Caught in the tangled weeds of busy nothing.
A mind fraught and frayed in the vines of life.
I wait for god to cut me free.
Yet in my sleepy weariness I hear.
A starlight voice that tickles the back of my neck.
And turns each shake into a shiver.
God whispers.
It’s all an illusion.
Your garden is your own.
And the demons are just voices trying to find a home.
8pm. Half awake.
Sonic ringing in my skull like sonar.
Crash through your words that splinter.
Deadening my star.
Sweeping up my sparks.
Picking the petals of me into nothing.
I curl back into tomorrow.
Soaking in the dew of innocence.
4am as the world whispers me awake.
All is calm as the night travels in my veins still.
I slept the day away.
Rubbing the tiredness and memories from my eyes.
Half a world resting in my heart from where I started.
Right where I belong.
The veil is yet to be lifted from my shaded stay.
Talking to me still from the past in a language familiar.
Talks of entangled vines and harkening songs.
A call of the kookaburra who rests on my eyelids.
The red land beneath my feet.
Sticking to me like sand on wet skin.
Rub away these English oaks. This chitter of festivity.
Don’t lead me blind with your patriotic tales.
Colour me sunlit gold and let me sleep.
Crying into the night and drifting away on the tide.
Waking on shore I pray I do not recognise.
He lay on the bed and watched the clouds out the window.
With closed eyes he felt the storm.
Vibrating the hairs on his skin like ghosts passing through.
He buried himself of course, there on his bed.
Sinking into the sheets like a body into a grave.
He was dead from the waist down.
Waiting for the little chalky helpers to plunge the skull.
But the water he felt was from the rain, which tapped at his brain.
Droplets of doubt and remorse.
Tidal fantasies of being swept away.
Yet forever he would lay, in that state of not doing.
Making love to paralysis with the sweet relief of excuse.
He died three days ago, yet still he talked.
Arguing with god, cursing the devil.
Gnawing at the skin of self in a heated display of shame.
He’d known death before of course.
It rattled and moaned around his house since that day.
That awful Tuesday when they left.
He had grown new skin. He had tried to begin again.
But death remained a friend, like a wad of gum stuck in his soul.
He blamed it, he shamed it. He cursed and versed in vain to it.
It was there now, the sad spectator to an actual demise.
Apathetically sweeping up the dust, like one would make a bed.
That bed which heaved with the weight of his guilt.
Throwing out the dreams that played on the ceiling.
While the nightmares wormed underneath.
That bed which was his last embrace now.
Peppered in petals that masked the thorns.
Intimately feeling its way underneath his skin.
And swallowing him forever, in the dandelions of demise.
Lay there dreaming, and dreaming of sleep.
This place is quiet, and in it I’ll keep.
You safe from the world with its threatening haste.
It’s maddening calls and dizzying pace.
You are so tired, like a fragile bird.
With a broken wing, it’s troubled song unheard.
So sleep and dream a millions miles from here.
I’ll keep you safe, until your dreams disappear.
A half-light silently wanders into sight.
It’s the beating throb of the world.
Now masked in shadows which crept out of us while we slept.
When the ghosts departed.
A dying embrace of an old lover.
The bottled words of a mother who told us to keep out of the road.
While we played, with such abandon, in the town.
On the steps of a church whose windows we’d smashed.
This lumbering giant of trouble, draws our blood.
While we stretch out our hands now in prayer.
To a god no longer there.
All in the shadows of broken mosques and beloved vampires.
Which we willingly idolize.
These empty hands reach for a comfort.
Waking up in pain.
Bruised and bloodied like knees of school kids.
Us in our youth, climbing the tree that hung over the stream.
Dripping the merlot drops into that crystal clear water.
Blurring our own reflections.
To pull open your world, and sneak inside.
Tearing out your heart, giving you mine.
Feeling each rise and fall of your chest.
Would lay me out like gold.
Each breath conquers me.
As you lick your lips.
Suggesting that is where we build our home.
On the tip of something beautiful.
We’ve cried out our past.
Knocked down each remnant of uncertainty.
Covering our delicate present in feathers and down.
For this is where we shall collapse.
And watch true love collide.
Collecting it up in a bucket of flesh and stars.
Light into the fearless high.
Put those things to sleep.
Leave your cancer, learn to fly.
Death of memories on repeat.
Did you hear these voices calling you to be?
Those voices, in all of you and me?
Did you hear…..
….an awakening to be free?
A pressure and strain.
This heartbeat struggling to remain.
Heaving to the sounds of a new beat.
The deafening drums of retreat.
Cast out of heaven by devilish hands.
Told to be quiet, sit and understand.
But I cannot remain, so far in and so deep.
Just bury me now, for eternity’s sleep.
They say, the world almost drowned.
The day she wept.
Those salty tears, so sacred and immaculate.
That the ground began to crack, like the conscience of god.
Crumbling into sadness.
For she was so young, and now forever lost in her madness.
Fire crack cackle in hushed shadows.
Little fingers about to be cut off.
What you say makes me shudder.
A creeping shiver left at the side of the bed.
A mind now full of kitty litter.
With the life looking and an ache to scratch.
Weakness, tossed out like surprise.
Sweetness that came in like a hammer to the glass heart.
Lick me up like spite, with a malice reduced down into silver spoons.
As I fall away from you.
And watch you choke on words and not loneliness.
It moves now in to post-blue passive aggressive.
Feeling the testosterone in our bones.
Angry, because you wanted it this way.
Embattled and emblazed with the world shouting us as well.
Waiting for the silence to once again smother our fires.
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.
They call you the king of commodity.
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.
Close your eyes as your tongue lolls over.
Cityscapes and supernovas.
Mercury swinging in to shift the traffic.
Allowing you to arrive more easily.
Sleeping another day away.
Swimming in medicated decay.
Lay me down with the tinkling of glass.
Those little fellows with their chalky mouths.
Grinning at an untold joke.
Keeping their euphoria to themselves.
The night suffocates, yet refuses to devour me.
Leaving me bitter and longing for sleep.
The jealously of the slumbered ripples across my skin like the cold.
It happened today, wearing my tiredness on my sleeve.
Welcoming rest and dreams within dreams.
Yet it won’ come.
Like an un-landed flight, I circle the skies in my lumbering state.
Creaking the fuselage with my tectonic groans.
Swaying in the night sky full of stars.
I manufacture a restful condition, listening to the world settle.
The universe put to bed and still.
They return, mother’s little helpers with their permanent smiles.
Swallowed down. I’ve been so high.
Aloft yet well-travelled.
There is nothing wrong now, I just needed to believe.
Dive into that waiting white surface so cool and clean.
Landed. 5am.
Grounded.
