
Unconditional is the treasure I place into your precious hands.
Treat it not like the stones in the pit of your stomach.
But more like rock broken from the seat of Sinai.
Stained in the divine.
And forever yours.

atomic blast shadow of man

Nuclear shadows

You cannot unwind the clock in my skull.
The ticking over time that set the world ablaze.
Who knew the day, when the sky darkened.
And fate eclipsed our shared heart.
Those running for cover.
Scattering like pebbles on a beach.
Lapped at by a sea of hatred.
I cling to the groceries in my hand.
Fruit, dehumidified in my grasp.
Turning to mummies like the bodies nearby.
Burnt in an undignified splendour.
What escaped hell that day?
Let loose by righteous souls who knew better.
A holy war into the mouth of the devil.
As the fire crinkled in the sky, it burnt down upon us.
Imprinting my soul into the pavement where I stood.
Nuclear shadows.
Snapped like the sun shuttering.
God, turning his head away.
God, with tears in her eyes.
The light of an age, swimming around those that twinkled inside.
But how soon those lights were gone.

girl in the sky devil angel

Kill them with kindness

The wind blew her northward.
Desert dry and frigidly barren.
A mind thirsty for something tasted before.
Spent, but ready to burst again.
Like a leaf on the breeze, planted where she fell.
Pouring paint into the world.
Cracking open other skulls to sneak inside.
Planting diamonds.
She came like Christmas.
A Beautiful pageant of lights and colour.
Soaking up the grey.
Uprooting the cemetery stones that stuck up like teeth.
She polished them like new enamel.
Dressed in the same clothes she was to be buried in.
She was like you or I.
The same skeleton underneath.
Yet she was different.
Feeding the animals in her mind that roared at life.
Acting like it was all a circus.
Until she floated away again.
Up and out of sight, out of hand.
When her work here was done.

pealing paint from a portrait

Reveal

The suffering of fools.
With each new day they add their stain.
A clogging to the air that you breath.
Beneath the end, that’s where they’ll find you.
So strong and complete.
Underneath.
You want it all so badly.
This revelation to tomorrow.
To be remembered and loved for the skeleton inside.
As you bathe in a bath of bleach.
And rinse your soul with turpentine.
Uproot the dirt and the dark that keeps you hidden.
That keeps you displayed for a world of passer-by’s.
This great reveal, behind the curtain.
Under the skin.
Is the world you live in.

ocean ripped through eyes

Drenched in departure

Through wanderings of a hallowed heart.
Untie the science while the rain comes.
Let the silence smother you.
Or little taps of life, crash on your skin.
Blanketing this world in a quiet monsoon.
Layering and prevailing over all before.
Let it seep into those muddy bones.
Washing everything.
Purify and personifying a state of being.
Fresh like holy water.
Stinging the sins like acid.
Drown and choke underneath those silent waters.
A vast tide that you wash over me.
Those days that were always numbered.
The borrowed time and delicious decay.
How sour those words met my mouth.
When I asked you to leave.
Tying my tongue into confused states.
Separate systems and traumatic time zones.
A flight into a new world.
Where the clouds coughed around me.
And the skylarks sung our demise.
God raining down sad tears.
That had been building for some time.

man in a black explosion

I Came to disappear

Through wanderings of a hallowed heart.
That blesses the soil it treads upon.
Within it tolls a silent bell.
Which calls for time and distance.
And leave me not in that harried place.
Of ill begotten souls and woe.
That race about like dying rats.
And burn the imaginative pith to shadows.
We come alone, and all in pieces.
Figuring out where it all began.
I came out of the dark,
Yet too close to the sun.
Struggling to find a path.
Now watch me disappear.

Red fighting stags

Argue

What did they tell you about this future?
While the TV played on and you half listened.
This heart you mangled and molded.
These flowers died a long time ago.
Who is to blame?
Distance. Family.
Your fake departure, when your heart wasn’t in it.
Made all too easy for you.
Red letter days and disappointments. Plastic friends.
Those that melt in the heat while the kitchen burns.
Who dries your eyes now?
Lazarus lies, housewives. Shopping that ego.
Choking on the need to be right.
All those lies have now been tagged.
Selfish. Self-aware. Convenient amnesia.
All built on your version of events.
Apologies now that are forbidden.
Poisonous to the tongue.
Under rug sweeping.
These broken pieces of a person you once knew.
Only you.
As you blur once more into everybody else.

Starfish in the sea at night

You are the ocean

The cuts spill a gold.
Where the bone is exposed, a strength shows.
Rebuilding myself like a starfish.
Grown back, from ripped apart.
Those are not pearls, but diamonds in the blood.
Strong and timeless.
Clankering around my metal heart.
Each soul contains a treasure.
This golden light of the ages.
Liquid wonder and most precious to the divine.
Dripped down in time.
Spilled on the floor where you left me.
Soaked up through my veins because I had to.
I needed it, to get away.
The undulation of time.
Sets forth a storm of unfolding.
A revealing of a love you hoped to lay sunk.
Rotting like a shipwreck on the ocean floor.
But no more.
The stars in the sea salvage us.
Hauled to the shore to gasp again on palmed beached air.
At that place, where I promised you forever.

skeletons and flowers

Nothing wrong here

Dressed in those emotions.
Wore the role you wanted.
Let it drip like turpentine.
You showed me your Jesus scar.
And I cut through the confusion.
You leave me buzzing like a motel sign.
Only you could scratch me that deep.
Rush through me like amphetamines.
What did they say when you returned?
Did you make it feel so numb?
Feasting on cartilage and present tense.
Pronouns and words unspent.
Yet the dark offered such shelter and shadows.
Calling you back to another brilliant night.
Where you looked ahead.
Seeing us there.
Stepping over the bodies of others.
To Look me in the eye.
Celebrate me deep.
They all wanted to be wrong.
Singing up their symphony of sorrow
For a loss that had not yet begun.
Bone and cheek.
Questioning our mortality as you trim the fat.
All conquering weirdos.
Destroying the things they never understood.

Geisha's painted neck

愛 (Love)

I dare not touch, a hair upon your head.
Or your skin that falls like rain.
Into my arms I dream you would tumble.
Kissing your lips that welcome me like a traveller’s light.
Burning out of the darkness.
Threatening sweet cherry deliverance.
I would peal back your skull and dive into that sea of thoughts.
Swimming with you in circles.
Hand in hand on a celestial ocean of knowing.
To know you. To touch you.
To take the pain you feel and burn it within my own bones.
I place this pedestal only for you.
Keeping you safe and aloft, closer to the heavens.
Where you belong.

car lights misty trees

Toujours en fuite? / Still on the run?

Vous souvenez-vous, quand vous étiez jeune?
Les battements de coeur dans un infini.
Une seconde sur les lèvres de Dieu.
Pouvez-vous sentir la forêt?
Es-tu fuyant?
Disparu dans les arbres.
Quelle partie d’entre vous ne dort jamais?
Pour toujours rêver dans un monde où règnent les cauchemars.
Portez votre couronne.
Asseyez-vous, et lavez-vous dans les larmes cosmiques.

Do you remember, when you were young?
The heartbeats in an infinity.
One second on the lips of God.
Can you smell the forest?
Are you fleeing?
Disappeared in the trees.
What part of you never sleeps?
To always dream in a world where nightmares reign.
Wear your crown.
Sit down and wash yourself in cosmic tears.

astronaut on moon surface

Crawling back to the sea

Did I miss the Milky Way?
Seeping into my bones while I sleep.
Creeping over my soul like a love I can’t keep.
Forgetting how this feels.
If I am nothing but confused, then I know.
I know what I must do.
I welcome in the deportation.
Listening at the water’s edge.
The primitive sound of the sea of tranquillity.
Lapping at my soul.
An ocean of storms.
Propagating emancipation.
So annotate my departure now.
Hang it on your wall and drink it from your coffee cup.
Diminished and exonerated in your eyes unfit for the surface.
They would pop under the pressure of it all.
Like the path I tread. Or the self I give away.
Where is the road I follow? The crater to jump?
I told you before about the universe at my doorstep.
But I know you wanted me to be wrong.
All along.
But you forgot how to swim.
So I shoot myself across this space and walk into the sea.
And you can fall down to your knees.

woman water glass

Drown

My youth would blow a happy breeze.
Through my heart as I devoured the world.
Now, in the debris of such smashed illusions.
I Drown in the tide of life.

girl swan plaster

Sensitive souvenir

Through painted eyes I see your heart.
Overflowing, submerged in milk and honey.
In that kiss, I feel the tenderness.
Which my soul has yearned for.
But like a pebble in my shoe.
A reminder remains.
That stain on my heart will never fade.
And those mistakes I will keep in the back of mind.

galaxy stream

Baptised by you

That endless world they talk of.
A Drowned world.
It opened in my heart when the starry waves washed inside.
When you looked at me.
With that light of god in your eyes.
And in that moment, like that pebble in your hand.
You grasped at the infinite.
You consumed my soul.
And we would remain forever bound.
Like that pebble in the ferocious stream.
Washed endlessly by the cosmic current.
Until clean.

photo polaroid blurry person

Take a bow

Nothing to fear, but the beauty unleashed.
As those velvet eyes unfurl for the world to shiver.
This collapse of an age, of a time now expired.
Blown into the dust of yesterday.
How heavy it must sit. The weight of youth.
Trapped in a moment, encased in expectations.
Those lips, sudden to crack like an earthquake.
The tuneful words scratch, like a raven’s song.
Beneath this magnitude, sits the one I love.
Grasping silently for escape.
I promise to take you away.
From it all.
From here.

man smoke

Nuclear

Empty and scorched. Your fingerprints all around me.
The metal heart buckles as it burns.
A hollowed out feeling.
A holocaust beginning.
That day you left, the skies got dark.
Which substance feeds this pain?
Gasoline for despair, welled in the pit of truth.
Nuclear burns and white light.
The spreading pain of a headache that never fades.
Brought on by crying deep into the night.
The day masked in the dark. A perpetual darkness.
Here, nothing grows.
Inside the husk, no flowers will bloom again.
This skin is toxic.
This mind now rotten.
And empty shade of loss.

storm person walking into

The Majesty of mystery

Stolen time which seeps out of blackness.
Returned like pearls to the sea.
All we know, we have forgotten.
Clearing the realms for wonders to birth.
We close our eyes and catch the breath that escapes.
The Sustaining mist of God.
As this mind coughs up havoc, with its mystery of the unknown.
That pulls with a gravity to the dark and tragic.
God cradles us in feathery hope.
Kissing promise once more into our blood.
Gravitating away from grief.
Running water of certainty in our blood.
For we never truly know what exists.
Beyond the curtain of our eyelids.

girl water beauty

Who let in the rain?

Underneath that crystal water
Of crushed stars and dreams.
Dwelling like a memory that won’t die.
Lies a soul.
Frayed and tattered.
Filled with thoughts of eucalyptus leaves and saffron.
Tide up in heartstrings and self-made knots.
Tackling the torrents soundlessly.
To drown silently in a rising tide.
This was their gift to you.
Keeping the truth and the pain out of your eyes.
Packing soot and coal into the sockets.
Trembling inside and yet still.
Like a sewn up teddy bear.
All glass eyed reflective.
Placid.
Who let that rain in, to wash the hope away?
Deluged in dopamine and on the brink of decay.
Each drop inched closer.
Under the door and down their spine.
Exploding the sky with a grey that blocked out heaven.
God made the rain, the floods and the tide.
To wash away the sinners, the soulless and already sunken.
Yet she was always destined to float.
Catching stars in pockets and wiping the salvation across our mouths.
But the rain came in.
Straw ladened and camel shaking.
Soaked in misery and shame.
And now she is lost under the surface.
Ripped away in the undertow.
Growing gills and thicker skin.
Crashing on someone else’s shore.

main on train warm light

Fundamentally a confused period of wheel spinning

A mud that clings, sticking like the saliva of sin.
Was just darkness.
Covering completely.
Rooted, yet lost.
What miracles could be made in the dark.
When we had forgotten how to spark.
Collectively they comforted.
Wrapping words around like arms to keep us safe.
Yet the fires were still burning.
The neon plumes of dangerous magic.
All out of control.
Nothing moved but danger.
Nothing thrived except fear.
And death crept on near.
Inactive seeds of hope.
Littered the floor once more.
Those hands of light crept back into the void.
And we were once more, covered in darkness.

pink clouds from plane window

Arrive/Depart/Transfer

Stripped back today’s waste.
Our suspicion rises.
What you choose to do, what flounders.
Prepared to turn me inside out again.
Airport lighted, with the sun still sleeping.
Bore me down to my appled-core.
Picking out the seeds you planted.
And that I washed with tears.
Alighted.
My boarding pass heart in hand.
To see such new wonders in your eyes.
Breaking from home.
Rest your head on my shoulder, I will read you bad poetry.
Whispered deeply.
Into your heart.
You loved me today, as the night colours away.
It breathed new life inside.
Returning from Saturn and watching the universe tip over.
The others none the wiser.
Souls that were drawn out of committee.
Leached from the darkness.
Hard to take off.
Now night-time while travellers sleep.
With you, I always fly.
That south western sky, heading to the red earth.
For you are everything.
And all I need.

angel wings

Spirited

You see?
All of this remains.
Before. Behind. Way after.
The crucible cracks and splutters in its creation.
Offering golden wings in which to ascend.
Where will those heavy wings take us.
On that lunar breeze which blows from the lips of god.
A substituted living now folds into the ocean.
This blessing of cotton wraps around my eyes.
Yet still I see.
If I wait for you, what dies in my veins?
If I go now, will you remain?
The hesitation catches me like asthma.
Your love pollutes my body like oxygen.
Fixing me to rise only when your lungs heave.
At times we are at a distance.
Calling half a world away.
Yet still I remain, waiting for you to see.
Waiting and believing.
That love in your eyes.

boney hand and eye

Blink to worlds

There’s a resonance within.
These bones that call.
Out to the nothing, across god’s table.
The banquet to stars, that hearken us home.
And though it’s hard to try against a world of darkness.
One that creeps in with the rain.
It calls to me daily.
Blinking out of my mind’s eye.
Dropping all mortality.
Reminding my that I am divine.

Rabbit caught on wall

Stuck

I dreamt about the future.
Unravelling and revealing.
Yet all they do is talk it back.
I’d been beyond before.
Far away and out of reach.
Such things I’d seen.
Now the stars drip down like lies off a tongue.
Hold it and eat them. Consume.
Cough.
Try to let me in again, though a distant world away.
An outcast to the tribe.
This could be the saddest day.
And though I get lyrical, as I always will.
Tarred and caught in the well-placed trap.
I ask that you touch me once more.
I am trying.
Come walk these shoes and wear this soul.
Give me new direction.
So easy to get stuck.
But not the other way around.

body pulled underwater ghostly

Bord / Edge

Debout sur cette rive une fois de plus.
Sur le bord de l’existence.
Je voussens dans le vent.
Je me sense arrosé dans le marée.
Est-ce que je me vois marcher sur cette plage?
Ou me sens perdu dans un million de grains de sable.

–

Stand on this shore once again.
On the edge of existence.
I’m standing in the wind.
I feel watered in the tide.
Do I see myself walking on this beach?
Or feel lost in a million grains of sand.

Beauty trapped

Bind my heart, break my bones.
Sneak in when the lights are off.
When my guard is down.
Snap my soul and slip inside.
Overwhelm and consume me like heroin.
The addict in me pulls you near.
Breathe me in, suck me out.
Spun up in your mind like a crystal chandelier.
Precarious precious beauty.
Your hands on my innocence.
Pulling me down, knocking me over.
Teaching me how to fly.