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.

24/09/202217/05/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: fight, love, travelTags: airport, alight, australia, flight, fly, love, poem, Poetry, sky, sleep, time, transfer, travel 6 Comments

Maturation

The sun illuminates such maddening visions.
Of logical paths I dare not tread.
A way to your soul that is covered in thorns.
The heat burns and chars like the wattle trees.
My bones like their branches.
Crumbling and dead.
Yet words you whisper on the Nullarbor winds.
Reach me over oceans.
Washing into my veins like scented magic poison.
An oxygen for my heart which longs to be with you.
So I twist towards the sun, though it burns in your direction.
Blaring up from below the equator.
Through a lens of love and reproach.
Like a plant feeling a new growth, bursting from my skin.
A love is grown again within.
Hoping to be potted, once again in your dusty soil.

06/08/202213/05/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: heart, love, plantsTags: art, australia, flowers, growth, heart, long-distance, love, nullarbor, ocean, oxygen, plants, poem, Poetry, running, science, serperation, soul, thorns, tree 1 Comment

An aftertaste of paradise

Missed the miracles, those saving graces.
Little wishes that burn and sting at the end.
For what could have saved us?
In the face of the insurmountable.
Of turned cheeks and empty pockets.
The eucalyptus chokes my lungs.
And demise weighs heavy on my soul.
Call it all what you want to.
Tack it up to the wall of my new prison.
I couldn’t belong, I didn’t believe.
The land beneath my feet felt the same as any other.
Yet the sky burned with dreams.
And the rains washed my history away.
All with you by my side.
Now a million miles later I ache for those memories.
To never fade, but to only remain unchanged.
The tangled touches of a life that was beginning to build.
Brick by brick, though the floor was made of sand.
A piece of that bliss is caught between my teeth.
Stubbornly it refuses to move.
A reckoning of intent to stay or go.
When these eyes close, it is love that coats all I see.
Housed in a land beyond the equator.
Rustling in the leaves of my disposed days.
Calling like the kookaburras tapping at my mind.
Crying out to visit once more.

17/03/202216/03/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: disaster, dreams, fireTags: australia, bushfire, death, devastation, ending, fire, flames, heat, hot, love, memories, paradise, plans, poem, Poetry, trees 1 Comment

Comes back to then (redux)

MORE VIDEO ART HERE

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Taken from Everyday Nightmares – out now

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11/06/202110/06/2021 by Mark Ryan Categories: fiction, goodbye, sunTags: art, australia, crying, fiction, goodbye, hurt, lost, melbourne, nightmares, pain, poem, Poetry, rarra, redux, sunset, tears Leave a comment

Comes back to then

The red country hung before us.
Our life now a great adventure.
Your love was all I needed.
Your smile I planned to treasure.
Days crumbled, eyes tightened.
We were no longer tender.
The gulf began to widen.
I couldn’t stay.

Ten years in, I hoped you believed.
All of my love and my heart on this sleeve.
I cannot cry, I cannot lie. All I can do is die inside;
On the day that I had to go.

You told me to meet you.
Down by the Yarra river.
I wanted to keep us.
In my heart that had begun to quiver.
Life shifted, dreams folded.
My instincts ignored for worse or better.
We cried and imploded.
And then I left.

In all of my time, I barely ever touched what really was mine.
Life briefly showed me, everything that never really ever could be.
A cruel revealing, a maddening feeling of seeing all that would never last.
The joke from above, putting such beautiful future quickly in the past.

16/03/202116/03/2021 by Mark Ryan Categories: goodbye, loss, relationshipTags: australia, city, cry, death, departure, left, life, loss, love, melbourne, pain, poem, Poetry, red, river, yarra 10 Comments

Come home

A sky threatening to swallow us whole.
Disappear into blue.
Lost in me and you, and the pulls of the earth.
You wandered too far into the outback.
Too far from my feathered touch.
Now the oceans recede.
And the heavens close.
The stardust of hope may sprinkle these sheets.
Matched by tears of absence.
Yet inside a birdlike song sings.
Come home.
Come home.

06/01/202106/01/2021 by Mark Ryan Categories: birds, distance, heavenTags: art, australia, birds, distance, heavesn, home, loss, music, poem, Poetry, sky, song, space, stars, tears, travel 6 Comments