Your ideologies hang by a tangled thread.
6,000 years of life they said.
Yet in the ground and in the tar.
Lies the truth (will out) like god’s memoir.
To bring about his own destruction.
For amber shows of life’s reduction.
And kills those narrow minded thoughts.
By adding to the six, a lot more noughts.
God’s grace, bathed in divine light.
Casting gold over cracking skin and fallen vows.
The vessel inside, so empty at the beginning.
Now overflows like a cup of human kindness.
What troubles does she have at the seat of the saints?
What ails her heart that cannot be soothed?
Sweet words from Jesus must mend the wound.
She smiles at a knowing, a celestial secret.
Whispered to her in the musky wooden rooms of god.
All this is but temporal.
All pain is marginal.
Your being is relative to the consciousness you invoke.
So why does she smoke?
All this bubbling inside my veins.
Feels like angels spitting in my brain.
A feverish swoon overtakes me now.
The silent prayer and misplaced vow.
That swirl and flick of the finger of god.
Dilutes this blood to something odd.
More like a lick from roaming devils.
Who cough and sniff, and silently revel.
This outbreak which defies prognoses.
And nudges for spiritual diagnoses.
For though my body and mind is sick.
Inside the soul this illness licks.
And leaves me now mere bread and wine.
My soul and spirit, drenched in turpentine.
As lips part, unleashed dogs rip and wrought.
Choking on the tiniest thought.
That burn away nirvanic benediction.
And grabs the wood for your own crucifixion.
For a pox you are in eyes of scarlet tension.
A strangled lie of incomprehension.
That simmers to a sinner’s plea.
The fragile-ness of complexity.
You do not find it in the brush strokes of the saintly.
Or willowing wisps of utterances in cold hallowed halls.
Do not look for god in pages of prejudice.
Or underneath the rocky souls of the holy.
Light a candle and feel me.
Peel back the bits of Christ to find me.
Swimming in the shallow cells of you.
Awash, in the DNA of God.
Place the blame, again and again.
Languished yet molten.
Repeated reframes.
You melt the words into my soul.
A watching raven.
Fleeing the cold.
Of your frozen heart, lodged in time.
Refusing to die.
Refuted such crimes.
This is your Valhalla, your watchful mount.
Where I’m nailed to a cross.
Impossible to surmount.
Like those black raven eyes, you carve into my heart.
Waiting to walk my apocalypse.
Waiting for the dark.
But let the ink, snuff out all the hope.
Tend to my gallows.
With turpentine and rope.
For in the dark I’ll move, as all cats look the same.
And spark up a supernova.
Of our love, flared out in your name.
The dark will intensely turn from black into white.
Your soul will be cleansed.
By diamonds and this might.
Then only God will watch, as we crumble into the sky.
Into a blanket of feathers.
An eternal bed for you and I.
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.
The curse of life, that brings you down to pray.
Everyday.
Fresh chaotic ordeals that scrape and scratch.
At a heart not born to break.
Yet fade, in its inevitable decay.
This life, this time.
Yours and mine, held in the palm of fate.
Tickling the future by what we do today.
Taken from ‘Everyday Miracles’ – out now
Have you seen?
God’s opportunity.
Inside psalms which scratch your heart.
Voices so strong they stabilise heaven.
Disappear and discover that new challenge.
Which calls you higher.
You remember the way I fell.
I remember your outstretched healing hands.
It’s my only reference point now.
Blooming the songs and suspicions in my mind.
How could you be so sincere?
This imagination comes alive and shakes me.
My snow globe mind.
And in mind of my defence, I used to not believe.
Your simple kiss changed that.
And shook me deep.
These flowers I now weep.
Now the world sounds better without you.
The sound of rust and avoidance.
And the chatter of indifference.
A pin of change, held in thy hand.
Explosions in their eyes, are merely the dying stars of hope.
As they drop bombs on everything you see.
All that once glittered was sold.
Packaged and peeled like your skin on the cross.
And we taste the regret each day.
And we forget each pain and stay,
Locked in a world of static.
Explaining each miracle away.
It once felt like home.
Until the sands rose and the waters melted.
And we looked once more in the back of our skulls.
Picking away at you on the roof of our mouths.
The tourniquets we place over the lands now fray.
The crumble and crack of reason.
The pain is the only thing we’re happy to hear.
As we martyr those who walk your walk.
And silence those, with that familiar talk.
Of love.
If only I could let you go.
Off my skin.
Out my heart.
I wanted a part of you to reside in my cells.
Forever burning bright like my northern star.
But the cancer grows.
It eats away at all we have.
Now, I must be stronger than Jesus.
And survive being crucified.
By you.
Havoc and Consequence 