Holy Water

Trickle how the water comes.
Softly how those moments numb.
That drip of more, that addict within.
Stalls the change as reduction begins.
A thought, so sharp, it cuts my soul.
And leaves a bleeding anxious hole.
Stuff it up with sterile sympathy.
Your knee jerk blanket atrophy.
Born from your most humble place.
Yet rests uneasy in this space.
That trickle of love begins to vanish.
You dab my lips with bitter anguish.
And pull on strings that dangle there.
Beneath the tears, beneath the prayers.
Though within me roars the unfair state.
Of caught between this shifting hate.
The tectonic rasps of that indifference.
Reduces this voice to insignificance.
So I lick the drops upon the floor.
Savouring each and those before.
Hoping the flood will come again.
And wash hope through me like heroin.

18/04/2024 by Mark Ryan Categories: holy, love, waterTags: divine, flood, holy, hope, love, poem, Poetry, relationship, water, weather 3 Comments

OVERLY CONDITIONAL

Snowing in this heart again.
On the verge of emotionally dependent.
Trying not to gasp, or suck the bleeding air.
Eliminate or supplicate.
Little pills of love I struggle to swallow.
Bruised by this circumstance.
And hardened by this history.
Gasping once more.
You offer precious oxygen.
Up here, where the air is razor thin.
Heady, with thoughts of us.
Talk more of commitment.
Speak only of forever.
I puncture holes in the heart.
So the love can escape.
A little bit of ballast.
Some tiny space for me.

29/02/2024 by Mark Ryan Categories: love, poison, tomorrowTags: air, breathing, commit, commitment, emotional, forever, heart, history, love, pills, poison, soulmate, tomorrow, toxic 6 Comments

THE BIRDS OF SUMMER NEVER FLY

Humming like humidity, an urgency to remain.
Strong, like the grain imbedded in my heart.
Seeming to travel, like tiny rivers outwardly.
This aura heaves a sigh.
A steady complacent reply.
To being here, with you.
Easy to be lost in daydreaming.
Washed by the winds that shake nothing, only memories.
The dust in clogged areas of my mind.
God had other plans before.
His little tremors which shook my old world.
Making cracks, scaring the birds.
Now each day stretches in tangerine tenderness.
Dappled by sunshine and summer rains.
Soaking my feathers, lightening my eyes and heart.
To remain, if only for a while, steadies my soul.
Allowing the happiness to travel through the streams within.
Strengthening and undoing in waves all at once.
Migrating to nowhere but now and forever.

01/12/2023 by Mark Ryan Categories: birds, happy, summerTags: art, birds, flight, flying, god, happiness, happy, heart, joy, love, migrating, poem, Poetry, soul, summer 2 Comments

Must Be Survival

The past hangs in the air.
Dusty and dangerous.
Tantalising, yet splinter filled.
Bat it like a ball away.
Call it like a cat to stay.
To comfort.
Within the pages lies the secret.
To learn from the end, what the beginning never told.
I wear it now like armour, like decoration.
Little medals of pain and trauma.
Shining in the tomorrow sun.
The scars healed.
Sewn up by tears and terrible nights.
Mended through my own defiance.
Hail Mary, full of grace.
Oh Father, those were my sins.
But that was then, and flesh was paid.
I grew back bones and inclination.
My mind devoured the chance to change.
Now, golden and precious this day; this hour.
Every minute blooms like imperfect flowers.
For nothing matters now but to love and push on.
Because of you.
Because of me.

24/11/2023 by Mark Ryan Categories: flower, strength, tomorrowTags: art, beauty, flower, flowers, growth, love, pain, poem, Poetry, skin, strength, sun, survival, tomorrow 12 Comments

Dream now in colour

Clouds collapse as I pass on through.
Padding this prison with colour.
Explosions in my eyes.
Memories shiver out like masturbation.
Leaving residue across my smile.
You were once dark like charcoal.
Crumble to kiss, choking my mind.
Infiltrating the lungs of life.
Returning now, from a trip to your heart.
Licked and loved, reborn into frantic shimmers.
Colours which dance like the sun across a ceiling.
Splintered out through the stained glass of my soul.
Where once I stumbled, I now walk.
Framing these moments that splutter dreams.
Magic and flared, fireworks of indescribable possibilities.
I dream now in colour.
I bury the past in grey.
Living out the future in shocking stains which stay.

15/11/2023 by Mark Ryan Categories: colour, dreams, lifeTags: colour, dream, explosion, future, kiss, life, love, mind, poem, Poetry, smile, soul 6 Comments

Slate

The taste of a thousand histories swallows inside.
Crumbling like chalk and Rome.
The feeling of tomorrow, attacks these eyes.
Penetrating only where I allow.
Letting light and life in once again.
Mistakes sit like marbles.
Orbial reminders of evolution.
As once more I sail around your sphere.
The centre, a vast expanse of grey.
Itching for that etching of our love.
To permeate and christen this new world.
What will grow, is only what we sow.
I’ll toil this tundra, chipping at the rock.
Watering on happy tears.
For in the passing of time.
Our empire will climb, up once more to the heavens.

03/10/2023 by Mark Ryan Categories: future, growth, plants, worldTags: art, future, growing, growth, love, plant, poem, Poetry, seed, slate, start, tundra, world 8 Comments

Go to the mountain

Within your mountain clouds, breathing you like vapour.
Looking down, dreaming of that caressing landslide.
Each view, smothers me like the sea.
Within a moment, smashed by the rocks of your intellectualism.
A tumbling lump of sensual debris.
Strewn across your valley.

30/09/2023 by Mark Ryan Categories: love, mountain, sexTags: art, breathing, intellect, love, mountain, poem, Poetry, sex, valley 14 Comments

Pull in destruction

Watching the world as the sun descends.
Closing my soul at my grave again.
You are the light on which I feed.
And you are the force that pulls me underneath.

Your smile gets trapped there inside my heart.
A choke of the moment in which to start.
The slow destruction, a dismantling fall.
Love is the reason we live at all.

Blame never scratched into your eyes.
This is my own collapse.
My own demise.

06/08/2023 by Mark Ryan Categories: crash, graves, loveTags: art, collapse, endingpainpoetry, fall, falling, hurt, love, lovers, poem 6 Comments

Glaciers beyond my eyes

Altered states which cling to the walls of my soul.
An inside bark, encasing the underneath.
Cut, and see the rings of my life.
Of this existence.
Petrified and stained by the echoes of ghosts.
These eyes witness the great collapse.
The rebuilding and celebration of all things before.
And after.
A deconstruction of a self that hums in stasis.
Fumbling words to questions no one really asks.
Lips painted and parted.
Moving through headache greys and champagne elation.
Burying a love.
Suffocating a happiness, trapping the beauty and moments.
Now these eyes shift with my vibrating soul.
Moving under their own weight in order to stay in place.
Constantly evolving and expanding.
Yet motionless to others.
Cold to touch.
But beautiful in its inaccessibility.

11/07/2023 by Mark Ryan Categories: happy, ice, lifeTags: art, beauty, bury, cold, coldness, death, eyes, glacier, happiness, ice, love, mind, poem, Poetry 6 Comments

Doubtful conviction

How brazen you stand before me.
Tall like the pillars of salt.
Solid tears of discomfort.
Feathered scars which belie the much contemplation.
Demand, yet deferring all responsibilities.
For a soul in crises.
My unwavering yeses, let you climb this tower of babel.
As your skin toughened and the callouses were caused.
Across your heart.
What you demand, I will not give.
As you move through lineage, an acorn into a king.
All parts that I once loved, and secretly still do.
Still.
Symptoms of a revelation, breathing beneath.
You force my hand, quoting paradoxical scripture.
With borrowed hypocritical teeth.
The milk makes way for honey, and my walls begin to fall.
Paralysed with selective objectivity.
How could I refuse?
Nothing left to lose.

02/05/2023 by Mark Ryan Categories: change, god, heavenTags: angels, art, change, fall, god, heaven, honey, love, milk, paradise, pillars, poem, Poetry, revelation, teeth, trust, uncertainty 6 Comments

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.

05/03/2023 by Mark Ryan Categories: soul, space, starsTags: art, comets, death, decay, end, fire, love, night, poem, Poetry, soul, space 13 Comments

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.

24/02/2023 by Mark Ryan Categories: angels, death, dnaTags: angel, art, death, dna, drugs, earth, grief, hope, loss, love, poem, Poetry, remain 10 Comments

Beauty

Now it holds me, now it speaks.
Crumbling the skin away to see what’s underneath.
Cupid kill me, cupid teach.
Beyond the heavens, with the devil at my feet.
I want to heal you, I want to kiss.
To consume the time that threatens abyss.
For in this moment your beauty lies.
Inside my heart, my hands and eyes.

29/01/202313/01/2023 by Mark Ryan Categories: beauty, kiss, loveTags: abyss, art, healing, heaven, kissingkiss, love, poem, Poetry 5 Comments

Internal/central

This illuminating version.
Drifting.
Loving, only when the time is right.
When it’s uncalled for.
Who knew?
Who cared?
A scorched soul while the film played on.
And all roads led to the same.
Your heart curdled up tight.
Wearing out my mind.
Melting the plastic of the world we once inhabited.
Central now.
Gaining control of a need that was needed.
Crazy, only to know we were always driving.
Using our knees to steer.
Hoping to crash and burn.
In a beautiful all consuming fire.
So central to our survival.

22/01/202311/01/2023 by Mark Ryan Categories: fire, life, loveTags: art, crash, crazy, fire, llove, love, poem, you Leave a comment

Tender

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.

15/01/202310/01/2023 by Mark Ryan Categories: animals, kiss, loveTags: animals, feathers, kiss, kissing, love, poem, Poetry, space, swan, tender 9 Comments

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.

31/12/202228/05/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: angels, flowers, happyTags: angels, art, flowers, happy, heaven, joy, light, love, mind, poem, Poetry, safe, soulmate, sunshine, travel, wellness 6 Comments

Turbulent visions of love

You rage within me. A silent storm.
A tempest with temptation to drag me through heaven.
Cutting my wrists on the divine.
I let go, disappearing into the eye of all your wonder.
Lost in your turmoil and torrential rains of change.

21/12/202226/05/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: love, rain, stormTags: change, desire, divine, heaven, hurrican, lost, love, lust, poem, Poetry, storm, tempest, winds 4 Comments

Happiness obligation

A truthfulness we promised ourselves to be.
Thine soul entwined.
Cracked butterfly wings of gold.
Yet the oil got their first.
But we can shake the Texas tea from our mouths.
And sore higher into the moon shaped sky.
This crowning.
A deep reverence for the promise we made.
That were whispered into our ears when we came.
Sweet words like honey into milk.
We can avoid the fault lines that threaten like an injured bird.
Dragging our horizons down.
Pull up your crown, and remember the happiness we sung.
Wrote poems and lyrics to in our heart of hearts.
Take the hand that hurts, and heal with a severed ego.
A beauty that we owe to ourselves.
An apology just for you.
A remembering of the happiness we deserve.

18/12/202217/12/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: butterfly, gold, happyTags: art, butterfly, earth, gold, happiness, happy, love, moon, night, poem, Poetry, treasure, wealth 4 Comments

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.

03/12/202224/05/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: love, war, waterTags: animals, art, fight, lion, love, ocean, poem, Poetry, relationship, sea, time, war, weapons Leave a comment

Begin the begin

Falling freeways that collapse like thunder.
Splattering dust into my open heart.
The sun shines on.
Blanketing our eyes with dizzying despair.
That road was to the sea.
The ocean that promised such departure.
The great wide expanse that echoed home.
So we look above.
Counting trails and streaks across the sky.
Fighter jets and passengers making their escape.
Crawling, flying and fretting to other cities.
Other sights of wonder.
My mind melts into now and I collect my possessions.
All packed into one golden shell that I carry in my pocket.
It whispers your name.
It breathes your air.
Cinnamon cords that play forever on my lungs.
I crack this pumpkin sky and break on through.
The open road, a littered landscape of longing.
Making my way to you once more.
Stabling the state of mind I’m in.
Begin the begin.

26/11/202223/05/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: escape, sea, travelTags: art, escape, freeway, heart, longing, love, ocean, planes, poem, Poetry, sea, sun, sunshine, travel 2 Comments

Bare

My bones lay like dust in your eyes.
Is that why you cry?
Seeing such emotion stripped bare.
Chalking up your mind.
Yet this heart beats in your mouth.
An oral fixation for the truth.
Tasting every rhythm. Every pulse.
I burned all this down around me.
To smoke out the ghosts of a past.
The ones you wanted dead.
So, now lay me down.
And kiss me back to life.

23/11/202223/05/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: bones, heart, smokeTags: art, bones, fire, flame, ghosts, heart, love, pain, poem, Poetry, smoke, truth, you Leave a comment

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.

16/11/202222/05/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: angels, death, fateTags: angels, art, chance, death, demons, doover, fate, ghosts, god, heart, heaven, light, love, poem, Poetry, prayer, wings Leave a comment

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.

12/11/202220/05/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: love, sex, theatreTags: art, coffee, eyes, headache, kis, love, poem, Poetry, popcorn, sex, show, stage, theatre, week, weekend, work, world Leave a comment

Cremate

Break these bones into splinters.
Snap the spine and suck the sap.
Throw the pieces on the fire.
Douse it all with distain and detriment.
Do not handle me with gloves on.
Touch me deep.
Treat me like a firework, ready to alight.
Burning through like phosphors.
Strike the match on my skull.
Crinkle and crack such emotions within.
Burning down to my heart, sending my soul to embers.
Floating into your lungs to dwell forever within.

05/11/202228/05/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: fire, flames, hurtTags: burn, cremate, disaster, emotions, fire, flames, love, poem, Poetry, skull, touch Leave a comment

Idle hands

Spider vines that creep.
Under my skin, beneath the bone.
Touching you there, where I knew you’d feel something.
Underneath where the devil plays.
Where the intent whispers like a tongue on the breeze.
My witch’s familiar licks the blood from these fingers.
Sticky and sickly sweet.
Hunting you down.
Seeking revenge and reason for you turning my head.
And throbbing my blood.
With your idle care.
Now at the whim, of my idle hands.

29/10/202222/05/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: lost, magic, witchTags: art, blood, bone, care, demon, horro, kiss, love, lust, magic, poem, Poetry, sex, witch, witchcraft Leave a comment