Like the night.
Soft velvet expanse.
Reaching through time.
Through misty eyes which open wide.
They devour me.
In a kiss that kills me.
Over and over.
Yet tenderly I swim down.
Passing jagged words you keep inside.
Released, only to the moon.
As you howl them into nothingness.
For tender is your way.
Sweet bruises of affection which stay,
within us forever.
As we nestle into the tender wings of love.
Slipping into time.
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.
More pain in her heart than a bomb over Japan.
She clicks her heels, but nothing happens.
More alone than home.
She darts into the traffic.
Proudly defiant, like rhinos on the Serengeti.
This was her town, but from it now she runs.
Her tears falling like skyscrapers.
Down into the rain and the black streets of London.
That tries to coil around her feet.
The slinking snake of society.
She runs out.
Down.
Then up.
Onto the lampposts until they change to trees.
And she feels the nature breathe back within.
The racing rats she leaves behind.
Throwing her phone and her tolerance into the trash as she departs.
This was never for her.
She comes now, out into the greens and browns that match her eyes.
Seeing the vista swim into view like a quiet paradise.
She comes here, to disappear.
She comes to survive.
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.
In the forest, all alone.
My lonely tree feels cold as stone.
Surrounded everywhere by its branches.
That bend and twist to their own advantage.
They shake in the wind, and shiver in sadness.
Sunken in a disturbing madness.
Until one day you came into the woods.
Scared the animals and riding hood.
Yet the wolves they ran, and hid like rabbits.
Convoluted out of their own bad habits.
And into my glade you stepped so proudly.
And struck a match and yelled out loudly:
“Love is a flame that burns us under!”
And as quick as lightening, you lit me like thunder.
So my lonely tree, burned quick and sadly.
And I faded away, into death quite gladly.
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.
Cracks in the colossus.
Licking time across new wounds.
Limping and lumbering back into the ocean of your eyes.
Taking lifelines.
That little notepad you kept in your desk.
Right behind your mind.
Scribbling a sonnet for thine truth to break.
And a storm to release.
Sweeping up all the worries and the fish from the bottom of the sea.
I bottled up these sea storms.
The swell in your day.
But you pick and poke at the cork and the corrections.
To then complain that you are soaking wet.
What fable lives now in that oily deep?
What treasures do you covert, claw at and keep?
For in my mind too swim a thousand sharks.
Tasting blood in the water.
Now, no longer able to swim.
A tangle of troubles, the octopus crawling underneath the waves.
Occupying my deep.
Is it so hard to stay with me forever?
Or tear the hearts that fuse and tether.
Like an animal tied to a stake.
I circle around and shiver and shake.
So choose it now, and choose together.
A bursting wonder, to weld or sever.
Are you haunted or hunted?
Crossing streams of inky despair.
Trying to slip away into the night.
A hunted animal.
Arrow marked and sought out.
It is not the jungle you wish to return to.
The scraping spires of the city is the one you hope to leave.
But they won’t let you be.
You’re a hunted animal.
Wiping tears on leaves as you run.
Putting out the forest fires.
But soon your heart tires.
Waiting for collapse.
Still hunted.
Still haunted.
On the edge of extinction.
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.
The horses are wild.
Unbridled inner child, running away.
Caught in the spray, of life’s heavy rain.
Allow it to freeze, each moment in time.
As heartbeats align.
Cantering out of decay.
It’s when that hunter calls to you.
And you brace for the arrow, the shot to the heart.
Feeling like an animal.
Fighting to be heard and tolerated.
Breathing in new corrosive air that erodes your lungs.
Deeper into the jungle.
You earthquake proof your soul, and it shakes with the rain.
With a look from these eyes and the sound of their name.
Fighting to fly, to keep these wings feathered down and peacock pleasant.
Stretched over time and the eyelids of a stranger.
Keeping it all in, keeping it all safe.
Fighting against the rules you never made.
Fighting frontiers of tomorrow on the soil of yesterday.
Running with the tigers.
Forever fighting to stay alive.
Taken from ‘Everyday Miracles’ – out now
Havoc and Consequence 