When beautiful failure
Comes to you late
Embrace her.
Category Archives: Poetry
Another day
Grey as old bruises
A night
Waved goodbye to
Through a haze of pills
To silent
Creeping
Cranked-high nausea
Buttery butterflied inside
And dried
Bitten lips.
Kiss me
And my spirit drifts
From its monastic cloister
To drive back slum thoughts
Some caught
In this closed head.
Flammable
A fire creeps
Across a land frozen
Inside and out
It chars and blisters
Thin skin
And offers no warmth.
A fire built
On the funeral pyres
Of our young
Kindled by those
Hard-nosed
And feeling no warmth.
Late in the day
The blade licks the whetstone
Dry
The blade sings
Memories
Of when it was rock.
The whetstone sings
Harmonies
Of when it was rain
Drumming,
Making puddles dance
When dinosaurs were distant dreams.
The harvest awaits
Under a boneless sky
Shivering in the warm air.
The blade now lies
Sharpened, ready
For tomorrow is its day.
The cooling breeze
Passes by
It cuts the sky to ribbons.
Talking
In a throat
stuck
words like a fishbone
choking
a hand
loosening a tie
like a noose
and the eyes say it all
nothing here is true
and speaking slowly,
the truth, slowly,
comes peeping around the lies
and dances naked before the world
while the speech continues, confounding and comforting
spinning a spider’s steel-hard web to snare
and draw back in
that truth.
Napowrimo
National Poetry Writing Month! It’s a real thing that I may or may not participate in because the idea of writing a poem every day for a month kind of scares me. I’ll try, though, but I’m not going to be shouting about it unless I get the confidence. So, with that in mind, my first poem is a joke. Great. Lolz.
Tilt Street
Bleary Balearic beats
slouch
down silent stairwells
to touch on ears untroubled
by sleep, with doubt
creeping in at five am.
To The Sky
A plane flies
straight
through the striation of wires
keeping my train –
it never crosses,
though the cables snake
and knot
the blue from the sky.
London opens its throat
it booms and roars
and whines and moans;
London howls to the sky
and I answer
an open heart
beat
matching its ebbing,
flowing,
wordless,
endless cry.
A million fragments
of a trillion thoughts
scattered to the wind,
brought to heel
kept in mind
and thought again.
In the sky drifts
lazily a child’s balloon
massive in steel,
hanging from thunder.
I lean my head
on the train’s smooth wall
and hear
whispered obscenities,
prayers to a vulture god.
Enfield
This was my entry to the National Poetry Competition. I did not win, so you get to read what is, effectively, a loser’s poem. Lucky you.
Brief thoughts on poetry
Poetry, I told myself this morning, is stained glass. Language is like a sheet of glass, a window. Beautiful, often; functional, it allows us to see the world without being in it, and usually we catch our own reflection as we look, fading ghostlike into the landscape. Hard and unyielding, language can be melted and reformed, though it always comes back to what it is, what it was.
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