Shadows on your eyelids

Scraping away the amnesia.
The skim of a time longed to be forgotten.
Yet not a distant past, but a painful present.
Gifting nothing but sorrow.
The lights have begun to fade.
Twinkling and dimming as if being submerged.
The chalky depths capture you now.
Tiptoeing you towards your apocalypse.
Towards our regret and loss.
If only we could drown the weight around you.
That poor thing that sinks in teeth as fragile as salvation.
Weak as the gap between us now.
Yet these acts of love pepper the sky.
Like dying stars that fill your eyes.
Shuttering and flashing,
Remembering a time when you were winning.
Tomorrow looms now like the Nullarbor.
Endless and lonely, threatening such unknown.
It sets into your bones and destroys your reason.
A tsunami to wash away dust and life.
The hand now clasps for hope and healing.
Pulling away just empty feathers.

05/02/202305/02/2023 by Mark Ryan Categories: death, grief, hopeTags: art, death, desert, fragile, grief, hope, loss, medication, nullabor, pain, poem, Poetry, present, time, tomorrow, winning 19 Comments

Forever might never come

Somewhere someone is dying.
A last word stuttering from lips.
Visions imprint on eyelids.
Forever.
The tins of the past stack up.
Filling space in your mind as they rust.
Tumbling from the attic like heavy Christmas decorations.
Some shiny, others cut where the edges hurt still.
Somewhere a soul is born.
Breathing it’s first breath as a mother shivers.
All this while the earths spins in continuum.
Caring not for the specs aboard.
Now, that is all that matters.
The imprints of gold beneath your feet.
As you make your own journey.
A destination in mind.
A port of departure behind.
But now, as the wind blows through you like a ghost.
And your skin turns towards the sun like a plant.
Now is what truly matters.
Who knows when the world will stop spinning.
Or when we cartwheel off into space and nothingness.

10/01/202310/01/2023 by Mark Ryan Categories: age, future, travelTags: birth, death, earth, future, gold, journey, now, past, poem, Poetry, space, time, travel 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

Distance corroded by time

Lost, feeling the way out.
Travelling through the veins of god.
Hearing that global heartbeat.
Washing away in the flow.
I want to swallow the moon tonight.
To feel the tidal shift in my stomach.
To spit out the bones of the past.
And the well-travelled memories.
I touch this earth and it feels like home.
Yet when my eyes blink open.
I am crushed by the weight of this world.
I belong here, but a million miles behind in time.
Waiting for the palm leaves and ferns to sprout in my veins.
I wish to return, yet also remain.
Eating forbidden fruit.
Running with the beasts.
Perhaps the change will come from inside.
Washing over me like conscience.
Seeing the divine in all that my eyes lay upon.
This is our home.
It is our only one.
Ninety-two million miles from the sun.

02/11/202219/05/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: sun, time, travelTags: bones, city, earth, god, home, lost, memories, poem, Poetry, return, space, star, sun, time, timetravel, travel, veins 6 Comments

Recapture

The silent soul who wades this world.
With brittle bones and sad inclinations.
Arrives at a place in a memory.
Strung up with words that bind.
Does he fall deeper into the despair of an age?
Of that turning sun that snatches all that lay in his hands?
Or does he shift, arch his back to the march of time.
Following from the front, the best laid plans?
A flag in hand, and a mouth shut.
Marching to a funeral beat.
A soldier in a war of change.
Corrupting from within.

17/10/202219/09/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: age, sad, warTags: age, death, despair, fight, following, fool, guns, hope, poem, Poetry, sadness, solider, sun, time, war, world 1 Comment

Hope against Hope

The blood settles, as if time holds its breath.
Cupped in a hush, frightened to flow.
The rest awaits.
A shuffle in the mind.
The attic of the body, like a restless Dorian Gray.
When the eyes reveal the true horror of the ordinary.
A Day, much like yesterday.
Comfort swallows, the needed search forever longing.
Secure and safe.
How else do we move, if not shaken from the spot.
The mountain beckons, a summit that seems never conquerable.
A defeatist voice that echoes in your ears.
Humming its way through your muscles, reversed intent.
Until a swing of the pendulum, a signal fire of age.
Of time wasted, sand spilling from your hands.
Dust in the blood.
Your time is now, it was actually then.
We enjoy the blessing every day, to start again.

15/10/202215/10/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: blood, body, hopeTags: art, blood, body, change, climb, comfort, escape, hope, hurt, light, loss, mind, mountain, poem, Poetry, safe, time, voices Leave a comment

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

A Once before and yet to be

Words were meaningless then.
Arrows and honey lost in the storm.
Traveling so far, just to find a home.
I gave everything I had away.
With broken bones I crawled.
Like octopi coming out of the sea.
A starfish, growing back.
My world is not littered with diamonds.
Those words, once so meaningless, do not sparkle still.
But they do feather my nest.
A poet, a teller of stories.
Some long, others gone.
But sadly, and shockingly.
My own tale of loss and redemption.
Yet it echoes deeply into my other worlds.
And rings out in a life yet lived.

10/09/202210/09/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: octopus, stories, timeTags: diamonds, future, hope, loss, octopi, poem, poet, Poetry, redemption, sea, starfish, stories, tales, time 1 Comment

Days of correction

We wait for you, as the heavens fall.
As the skin begins to be pulled from our bones.
The sea foam swallows.
Thunder follows.
And all around the sparks flicker.
We wait for you to catch up.
The lead in your blood to bleed out.
A correction, an alteration.
A mind frame recalibration.
I wait for you, till the end of time.
Modifying what was placed inside your DNA.
The world is ending, and time hangs like a necklace.
Heavy and beautiful around your neck.
You need to move faster.
Evolve and leave the husk of darkness resigned,
to a space only the ghosts will welcome.
We are in the age of correction.
A simple state of detection.
Of knowing what to take, and what to leave behind.

24/08/202215/05/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: angels, change, timeTags: angel, beauty, bones, change, correction, dna, hope, light, motivation, necklace, poem, Poetry, sparks, time Leave a comment

Photosynthesis in retrograde

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.

30/07/202212/05/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: death, hurt, loveTags: art, flower, light, petals, plants, poem, Poetry, rain, sleep, sonar, sparks, star, sunshine, time 2 Comments

Leave us where we lay

His heart, now the colour of his wife.
Ashen grey and broken.
The urn smashed, scattering them both across the clouds.
Little flecks of life stuck on the window of the world.
As the volcanoes rumbled and the gods groaned.
Down they both came in the rains.
Licked up by the wood spirits and the humans below.
Pooling in the heart of the world.
Cells and shells, finding the seabed of the soul.
Undulating to the sound of time.
Those tears of the gods which fell in this passing.
Are drunk only by the sinners, like sweet wine.

23/07/202212/05/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: death, gods, rainTags: art, ash, clouds, death, drunk, god, gods, heart, humans, loss, mountains, olympus, poem, Poetry, rain, sea, sinners, skeleton, soull, spirits, tears, time, volcanoe, wine 4 Comments

Once never here

Mind and muscle try to escape gravity.
Standing too soon.
Trying to lift off into the unknown.
Far away from here.
Hanging onto nothing but indecision.
You close your eyes to the jet stream, and that fear of falling.
You feel it now in your veins.
Coursing through the difference like a teenager.
Struggling for understanding.
But they could never see. They would never know.
Eager to cover you in un-precious stones.
Which is why you must leave.
To sail on the solar winds that taste of honey.
Forget the palatableness of decay.
For a distant shore will feel sweeter.
Than this rocky edge of adolescence.

06/07/202211/05/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: fight, time, youthTags: age, art, change, fly, flying, gravity, poem, Poetry, solar, space, stones, sun, teenage, time, youth 6 Comments

Champagne after a funeral

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.

03/07/202203/07/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: christmas, funeral, ghostsTags: art, champagne, christmas, clouds, death, drink, fate, funeral, ghost, ghosts, jesus, poem, Poetry, presents, time, tree, weeping 8 Comments

An astonishing indifference

Weighted, not by gravity.
Or the tear that hangs like lead on a golden cheek.
But pulled and suffocated by a lack of understanding.
A love you swept underneath those neatly placed rugs.
Pushed me to the back pages of the book you barely read.
Maddening words and itchy eyes.
The scratch on your heart you cannot itch.
You replace my thoughts, pull them away like calendar days.
Leaving me wandering in a limbo with ghosts as friends.
Familiar now, to those empty souls.
Who roam and moan in a void you will not listen to.
But the love is there, I saw it fly like a sparrow into your ribs.
It flutters madly, though you clipped its wings.
Locking it away, with your tiny golden key; kept under your tongue.
Behind all the masks on your face.
A world now sees only callousness and indifference.
But you are so different.
Underneath.

26/06/202226/06/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: ghosts, love, timeTags: art, bird, calendar, care, departure, ghosts, indifferent, key, love, mask, poem, Poetry, ribs, soul, time Leave a comment

Bestowed

Your voice, it calls me higher.
Cracking this concrete world which tethers us.
The challenge in arriving, with a heart still heaving.
Shaken to the core, for the love you try to give.
You turned away and I was lost again.
A return settles in my soul.
With eyes that learned to love once more.
And hands that try to heal.
Don’t speak to me yet, for I may shatter.
Listening to such sweet benediction.
From lips I wish to meet.
To taste again love’s magic.
These expecting steps, lead me further.
As I clumsily tumble into now.
You say you want me.
But the moon begins to weep.
As you begin to wash away my sadness.
Kissing the scars, some made by you, in low starlight.
Skin to skin.
Drenched now in honey, sticky within.
Sweet sparkles.
With strung up stars waiting to explode.
Disintegrating now into brilliant lights of diamonds.

22/06/202209/05/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: kissing, love, starsTags: art, benediction, heal, healing, honey, kiss, kissing, love, loving, magic, moon, poem, Poetry, sadness, shatter, soul, starlight, stars, time 2 Comments

Selfish servitude

Now that we are so anaesthetised.
We settle for blankness.
Without any compromise.
You suck the soul from us every day.
Filling the void with countenance and suspicion.
Such a beautiful paradox, what a time to be alive.
So lazy by design.
You wear the masks of the familiar.
Cutting the ties that bind us to our future.
And who are we to utter, the silent stutter into separation.
Your desperations keep us scared.
There is no oil here, only pits of anger.
Bubbling to the surface.
Such disturbance now at the house.
The roaring of a mouse, of a nation who were followers.
Now numbering the chorus that’s out of control.
Democracy hangs in the air, like the miasma of the 19^th century.
Fogging London once more with a noxious distaste.
We all wear our own tin foil crowns.
Crunching the bones of despair.
The Fear of standing for something.
I am but one of many, lounging in my paralysis.
A self-inflicted state of disconnect.
Waiting for the numbness to arrive.

11/06/202211/06/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: anger, pain, selfTags: britain, change, crown, Democracy, drugs, EU, law, masks, nation, numb, parliment, poem, poems, Poetry, time, uK 8 Comments

Devoir

The noise was smothered by the night.
Lain down in god’s whisper.
So deep the mind fell.
Beyond fossilised creatures and secrets in tar.
The moon hummed in its milky orbit.
Delicious solitude descended.
A quietening of existence.
That is where I’ll find you.
Beyond the chaos and the trauma that litters these lives.
Your sanctuary for my soul.
A marbled palace adorned with tears and precious memories.
A temple I wish to practice our religion.
So light those candles and sing me to sleep.
With conflicting thoughts of tomorrow.
And your voice crawling over me.
That when the day blazes into this skin.
Purifying each sin.
The renewal within, is possible.
Only by your sweet vow.
To remain.

08/06/202208/05/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: love, peace, timeTags: care, change, lonely, love, marble, moon, peace, poem, Poetry, pray, religion, solitude, tears, temple, time, tomorrow 2 Comments

Hold it all in

Cocooned in a love that had died.
Brought to life once more in this time.
In a moment, connected not by space or matter.
But by the golden dance of hope and perseverance.
I’m on the verge of ecstasy again.
So I swallow it down, keep it all in.
The smile I suffocate with my lips.
Breathing in the heady acceleration of this future.
Trapping it in amber.
No words come from you, yet I hear your voice.
Within, spinning spiderwebs of trust and delicate touches.
Heaving my ribs to make way for the love.
Expanding.
Melting this iceberg.
Though this moment won’t last.
As I feel the morning rays creep over the windowpane.
Threatening today.
And tomorrow you my choose to go away.
Now is all that matters.
It feels, as I collapse into forever.
Washed in your eyes, the drenching of starry hazel plumes.
Making me divine.
So I keep you in time, trapped like beauty.
Forever.
Mine.

06/06/202206/06/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: future, happy, loveTags: care, dream]sun, forever, future, happy, hope, kiss, lips, love, poem, Poetry, time Leave a comment

On cosmic sand

Varied in hues, blurring to a view of angelic replication.
Divinity leaking from your bones.
I find you there, holding on to the edge of redemption.
Picking pearls up from our past.
The beach weighs heavy, cresting out from our circumstance.
I had to travel to find you.
You had to forget to believe.
In this peaceful rush of sweet sea air.
Mottling the very face of time.
I have returned, to that place where forever was promised.
Now, as sparks in the sand threaten joy.
The colour of contentment washes over you.
Knowing that the next step will demand such strength.
And in the arms of each other.
We are rock steady and prepared.

21/05/202207/05/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: beach, love, spaceTags: angel, at, beach, beauty, colours, divine, forever, love, poem, Poetry, rock, steady, time 16 Comments

Tragedy ending on this

As the city hums, and chokes the flowers.
This mind refracts.
Stuttering like the trains which snake beneath my feet.
Beneath my bones which rot like timbers of time.
Belonging to a place that clouds and coughs.
Surrounding like a multitude of sin.
This is what I wanted after all.
But the magpies pull the treasures away.
Spiriting the sparkle skyward like seasons.
I feel old and rooted.
Yet freshly hewn and tender.
A ghost of a ship stranded in an international airport.
Someone’s lost luggage.
Unclaimed but missed.
What if the cracks and voids are filled.
By only nonsense and the spit of this current time.
Fuzzy images and words that make no sense line my eyes.
And roar while I try to sleep.
This sleep, this dream.
Shaking in and out of a nightmare.
Which I chose to play.

13/05/202213/05/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: city, nightmares, timeTags: airport, art, birds, city, dreams, fate, flowers, ghost, lonely, nightmares, poem, Poetry, sad, ship, time, treasure 3 Comments

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.

27/04/202220/03/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: goodbye, hurt, seasTags: birds, bones, cry, departure, flight, heartache, holy, hurt, monsoon, ocean, poem, Poetry, rain, raining, sad, sea, seperate, storm, tears, time, timezone, travel, water Leave a comment

Nothing wrong here

Dressed in those emotions.
Wore the role you wanted.
Let it drip like turpentine.
You showed me your Jesus scar.
And I cut through the confusion.
You leave me buzzing like a motel sign.
Only you could scratch me that deep.
Rush through me like amphetamines.
What did they say when you returned?
Did you make it feel so numb?
Feasting on cartilage and present tense.
Pronouns and words unspent.
Yet the dark offered such shelter and shadows.
Calling you back to another brilliant night.
Where you looked ahead.
Seeing us there.
Stepping over the bodies of others.
To Look me in the eye.
Celebrate me deep.
They all wanted to be wrong.
Singing up their symphony of sorrow.
For a loss that had not yet begun.
Bone and cheek.
Questioning our mortality as you trim the fat.
All conquering weirdos.
Letting the unknown collapse in quiet apathy.

24/04/202224/04/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: dark, drugs, skeletonTags: collapse, dark, drugs, emotions, hurt, love, motel, night, poem, Poetry, scars, time, weirdo Leave a comment

Spirited

You see?
All of this remains.
Before. Behind. Way after.
The crucible cracks and splutters in its creation.
Offering golden wings in which to ascend.
Where will those heavy wings take us.
On that lunar breeze which blows from the lips of god.
A substituted living now folds into the ocean.
This blessing of cotton wraps around my eyes.
Yet still I see.
If I wait for you, what dies in my veins?
If I go now, will you remain?
The hesitation catches me like asthma.
Your love pollutes my body like oxygen.
Fixing me to rise only when your lungs heave.
At times we are at a distance.
Calling half a world away.
Yet still I remain, waiting for you to see.
Waiting and believing.
That love in your eyes.

13/04/202220/03/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: angels, flight, loveTags: angels, blood, delay, eyes, flight, god, grows, growth, hope, love, pain, poem, Poetry, sprout, time, veins, waiting, wings Leave a comment

Bord / Edge

Debout sur cette rive une fois de plus.
Sur le bord de l’existence.
Je voussens dans le vent.
Je me sense arrosé dans le marée.
Est-ce que je me vois marcher sur cette plage?
Ou je me sens perdu dans un million de grains de sable.

–

Stand on this shore once again.
On the edge of existence.
I’m standing in the wind.
I feel watered in the tide.
Do I see myself walking on this beach?
Or feel lost in a million grains of sand.

09/04/202210/03/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: beach, death, lossTags: beach, death, decay, lost, love, poem, Poetry, sad, sand, sea, time, water, waves 2 Comments

Ascend

What have you done?
Today, this life; where have you gone?
Which angry root did you pull out?
What weak bone did you break?
What flood turned to drought?
Which love to an ache.
You may forget everything in the end.
As time shuffles by, and souls begin to bend.
But you have each moment, each second in the sun.
A little tiny diamond, reserved for each one.
To pick up today, and more the day after.
A small little treasure, like happiness and laughter.
So forget the mould and oil that covers you like gloom.
And go out and discover, shoot for the moon.

03/04/202202/04/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: change, hope, moonTags: bones, change, diamond, hope, inpsire, moon, motivation, poem, Poetry, rhyme, rocket, soul, space, strong, sun, time, tomorrow, treasure, weak 6 Comments