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.
Tag: storm
Are you there?
Pretty memories slip inside these veins.
Washing you through my blood stream.
You lay over me, thick and heavy.
While I sleep and when I wake.
I hoped to crumble you out of my heart.
Yet you clung on like cancer.
Haunting me.
You evaporate the time when you shook me away.
Dipping our past in acid to burn off the unflattering.
Now you come to me with selective amnesia.
Telling me you love me still.
I smell the alkaloid tinge to those words.
A bruised motive lies underneath.
You were there all along, but failed to hold me.
To reach out when I fell.
When the dogs ripped apart my soul.
Are you there always, watching me?
What did you feel when I cried in the dark.
When the little razor drifted across each wrist like storm clouds.
Would you have moved to mop up the red rain?
Or are you only there for the summer time?
When the shadows are your own making.
Drenched in departure
Through wanderings of a hallowed heart.
Untie the science while the rain comes.
Let the silence smother you.
Or little taps of life, crash on your skin.
Blanketing this world in a quiet monsoon.
Layering and prevailing over all before.
Let it seep into those muddy bones.
Washing everything.
Purify and personifying a state of being.
Fresh like holy water.
Stinging the sins like acid.
Drown and choke underneath those silent waters.
A vast tide that you wash over me.
Those days that were always numbered.
The borrowed time and delicious decay.
How sour those words met my mouth.
When I asked you to leave.
Tying my tongue into confused states.
Separate systems and traumatic time zones.
A flight into a new world.
Where the clouds coughed around me.
And the skylarks sung our demise.
God raining down sad tears.
That had been building for some time.
Octopus
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.
Somewhere in this memory
The snow had begun to fall early that evening. Though the sun had long since slumbered down, it was around six o’clock when the few flutters of winter dusting started to whip past his window. Daniel had left the curtains open like he did most evenings, watching the wild sky drip away beyond the horizon. It had rained lightly that day, and it took a while for the snow flurries to leave any impression on the ground. But as he watched from his small window, his face illuminated by the Christmas lights, he noticed as people came out of their houses to investigate the snow.
A few kids ran about under the streetlights, already bunching up snow into cold balls to throw at one another. It was a shame, Daniel thought to himself, that Christmas had passed already, and the snow had waited until after it had passed. Another bleak grey day that offered only the magic of the season, rather than from the endless possibilities of the weather.
He went to the kitchen and made himself a spiced tea. The smell of cinnamon and spices hung in the air, warm and inviting. He then went into the main room to where the Christmas tree was, sipping the tea which burnt his lip. He’d put it up alone this year, the first time the ceremony had ever been performed that way. He looked at the huge golden bell that sat a top of the tree; sparkling, like everything else did, in the strung Christmas lights that dotted the place. He couldn’t remember ever buying that bell, yet it appeared every year to top the tree they always had.
He sighed and placed his tea on the side, pulling one of the boxes towards him. He hated taking the tree down, or the Christmas decorations. As a child he’d always pleaded to his parents to keep them up longer. But they were bound by the laws of the season and the far away court, and all the decorations had to be down by the twelfth night. Why? No one could ever tell him, that was just how it was. Yet this was how things were now, every year it seems. Him, alone taking down the very things that were put up to enliven his life, if only for a few weeks.
He started to take off some of the ornaments, some of which he remembered putting on the tree even as a child. These must be so old he thought suddenly, vaguely aware of his own descent now into adulthood. His phone began to hum into life nearby, but he ignored it. He wasn’t in the mood to argue again, and that’s the only thing that phone was offering to him this evening. He placed some of the baubles carefully into their homes, snug in a box that would keep them safe for another year. He turned up the music he had playing, his new tradition; Christmas songs to ring out in the stripping of the tree. In a way, such a violating act. The trauma of the season.
He hummed along to some of the carols, there religious message washed away now he thought in the progression of the years. He felt old, and tired. Like his youth had slipped away without him even noticing it. He might as well be boxing up his memories instead of these decorations, freezing all he ever wanted and all he dreamed off in these magical days of Christmas. Spun up like candied sugar and placed away safely, to be removed once a year along with his heart.
He sat down on the rug; patches of glitter peppered the tufts still from the wrapping paper that had been destroyed last week. He closed his eyes as the choir music filled the room, taking him to a place in his memory. He watched as his younger self ran down the stairs, eager to see if Father Christmas had been. His parents, holding hands and smiling as they watched their children tear at the presents that had been carefully placed hours before beneath the silver Christmas tree. Though the tree was fake, over time it had faded and fallen apart, much like the marriage and the moments he now saw in his mind. The presents, along with this love within the family had been torn apart and forgotten about also. Thrust up each year like some special spectacle. Packed away when all were done.
His phone rang again, bringing him back. He opened his eyes and looked at his phone on the table, lighting up and convulsing in an epileptic dance. He ignored it again and went back to the tree to finish off. The lights were always the trickiest. It was easier with someone helping, and fun too he thought as he remembered how they had joked around putting the lights over one another, pretending they were trees themselves. The time when one of the fuses had gone and the whole house had been plunged into darkness, not before the sparks had succeeded in frightening them both.
Lights were always a pain to put away, but he resigned himself that it would be another year before he had to worry about them, and balled them into the old shoebox he kept, sealing the lid and the doom of the lights till next year. The rest of the decorations found their way into boxes relatively quickly, only a few things were placed around the small house as it was. He nearly forgot about the wreath on the door, only remembering it when he glanced outside to see how the snow was. It had come down pretty heavy now and he thought about going for a walk later when he was finished, to enjoy the winter landscape.
He finished his tea and snatched up his phone, looking at the missed calls. He sent a message quickly and then stood back looking at the barren tree, back now to its natural coat. They usually had a fake tree, but this year they had gone for the real thing. It stood now, just a hair smaller than him, shedding pine needles below itself like some defecating potted creature. He closed his eyes and could smell the aroma of the tree, the fading pine of a dying spirit. He wondered where it had grown, what bird or beast had called it home in the time it grew to its seasonal perfection. To be adorned and beheld for a few weeks only to then be thrown out with the other junk of the season, left to decompose in the street awaiting to be whisked away to somewhere out of sight. In that moment he saw the death and cruelty of Christmas. How things were cherished, only for the moment, then forgotten about and placed away. His phone nearby rung a reply, and he glanced at the preview from where he stood. A small tear appeared, and rolled down his cheek, the air leaving his lungs before a gasping inhale.
Daniel went to the French doors and cast them both ajar dramatically. The cold winter wind swept into the room, and some snowflakes fell onto his carpet. He snatched up the tree by the middle trunk and took it out into his garden. His bare feet sank deeply into snow that had settled already, but Daniel did not care. He went back inside and picked up matches that rested by the Christmas candles. He returned back to the garden and struck three matches at one time, letting the oxygen breathe life into the flame. He threw them onto the tree and lit some more. The snow whipped around both him and the tree, but eventually the flames took, and it began to burn. Flames licking the innards of the branches as he stood in the snow that numbed his feet. Drifting from his living room, ‘O Holy Night’ lifted into the air and encased them both in that moment. Frozen for that cold blink in the eye of Jesus, who watched on in seasonal despair.
Taken from ‘Impermanence of things‘
Jaws
Those words that flowered down in your skin.
Tickling like cancer.
A love that swelled like a harbour master’s fear.
At the sight of a storm.
You put this in me. I drank it in.
Siphoned off the flames like a bird of paradise.
Flying towards the sun.
Down into the roots of your stomach.
Innocence searching, now lost in moments just begun.
Borrowed, broken. Black and blue.
Rubbed off skin, down to the hurt and bone.
Hold me in your jaws, feel the juicy love between.
Swallow me.
Tastes like goodness.
Tastes like emptiness.
For in the morning, I am gone.
Some kind of stranger
There were stories of course.
Bad childhoods and frequent trauma.
Violence was like the rain, blown in like a storm.
But she did not live in the past too much.
Her story was colliding forever into tomorrow.
Wiping off the fever that electrified each night.
She had been beaten and adorned.
Wrapped both pearls and handcuffs around her arms.
Flesh was to be devoured.
Ghastly and exciting, making a mess in her soul.
She wiped away the blood drool.
What lay between her lips, her soul, her hips.
Was given by her own decision.
A consensual bargaining, for being alive.
For being a creature so prone to movement.
The survival of the imagination.
Her look that cuts the room.
The heart pierced by gloom.
Made her a provocateur for a classless age.
You would smell her on your sheets.
Crave the wet drip that smouldered still on your tongue.
But she would be gone.
Side stepping a fall from a grace she named herself.
Wearing her own crown, made of tinfoil and treasure.
But it will not always be that way.
The legs that part make way for opportunity.
Which always finds its mark, awash with indecision.
She was the girl that left too soon.
She was the guy who bought the moon.
And sold stars instead.
He is not one to remember fondly, his past indiscretions.
But shame had no place in his beautiful heart.
And his story starts, not with a departure.
But a glorious homecoming.
Island
ISLAND
This fear of limitless emotion.
Washes at the shore of my soul.
I fought a war for our love.
Raging like a storm on the face of time.
And now I fall like an island in the sea.
Alone and bare.
Washed by a tide, a poison of loneliness.
Never more to welcome the sun above.
I can only skim sad pebbled tears out to you.
There on the horizon.
That sight of hope, which will never land on my coast.
I glow, and diminish through this all.
Soon nothing but a shell.
That cannot even echo the sea.
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Reaching roots
How deep do these roots need to burrow?
While the wind of the world shakes and batters.
Down deep, past dinosaur bones and bits of myself.
Long forgotten memories and names no longer remembered.
Roots of strength, yet they strangle the small and struggling.
Little sprouts of new dreams which begin deep in the dark of my soul.
Waiting, for just the tiniest flash of light.
Yet the roots need to be strong.
For it’s much further to go on.
And this tree is desperate to reach up to heaven.
Leviathan (Redux)
LEVIATHAN
You might never know it’s there.
It’s been quiet for so long.
Dormant, but strong like indecision.
Lying in its own blackness, biding its time.
It’s older than you, it came before us all.
Moving and shaping like the clouds across the sky.
It does not seek the calm waters, or the tangerine days of summer.
It comes with the storms, the hurricanes of the heart.
When your bow is breaking, and you’re taking on water.
When you are barely holding things together.
Caught on rocks and the shallows of shame.
It seizes those moments.
Gripping you in its darkened grips of despair.
Blocking out the sun with its inky nightmare.
Pulling you down fathoms gasping for air.
To float forever in the torrid turpentine seas below.
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Taken from Leviathan (of the soul) – out now
Raining underneath
Underneath. Down here where it’s calm.
Where the black beauty of the abyss touches my feet.
All is quiet.
All is still.
I’m entombed as if in a coffin.
Locked forever in my own space
Controlling the promise of my ever after.
And then you came.
Pelting my world.
Hurtling across like a comet in my stretching blue sky.
You bring the change, flowing through like a weather system.
Flourishing my eyes open like a new season.
Calling sub-oceanic flowers to bloom within me.
Aquatic forest pines that reach up to touch the surface.
To reach and touch your face.
My hands branch to catch the light you dazzle.
A sudden rush you instill within me like heroin bubbles in my blood.
Coming up too soon, bending my compression that has kept my heart safe.
Heading for the bends.
I’m a fish not born to fly with you.
High where the birds and angels soar.
Hidden in these depths for reasons.
For sins that keep me drowned.
Now it rains under water, puddling the pool of the sea that parts us.
And I drift in the stream of sorrow.
Knowing that the rain on the surface, is really your tears.
The Wind
The wind that howls, is the one that kills.
Blowing through these bones, coming down the hills.
Picking up like the devil’s breath.
It runs amok and hurries my death.
For though I’m not fragile as a slanted tree.
Or small, or weak and feathery.
The wind that howls is beyond my control.
It fans your flames that are burning my soul.
Havoc and Consequence 