Lefts, Rights, and Wrongs in Verse
Not as clumsy or random as a paragraph; an elegant weapon, for a more civilized age.
Sunday 26 November 2017
The Closing Tear
it's a miracle you ever
love yourself again.
Given what trauma feels like,
I don't blame you for
wishing it away,
selfishly.
You didn't open it,
didn't do this to yourself,
how could you know
how to close it?
That exposed nerve
causes you to twitch
and shudder
with each quantum breeze.
That brushing-by
breaches any security
you thought
you had rebuilt.
But without your will
and without your work
the machines inside you
soldier on.
You can feed them shit
or gold,
but they will turn to the sun
and work.
Soon you can run a finger
over a bump, once a gash,
and blood flows sleekly beneath,
instead of free.
And while it doesn't match,
and is too soft,
too sensitive,
not quite you -
is there anything so perfect,
anything that means "hope"
quite so much
as fresh, pink, skin?
Thursday 2 November 2017
Commute
Every day
on my way
to work
I pass
the door
we exited
the last time
I held
your hand.
The trip back
down that hallway
was the bus ride
into hell.
Beginning on
a bright fall day
with dinner plans
and concluding
in tears and hatred.
With each fluorescent step
you gripped tighter
while drifting away
and I plodded,
frozen in crisis mode.
Knowing what it all meant.
It was happening again.
I was not powerless
to help it now.
I merely had to
live with
the decision
we made
(Yes, we)
and embrace
simmering, eternal,
guilt and doubt
every day
on the way
to work...
Past the hospital
and relive
your energizing touch
and overjoyed smell
as you held up
that grainy,
black and white image,
and said:
"Right there. That's your baby!"
Monday 23 October 2017
Bobby Pins
Saturday 10 January 2015
At Very Least
When my dogs are making my life filthier,
and covered in hair,
When the best books have no savour,
When every song is bankrupt,
There's no fulfillment
Only stress, and striving
to death and a question mark.
They'd probably eat me
if I died here and now.
When work isn't an anxiety attack
or a black hole
or a way to feed myself;
Just something to do.
A little time with others
is the punchline to the joke
of the other ninety-five percent of life.
Like sorrow is the spearhead
but hope
is the six feet of oak that drive it home.
And love...well, nevermind.
Cooking is irritating
Eating just waste of time
Cleaning is pointless
Staying warm not worth it
Self improvement stinks of fallacy
and all the good advice
I ever took or gave
finds the stumbling block
of insurmountable self.
The words of my cynical
and callous favourites
mount in my soul
into something I wrote
better than they did.
"We are the lucky ones, my dear."
To get to live,
and love,
and hate,
and hurt.
To get to be here at all.
To see and hear and all.
And I thank every book I ever read
For my rational brain.
Because I know things
that I don't feel.
Thursday 30 October 2014
Assuming You're Right
I like to hope that the sky will one day split apart
And spew back verbal vulgarity and chemical death
(I'm all about settling scores)
The sickening saturations it never asked for,
And we'll all be party to a most unnatural disaster.
Then, much refreshed, that simple wonder
you made a god
will swallow the bloviating, pandering bullshit
you built a life around
and take back what it's owed -
Your lives - "souls" if you prefer.
I bet that sounds crazy.
But until that time,
keep acting, confusing, offering, appeasing
but never searching, never asking.
Even if we do seven years tribulation
Then one thousand with this king of nations,
And you've moved on past the grave,
Some of you raptured away,
You'll find when that drama is said and done,
This will all keep spinning,
And probably be better off.
That's one there's plenty of proof for.
Friday 5 September 2014
Sorrow, Smiles, Sarcasm and Stout
songs of my ancestors,
Where things are tuned
and toned down
as I've ever been.
After the hundredth time I rejected a set up,
a friend asked me:
"What even makes you happy?"
And I had no answer
But a blank stupid stare.
"You need some joy in your life!"
And I couldn't argue there.
"You need someone to help you
act your age. Be young for once."
But I've been old
Since I've been at all,
So I shrugged.
I've never wanted this.
I'm so tired of being tired.
I don't want to remember,
Or recall,
with every thing I do.
Like
After some off-colour silliness,
another friend said:
"You're so wonderful,
you'll find someone to love you
and make you as happy as you make us."
And with no shame I replied. "I did."
I saw, in her eyes,
her heart break for me,
despite the petty insignificance of my life
compared to her trials.
And her hug was the best one I've had in a long while.
I see that face still
Burned in the back of my eyelids
The light after the dark
Floating in the aether
of a sanity severed
Questioning myself
Calling my own bluffs and obsession
Reaching, in a dream, like a joke, for a dead past
I wake and fake a solace in false confession.
I hand out advice I can't take
And break and wither
I have become rot
Comparing falsehood
to a drifting now
You are the last
If ever there was a first
Or has it always been a lie?
Have these feelings always been a bad joke?
A pun of psychology and biology,
while the robot rusts.
A few years and change of sunlight and silver lining
and then the dark skies returned.
Well, it does feel like home.
Was I just two faced,
living two lives?
Goddamn me for a hypocrite.
Aw fuck it,
You gotta take what you can get.
Wednesday 30 April 2014
If Jesus is always the answer, how lame is the question?
like a lung?
I tucked and rolled out of
a runaway train
of jealousy
and mistrust.
Overnight, becoming
everything I ever
earned myself.
Found my stride again
(finally)
in an uphill sprint;
Snapping every tendon,
Baby this is how I do things
Never too old to change, but
why would I subject you
to me?
Learned to swim
choking
and drowning
in a dead salt sea
of cliche tears
and archetypal heartache.
Opened my mouth to myself.
Sometimes it's better to lose who you used to be;
The first person to forgive is yourself.