Oasis swims

To walk the sands of time, to find the doorway to heaven.
Leaves me breathless.
You put your hands on this skin, and I succumb.
Unabated astral movements behind my eyes.
To know you from somewhere, is to feel you under my skin.
As my blood crashes down the sand dunes on the walls of my heart.
I left you, and found you there.
Waiting for me where the moon sinks.
Threatening never to return.
With honey wine still on your kiss, I will not function.
I slip into another consciousness.
Walking in a dream that quivers on god’s fingers.
Kiss me from dying, and wake me once more.
Let me disappear into your arms that comfort me.
Like a blanket against desert cold.
And I will wash these tears away in the pools of your eyes.
That offer such sweet safety swims.
To the desert floor.

25/01/202325/01/2023 by Mark Ryan Categories: desert, eyes, kissTags: art, cold, comfort, desert, eyes, heart, kiss, oasis, poem, Poetry, swim, treasure, winds 6 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

Fragile to tomorrow

Fill the voids with treasure.
Beauty to banish the dark.
Fill your mind with flowers.
Because you know what is coming.
The fingers around your heart.
Cold as the hope you had for change.
Creaking against tomorrow faintly.
Delicate as god’s trust.
You suck the petals to feel the bloom.
Mother’s womb, and all the dreams you buried.
But the soil and sadness win out.
And the treasure turns to tin foil.
This gloomy dissonance reverberates.
As you fade once more into silence.

16/05/202216/05/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: depression, tomorrow, unhappyTags: art, change, depression, flowers, gloomy, god, grey, music, pain, poem, Poetry, tomorrow, treasure Leave a comment

Particular illusions

A result of you burning our bed.
I lie on the cool grass and watch out for comets.
Racing from Olympus to Paradise.
I pulled off the ropes and entanglements.
Escaping with my life, but not my soul.
Now these clouds that cover the milky way.
Blotting out the moon.
Are really the smoke from the ashes of our home.
Yet suddenly you appear, covered in moon dust.
With starlight diamonds in your eyes.
And you take my hand, and tip the sky over.
Shaking out the stars.
Promising me treasure to be found from our ruins.
Blinding me with Midas light.

14/05/202201/05/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: heaven, moon, treasureTags: art, clouds, fire, galaxy, heaven, heavens, hurt, light, love, moon, olympus, photography, poem, Poetry, sky, treasure, universe, weather, writing 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

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

When you think about your life, I surround you in a gentle sympathy

Oily hands which pin warnings to the walls of your paper cathedrals.
Closing their eyes to the view of sorrow.
It stretched before them, and under your skin.
Cool, when not engulfed in such flames of disgust.
Little cracks in stone, slowly crumble pillars of discontent.
The columns that held our gods too high.
Out of reach, on the horizon.
How can we touch the finger of god.
When we choose to crawl on swollen bellies.
Pick the needle which will penetrate the precious heart.
Kept in glass, and passed down and around but never treasured.
Wake up those angels which sleep inside.
Do not run and hide, from a future which began yesterday.
Tip the grey to another shade and shake out a song.
One which can be played at any funeral.
Signalling a death of something, and the beginning of such wonder.

10/03/202208/03/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: angels, death, treasureTags: angel, angels, books, church, death, future, god, heart, life, poem, Poetry, precious, ruins, skull, treasure, wonder 2 Comments

Resplendent consumption

Though the dark spreads doubt and fear.
It is in the light where she creeps near.
For shadows and gloom she leaves in her wake.
With mournful tunes and deathly ache.
The light is what she needs to feed.
A pulsing urge, like a sprouting weed.
She sucks the light like marrow from bone.
And crawls inside that place called home.
She splits the joy and hope in two.
Suckles each like morning due.
Savouring each fantastic pleasure.
That shrivels for you, but to her is treasure.
This dark and heavy visiting member.
Will drain the light to a dying ember.
And leave you feeling almost dead.
While she licks these words inside your head.
That if darkness fades and you feel lighter.
If hope does spread and things feel brighter.
She will return, like a rolling cloud.
To kill the light with her consuming shroud.

14/01/202203/01/2022 by Mark Ryan Categories: horror, light, monstersTags: at, brightness, creature, dark, darkness, demon, depression, devil, evil, home, horror, hurt hope, light, monster, pain, poem, Poetry, shadows, treasure, weeds 5 Comments

Palpate

To make you consider that what I see is real.
To crack this skin like a mirrored pain.
A reflective love dancing on the wings of happiness.
Clouded and scorched.
Licked and honoured.
A crumpling vision of everything.
Vibrating into trauma.
It’s now tapping now at this skull.
Did I force you to reconsider.
What treasures remain.
Whether it’s me, happy inside you.
Or just a vast ocean of pain.

---

Taken from ‘Everyday Nightmares – out now

04/07/202104/07/2021 by Mark Ryan Categories: heart, heartache, treasureTags: blood, delirium, happiness, heart, kiss, love, poem, Poetry, precious, treasure Leave a comment

Pain is the only useful feeling

It ripped inside, slashing like a frenzied animal.
Thoughts in pieces, history in tatters.
Reborn now into a new day, into a new lonely state.
Half breathing, barely beating a heartbeat that struggled with each step.
Yet alive.
Pain. It hurt still.
Pulsing and throbbing in his soul.
Licking the walls of his existence like a monster greedy for the dark.
How long must I wander here in isolation.
Blaming fate for my circumstance.
For the clouds I am under.
Yet there was a light.
It grew from his spinal cord, sparking where it snapped.
Growing back something else.
The hope he’d swallowed had bathed it.
In god’s hands he’d craved it, once before.
Lessons learned scratched now across his eyes.
The tears of acceptance washed them clean.
Pain, it seems, was his teacher.
To choose a different way, a different road.
Perhaps less travelled.
Inside his hope chest the latch flipped open.
And flowed a feeling, one of many, which dazzled his eyes like stars.

27/06/202127/06/2021 by Mark Ryan Categories: darkness, god, painTags: change, god, hope, hurt, pain, poem, Poetry, spine, travel, treasure 7 Comments

Adeline

Adeline, why do you trouble me so?
Why do you pull down the stars and the moon?
Chalking up these eyes with lunar dust and wonder.
Oh Adeline, do not speak my name.
It crumbles my ground and shakes my resolve.
Moving my inner mantle with volcanic changes of heart
Oh sweet Adeline, keep those lips the distance of the sun.
Rising from my eastern treasure like the dawn.
Blinding if I look that way.
My Adeline, I wish I knew you then.
When my world could make a house for you.
In the forest of fidelity when we were both young.
And hope was still a pearl in our eyes.
Goodbye Adeline, you will always dwell in my hope chest.
Covered in gold at the bottom of the fathoms.
Locked away in time by a key you will never own.

19/06/202118/06/2021 by Mark Ryan Categories: love, moon, oceanTags: art, gold, love, lunar, moon, ocean, poem, Poetry, relationship, sea, stars, sun, treasure, youth 15 Comments

Beauty trapped

Bind my heart, break my bones.
Sneak in when the lights are off.
When my guard is down.
Snap my soul and slip inside.
Overwhelm and consume me like heroin.
The addict in me pulls you near.
Breathe me in, suck me out.
Spun up in your mind like a crystal chandelier.
Precarious precious beauty.
Your hands on my innocence.
Pulling me down, knocking me over.
Teaching me how to fly.

20/04/202117/04/2021 by Mark Ryan Categories: beauty, sex, trappedTags: addict, beauty, bird, crystal, drugs, fly, glass, heart, heroin, kiss, love, poem, Poetry, precious, sex, treasure 4 Comments

Dislocate

This life, that fear of loving.
Of believing what is all around here.
A junction in your bones, fragile and misdirected.
Second hand bodies that fall like sad embarrassed eyes.
Only when the lights are out.
These fears call out your name.
Swim into your dreams and pollutes this bloodstream.
Who touched that velvet treasure?
You take rib, and scream a pleasure.
I feel the truth like each vertebrae.
You dislocate.
You propagate a new feeling within me.
A love so tender and tasty, it reeks of construction.
Of chaos and completion.
Slid off the bone of life.
All the noise seems to fade away.
To a coffin quiet existence that allows me to hear the future.
While you cover this love in salt for protection.
And I hold your bones in mine.
Counting the path of your spine.
Silently whispering to the angels a thanks.
For returning what once was ours.

26/11/2019 by Mark Ryan Categories: angels, bones, love, PoetryTags: angels, art, biology, blackandwhite, blood, body, bones, happy, heaven, love, poem, Poetry, spine, strength, thanks, treasure, vertebrae 5 Comments