A small collection of poems, with original artwork, is now available to buy here:
https://wordsforghosts.com/book/
All money raised will be donated to Spirit of the Rainbow Heron.
A small collection of poems, with original artwork, is now available to buy here:
https://wordsforghosts.com/book/
All money raised will be donated to Spirit of the Rainbow Heron.
Summer:
a late evening sky as you wait
for something, for nothing;
you understand what that
“certain slant of sunlight” truely is &
know you won’t ever need to explain why
all art is a beautful lie
containing multitudes of meaning…yet
even as the years grow unheeded
still you can’t decide between believing
“Une vie pourrie vaut mieux qu’une putain d’illusion”
or if beatiful lies are sometimes truths
in disguise…
but for now there is only the fading
colours of the sun &
in this moment, that is enough.
After these two years I have learnt
how to follow every step across each
floor; every right angle of every wall,
to walk toward the shower/shitter
in darkness: I could make the walk
with my eyes closed.
Two years ago – February
14th – such a lovely Valentine gift! –
I moved in to this house of unloved things
& became one of them.
Until gold & blue colours, like
bright sunlight meeting an ocean,
appeared at my door.
Soon, every week we broke the law,
as society locked-down I crossed town
so we could spend days & nights
drinking together, fucking each other
as if there would be no tomorrow
& not caring either way.
Then the weeks
became months; the winter
crawled through spring & became summer.
All the while I pined for another: my
wildflower amour, my amante, the one
who sent me into exile & into
this house with its smell of neglect,
self-pity & cigarette smoke…until
their moonlight eyes returned from dreams
to begin a day where we could satiate
our longing for sweet nostalgia.
So I unfurled & left behind
everything I found in those Ocean Eyes.
I followed the path back toward
life before exile but
of course, it couldn’t last:
it was doomed from the start & that
is when I met the raven with the soul
of a van Gough landscape,
but by then it was too late & escape
was all I craved…
Through it all I let my attention drift
into filthy depths of desecration.
Until raven hair, sunset lips,
sibylline eyes & such slender fingertips
fell from the sky to find
release
in a blue so ugly when compared to
the sky in which they used to fly.
For the one I hardly knew. Forgive me, I don’t know what else to do…
Today I read the last words you ever wrote:
it was a diary of your feelings
& your last poem…
You wrote so beautifully about the sky between
sentences expressing a tiredness so deep
you just wanted to die.
Knowing I failed to help you lift your head
more often; to help ease your burden;
to love you as you deserved to be.
Now there is no way to say sorry
& stay with you in that other world
you wrote of in you last poem,
one you wrote for me…
despite being only another drunk,
an idiot, rare & wild only to you,
yet even I could see with these
eyes of “ever changing colour”
how delicately, intricately woven you were
before your threads
fell away.
on the wind
I tried smiling at your funeral,
to avoid the choking weeds of grief.
Breathing trees
no longer naked,
their limbs veiling then revealing
a diamond-clear sky,
stood beside the road leading
to the building where your family was mourning.
(When she asked me where you’d gone,
I told your daughter you had
become one with nature;
every flower,
the lambent limbs of sunlight
& all those dignified trees,
believing
you would like that answer.
I hope I wasn’t wrong.)
A vodka (double vodka) before
the eulogy,
& another
(& another) after
it was over.
Then, outside: cold bright sunlight,
dreaming of you dancing;
the prosody of your body,
singing,
as roses red & white
flowed from your hips,
replacing the weeds &
loosening their grip,
just long enough to bring
some small relief
from the reality of your absence.
Yet there was nothing except
the brutal eloquence
of silence.
& the memories surfaced like
smoke from a furnace;
up from the chest & through the throat
to find a home behind the eyes..
When our hands have searched & found
the feelings we wish to drown;
when our dreams creep & crawl along the night
into the darkest corners where
creatures hide;
when
the words become sounds unbound
from meaning only vague feelings
& images remain,
What happens then?