The Safety of Number

The vinyl crackles from the corner,

The strained heartache of the mourners

Mirrored as they arrive in throngs;

No one here quite knows where one belongs.

False allusions, the air tainted –

Not one fellow is acquainted

With those with whom they arrived here.

Random gaggles approach in fear;

In those groups they come, the lumber

Thick for the safety of number.

They sought – but they found - no solace

Expected peace that is modest,

Abundant, glorious, all theirs

And now they mourn what is not there.

Never was? One cannot be sure;

They certainly found an allure

Amongst the music of the room –

Too bad what they heard was not true.

Waiting

The wounds, under your skin

Shine a light on the fight you can’t win

With your guns and your weapons

To the enemy, you come second.

Try as you might, give it your all

Beaten down, you still stand tall

But that’s enough, the fight is rough,

You can’t win a war just with luck.

And I’m waiting, waiting,

To grant you your wish,

This Christmastime, the candle burns,

It’s held in your hands, the whole world turns.

If I could cast a miracle,

I’d give you all you ask

This winter night

In the light that you bask

I’d give you everything

And all the rest

But here I stand, empty now,

Useless and hopeless.

In the hollows of the waking day,

I’m the love that you need

And here we pray

Yet the wreath is laid.

Here you are, the seasons are wild,

Let them face your inner child.

Stubborn and strong, you won’t give up

Steadfast heart, you hold onto love.

With the wake of the day, you face the storm

Cold and dark, yet your heart’s still warm

Chasing the wind, chase it away

Moving on to see the next day.

And I’m waiting, waiting,

To grant you your wish,

This Christmastime, the candle burns,

It’s held in your hands, the whole world turns.

If I could cast a miracle,

I’d give you all you ask

This winter night

In the light that you bask

I’d give you everything

And all the rest

But here I stand, empty now,

Useless and hopeless.

In the hollows of the waking day,

I’m the love that you need

And here we pray

Yet the wreath is laid.

I hold up my hands

I know I’ve done all that I can.

There’s not much more left to say

Except I hope to say that you’ll be back soon,

Back to me one day.

If I could cast a miracle,

I’d give you all you ask

This winter night

In the light that you bask

I’d give you everything

And all the rest

But here I stand, empty now,

Useless and hopeless.

In the hollows of the waking day,

I’m the love that you need

And here we pray

Yet the wreath is laid.

The Fallen Old Log

He sits ready on the fallen old log
Awaiting a tale of high mystery
Found in the depths of a mind cloaked in fog,
A story reshaped all through history.
The man recalls about his long-lost love
Hiding under a different - fresh - name
Yet it never gets old. A soaring dove
Circles above, a gift of peace, a flame
Of new hope. A love reborn forever
And not aging. Unlike this sage, who speaks
Of what is lost, holds tight as a tether
When he must let go, must change what he seeks.

His love is a memory, gold indeed;
What is so precious is not what he needs.

Slack

Trap him with whispers
And beat him with taunts.
Ridicule that which
He flounces and flaunts.
Rattle his bones,
And watch him twitch,
Make him hear voices,
Those that bewitch

Both the meek naïve
And the steadfast wary.
Invoke those dreams
That recur, never vary
And instead pray upon him,
His outlandish ideals.
Test what he thinks,
Second-guess what he feels.

What's your reality?
What do you see?
From all of his doubt
He will never be free.
Hear our winds call
And speak to his fears
Until his resolve is broken
By a faint stream of tears.

Burn him inside out,
Words drenched in acid.
Now he is ravaged, far from
His past, tame and placid.
He's changing before us
Into something never seen.
Nothing to recognise, gone,
From the wreckage we cannot glean

A single memory. Down and out.
His body is slack.
But amongst this ruin
His voice still speaks back.
His voice fights back.

The Chase

I am no hunter

So why partake in the chase?

I drop my gun -

This is no hunt. This is no race.

Nor am I the hunted,

The weak. I am strong, running free

With no more constraint because

Nature is mine. To live is to see.

I am not waiting like prey 

Fearful of the bite,

But I am not ruthless by

Dancing and leaping amongst the fight.

A bullet cannot hit me anymore

Or at least leave a scar.

Time is a shield

That I have not used so far.

The hunting ground is small

But I have no role in this war;

For now I seek safety,

Seek to wander No Man's Land no more.

I hope the wounded seek it soon, too - 

All in good time.

I have watched these hunts, but it is time I turned

To find a land that I can call mine.

Season's Grievings

The chatter falls away
And with it the mistletoe dies.
The Christmas spirit diminishes,
The season's grievings survive.

To the New Year ahead we look
With every intention to forget this past,
But that which haunts me is that which takes me there,
Where every misgiving and every mistake will be my last.

Saying goodbye would be a dishonour
To everything which has given me what I need to know
And marked every change on the path I have taken;
If I said goodbye I would never again say hello.

An altered date fixes nothing at all
Except the number of which I write in my script.
Each negativity cannot be erased by one little digit,
Nor will it be changed by magic, through a flick of the wrist.

So many smiles twisted by all that strain,
Nights full of worry and days full of passion,
Every indecision alongside the insane -
What does it take for all that to happen?

The season's grievings survive
All a part of true living.
"New Year, new me." Lies.
My own spirit remains, and that's why I'm winning.

Casualty

A violet smoke manifests the room,

Arising from slumber as the dawn approaches.

The dreams are cloaked in haze

And extinguished as this smoke reproaches

 

All that lived the night before.

Reality awakens to hide away

The falsities of reverie, believed

To be true, never spoken beyond the light of day.

 

The fumes are fatal, as suffocating

As truth. The truth should never

Be a fight, but a casualty of happiness,

The proudest of any endeavour.

 

Wherever this fine art may be found,

The conjuring of dreams –

Let the truth be known to oneself;

The smoke is not as toxic as it seems.

Praha

Founded circa 1306 BC; population 1.26 million, annual tourist population 8.08 million.

Cigarette butts glow like candles along the curb,
Still flickering after those last intense puffs
That took away the stresses of the daily grind
And replaced them with smoky satisfaction.

The fumes of the Underground infuse
With the toxicity of those spirals of smoke
That are caught in the rush of passing cars.
An urgency prevails amongst the timelessness

Of the amblers, travellers, flâneurs
Who search for the deepest rooted culture
In this permanent wave of exigent travail
Crashing through the delicate history towering down.

The cobbles are eternally awake
To welcome the next pilgrim, at leisure or otherwise.
One after the other they fall into this sea
And are swept away

To become part of the city, the oxygen that it breathes.
Everyone is faceless, native or nomad,
Lost and, alas, found in the ashes of burning tobacco and racing cars,
Oblivious entirely to their neighbours lost beside them:

This endless carnival of vague apparitions parades the streets,
A choir of angels, a celestial congregation from around the globe.
Their voices, low and reaching, soft and stark,
All call in unison, joyous in measure,
                               'Welcome to Prague.'

The Busker

"If music be the food of love, play on." - William Shakespeare

The busker sits against the wall,
A little hat at his feet.
It is a busy day, heaving,
As he faces into the heat
Of the Spanish plume above,
Weighing heavy over his denim-clad chest.
Still, the smiling chap plays on,
This noise, this poise crafting his best.

He strums out his simple tunes
For a penny or two, he asks no more
Of the passers-by who turns their heads
From his misplaced allure.
Conviction comes from his lungs
And passion pours from his eyes.
Lyricism drifts from his mouth
And he soars. He flies.

The music man is an oracle,
Profanes with his unworthiest hand
And makes sweet melody to his love.
The chords echo in this bustling land;
No one hears him
But he is not singing for the crowd.
I pay him not a penny, but my time
To his heart, beating out, beating loud.

Second Sight

Little-known fact - owls are far-sighted and his struggle to clearly see things that are close and otherwise obvious.

The drums herald a newfound track;
One million straws upon his back,
He pushes on and grinds his feet -
Something calls to him within this newfound beat.

The path ones, so dim and dark,
Without bright light, so coldly stark
From he clarity of the past.
Watch out, dear Monkey, beat moves fast.

Beat moves fast. Beat moves fast. Beat moves -
It stops. The path ends here, and here proves
Uncharted - these unknown bounds
Are bordered by shrill animal sounds.

Darkness fades in such a manner
That the Monkey is lost amidst the clamour -
The path has ended. The crescendo peaks;
The silence beckons, one voice speaks.

It does not matter what he says,
But what he does lays all else to rest.
The Wise Owl casts into shadow
The straws that were once a hallow.

He flies, not above me, but with me,
The past shrillness becoming symphony.
The path remains dark, but with each step on this night
The Wise Owl is my second sight.

Forgetting

"Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us." - Oscar Wilde

What is a memory?
A temporal compound of moments
Unremarkable in their poignancy
When in the grand scheme of life
They comprise mere seconds amongst years.
Each is one day lost, cherished or not;
Sentimentality of the forlorn memory
Wears thin with age, worn away when aged.

What is a memory?
The loss of that sentiment
And the failure of fundamentality.
To recast into the depths of the mind
Is a rescue mission
For something edging ever further away,
And yet it still survives.
Pensive strength turns to strife.

What is a memory?
Interminable remembrance
Of something that lived, lives in, and is still to live longer,
Hibernating until rediscovery -
That is a memory of veritable worth.
It is nothing if it lapses with time;
The beauty of a memory is that it is birthed anew
With every failed chance of forgetting.

Echo

Refrain (n.) - a much repeated saying or idea.

An echo resonates with the clarity
Found in the haze of inveiglement.
Original ballads of a refined form are rare;
Plagiarism echoes some early majesty.

The melody of the refrain is enticing, invoking,
A provocation of mistrust birthed only in such a tone
Of rhythm and texture, of crests and falls:
A cresting chorus of screams, a trust that falls.

A certain type of poetry is conjured in your voice.
The words are so comforting and abundant,
A false pretence of one's heart.
Like the greatest of ancient philosophers,

To each new ear that tale is retold, reborn.
Re-imagination enriches a new soul in all that it seeks to find
And when the story was first told, no doubt, you crafted a masterpiece
But today your refrains are meaningless, vague repetitions;

They are an elegy for the heart you wish to revive.

The Incendiary

Words can change a nation, but still ruin an individual.

Embers of the citadel
Lie beneath my chariot of truth.
It burnt to the ground in a day
Every antiquity, every modernity, lost.

The gilted wheels turn,
Whisking the ashes into a frenzy
That's not too dissimilar
To the one incited by your passion.

The charcoaled remains are your doing
And that passion of yours is virulent.
It is overcoming, intoxicating,
And to succumb to it feels so good.

The passion - poison - is an incendiary,
Coarse in my veins.
Cascades of venom empower me
Like your flames that took the citadel.

The ashen fatality beneath my chariot
Is what I am destined for,
For rushes of poison escape from my insides out
Until I am hollow, too, amongst this emptiness.

Nothing gives you strength of these measures
Except the infusion of toxicity such as this;
But the passion is the chariot to truth, to vivid reality
And all, even I, fall victim to its poison with time:

                                                I will burn.

Maître de langue

Someone else taking your words so that they have the strength to say their own can be their greatest downfall.

Down the long-lost winding path we venture,
A course we choose without an end in sight -
So we hope for one. A wild conjecture
Blinds our eyes as if we're shrouded in night.
What one looks for is lost in translation
As words have no value except with you:
Commander, maître de langue, frustration
That my value to you is false, untrue.
Hearing your footsteps echo, your stride strong;
I know you shan't wait so listen to me.
Just mark these words, because I am not wrong -
Watch down this path, it winds inside you, see.
        It is possible to lose yourself there -
        I already have. Please, take note, and take care.

The Broken Hourglass

Happiness - the only thing that can't hide in the dark.

Glass shattered on the floor,

The remains of our time.

Everything was clockwork,

All entirely sublime

Until right now, the end.

"Unexpected," you'd say.

"Have no regrets, be strong."

I hear your voice replay

Even if you're long gone.

And it hurts, but to see

The silent pain you feel

Inflicts much more on me.

It would be so selfish

To ask you to revert

Your choice. I care too much

To add to all your hurt.

One day it won't be raw

But for now I hurt, too.

I keep falling to tears -

Oh, to be friends with you...

But I accept your wish

And would not try to change

Your mind, our time. Guard the

Joy, so real, without range.

 

In my hands lay your strength

To go and find our fate

But now glass is shattered

And sand strewn. I so hate

That our time has ran thin,

Long-lost amongst the sands;

At least I can treasure

One last smile at your hands.

An Introduction

Things like this are always so incredibly awkward, so straight to it. I've always struggled to say what I feel (mostly because I mumble or just can't say certain phonemes) and bottling things up isn't very good for a harmonious soul. I started writing to be able to say exactly what I mean and poetry lets me do this. I don't claim to be a poet laureate or think of myself as the next Shakespeare, but I like to write and think sharing would be good. So I hope you enjoy (and if you don't please tell me because I'd rather not be embarrassing myself (on a serious note, any critique goes (within reason))). Read away...