Stop rooting around
and gazing at the finery.
Stop staring at the bottom
of the bin they’ve put you in.
You’re worth so much more
than those wailing sighs,
and blodshot nights,
that bruise your heart
in awkward fight.
Don’t you understand?
There is noble majesty
in the darkest maggot bowl -
burning bright and lighting
rusted scrape and tin,
and meaning so much more
than other unkind souls
will ever mean to me.
I saw them.
Kissing in the whispered breeze,
Like tandem bulrush reeds knocked
And fervent in lover’s wind.
The careful stoop of him meeting rise
And hope of her, leaning, bowing, bending -
Brushstroking the air in abandoned pose.
In tender togetherness they moved
Like star-twinned vapour trails,
The ones that fade through necklaced night
Before ascent of heated azure days.
So strange, I thought to see them here
To see such delightful intimacy.
And then, I realised.
These were just
my memories.
Can you run faster than the truth?
Can you catch it in your hands,
And throw it back to us?
Strike the bullseye!
Split the apple!
Storm the ramparts!
We all have targets
in our hearts.
Does a flame know when it burns?
Or of its brethren’s fellow toil?
All burn bright because they must
And all of this is down to trust.
Is this faith, or faith in destiny?
No call to idols and unproved deities,
Who comprehend these things that vex
Apart from Artist’s charcoal scratch.
Let us be caressed
like refreshed lovers,
underneath fingertip rain.
Let us lie below the sky
and feel the wake up calls,
falling like soft arrows -
into valleys of tired skin.
Let us smile amid the downpour.
Let us swim in rivers formed.
It is Summer and now
we should welcome rain.
There’s more here
than you shall ever know,
and that’s the way
of things.
Here,
we are all but only here
in this strange
invented place.
But together
we roll, as two -
like bonded wheels
over ancient tracks.
Any more than this,
we dare not dream -
but that’s O.K.
by me.
Obvious really…
I
like,
punctuation.
It really helps -
to frame the words.
Like breaths and sighs,
and pauses - reigning track of thought.
But then, sometimes, it’s frustrating;
stutter and muddle - jolt and bolt.
Things come out …. fractured
and staid. But then again -
I’m getting there.
Wherever,
that,
is.