2009 Poetry

2/1/09

Our eyes grow tired of each other, we sleep

as the sky falls like an autumn leaf.

3/1/09

The glasses I pour grow bigger the more I drink.

I'm peeping blindly into tomorrow's knowledge,

let this be objective or God rest it,

and yet there's no substance, but

that my hand has been let loose upon a page.

An old sonata puts my soul to rest

as I wait for another fruitless sunrise.

4/1/09

The air was trying to rob me of my skin,

was so thinly temperate that

distances increased,

between inches, between seconds.

A foul wind blowing from nowhere

I felt haunted by a hailstorm,

saw it reflected in my own eyes by the air's thoughts of ice.

The panic rose in my frozen legs,

so by knees of stone I trod around the corner of a smile,

landed softly by a glass of wine

and that flame in which I see your gaze to harmonise with mine.

4/1/09 No.2

A viral buoyancy in my soul,

you rise above all thoughts

at an expense through which they can't afford to live.

A cloud above the forest of my thoughts,

you starve its leaves of sunlight.

All would be well, but

that your rains evaporate as they fall.

It's a brilliant light by which my soul's been stricken blind,

more brilliant than the sun, it's one from which

I can't equate the distance

that my mind's Earth should set a cautious,

yet indebted orbit.

4/1/09 No.3

It's in the stride of your heart and the spectrum of your skin,

a wait far longer than is just,

your pulse is making you itch.

Sometimes a moment would consume a week,

others it would make one of a minute.

Every time you draw another breath

you're struggling to witness your own birth.

4/1/09 No.4

One can climb out of their cavernous gazes

to feed upon thought

of a subtler nature, there are pockets of fresh air,

indeed oceans

to be explored beyond the focused lens of a human eye.

Light can be tremendously diffused with time.

4/1/09 No.5

I spend sleepless nights by the tracks of time,

watching my thoughts

self-importantly sliding by from no direction.

Comforted by a gentle heat,

I let my gaze permeate the star flooded sky.

8/1/09

I even sought your failing light

within a wine which we had shared,

or by its daring aroma to live the music of your voice.

9/1/09

One can run rings around stillness,

I came to think as I listened to their echoing footsteps.

The sun, of course, is waiting only for

death,

and elsewhere stars run stillness around rings.

9/1/09 No.2

My birth is rare

that the candle's flame not be mourned,

which plagues the forest of my mind in swarms

and is extinguished by a single breath.

Were you born as I, the Earth

itself would perish by

every flame which has ever burnt.

13/1/09

I am a prisoner of gravity

and the impenetrable Earth,

my soul contorted

like spilt oil riding on a rough sea,

shackled in the space between pleasure and pain.

No higher freedom is known than that of

animals whose minds were spared of language,

who sing the un-fretted notes of the cello

while we, the fixed tones of the harpsichord,

those born in a long coat who need no more

convincing,

to whom fortune is still but a moment,

and necessity a bridge

over the torrent as which we know it.

28/1/09

The feeling is inherent of drowning in one's own breath,

and the pulling forces of fear and hope

that should life sound its sirens, death will stir.

Hope

both sticks in my throat, choking me,

and embraces my fear with a medicating force.

I watch

as the sun rises on the inside of one eyelid,

sets on the other.

I'm looking at something far beyond that.

It's illuminated at every sunrise but

seems to worship the vast expanses of the night.

31/1/09

Hiding in an enclosed system of caves,

I'm haunted by everything from all directions.

Feeling my way around a corner,

for an interrupted heartbeat I

catch the light of a cat's glowing eyes,

a substantial ember in the heat of a distant star.

Needless to say, I'm falling.

Landing on a choice

between a detailed map, or the general illumination of my world,

simultaneously all of my muscles contract.

A lost echo in the distance tells me...

1/2/09

I'm hard hit that time can't move horizontally.

Every unit of movement is a change in the weather,

each new light seen with a new eye.

There's so much here, that

one often may as well have started again.

9/2/09

There's more movement within me than all of that which I can't see,

I extend farther inwards than the universe does outwards,

and still my will to escape is an interminable force.

I afforded one of these suddenly brief days

to a full loop of thought.

It's a polychrome existence ruled by a colour-blind god.

Somewhere time, as the rose, works alike by any other name.

Elsewhere, on a spherical Earth,

light dims the passing continents.

18/2/09

Bathed suddenly in a warmer light,

the air breathes with a new viscosity.

Unconstrained, my blood flows

by the pulse of a discretionary thought,

and somewhere far away

there is absolutely nothing.

I still may not afford

that there be wind or rain outside, but

the windows firmly disregarded,

I am content.

26/2/09

Look at the tips of my fingers with their

quickly knitted rainbow lines of me,

like blunt arrow tips pointing at the heavens.

Rusting shields of my continuous demise

lining the advancing regiment of another algorithmic expression,

nothing is won as

there are no loops in the path of creation, but

nonetheless I feel an army clash with mine,

and alas another storm closes in on that clear sky.

28/2/09

There's one free sand at least

and at most on any monolithic planet.

One stain on any surgeon's window

on which breeds a family of casualties,

every time you sleep you're running and

for every non-existence there's a potential.

As you die at the time of your birth there is

indeed surplus to

any extent.

3/3/09

There's someone who wants to

touch you everywhere,

and that will be the crown on their royal being,

to know your extraneous flesh as does your

personal sentience, to trap your self and

get to know it like you'd always wanted to.

Reflect and don't tell me, lest it be

after the day you die,

that our souls are any more industrious than the smallest fly.

4/3/09

A dull, reverberant buzz zips around this micro-landscape,

upon which the walls close in, until

time floods the air, as water does the vacuum

of a drowning swimmer's starving lungs,

and the scripture says we can proceed.

11/3/09

The walls are a breeze through my field of vision.

They accelerate

behind my head, rupturing

a struggling tail of minutes.

16/3/09

Unzipping the air on my path,

I wrote my thoughts again today

in steps on the city's tangled pavements.

I'm chasing the tail of time which I drag

behind me like a ball and chain,

black snow gathering on my fetters

by new light as they roll around every corner,

by old storms as they grind along the weathered concrete.

Actions, of course, can

never dance well to the tune of a thought.

22/3/09

The drop of blood that escapes the pumping whip

of a slave-driving heart

illuminates one's being. I

can never tell if that equates to the sun

being crossed by a cloud, or peeping out from behind one.

I can inflict my well meant influence upon those who are,

and yet, I am.

My luck

is like that of a child who,

having been lost in the woods, has been found and

brought to safety,

but it is I who will forever be drying tears from faces.

22/3/09 No.2

Let me trace your eyelash with the flat of my thumb

when your luck is out,

just,

that the rhythm of my pulse might be a positive force.

Let me take that globe from your shoulders, Atlas,

that it might never escape my unsleeping gaze.

I'm watching the stars.

The glints in your eyes that mirror hardships and smiles.

27/3/09 No.2

Your eyes the only gap on the horizon between time and space,

one might gaze right through them, that if they existed,

there'd be no end to inhalation and

exhalation and circulation,

and the wind as ever would

drop every leaf to the root of another tree.

27/3/09 No.3

What are you but a

cognitive atom

in the molecular structure of my light?

4/4/09

What are those meandering lengths of the back of my hand,

life sailing life to the port of a fleeting dream,

I just saved a drowning child

who can do no more itself.

6,8&13/4/09

Drink a broad spectrum of compassion,

of the very most diverse, yet

unburdened smiles,

there's no richer water for the flower of one's health.

An eye, reflecting again the light of a

bicycle mirror comes slowly floating around

another grey, smooth-edged corner,

another star-like twinkle, and the down-turned human nose,

and a mouth that shouts "keep walking,

subject,

keep walking!"

It's known, each horizon is too far to tread

when effort strikes the settled human soul,

yet every foot has danced through forest thick with thorn,

(and every hand so been cut

to show blood's fiery lust,)

but

to smell a single rose at its centre.

"Keep walking,

subject,

keep walking!"

Does one trample the rose

for it too is thorned?

A scent being but a decorative,

or apprehensive note in the chord of a moment,

that is. One knows to let it be,

and keep walking.

The sun comes

to peep over a frowning hill,

on the far side a fleeing hiker is blinded.

Budding leaves return a trusting glance, and

are caressed by an exhausted breeze.

The crackling of a cyclist on the stones gives way to silence

as the last shadow floats away in pursuit of a cloud.

21/4/09

It's the difficulty of knowing a moment.

The memory and anticipation, on the same plane,

of the same thought,

in an expression, a signal.

Isolate a moment, nothing

of the sort exists, takes place,

they might say there's

no synchronised movement,

no platonic emotion, no,

and then that there's no

"single" word.

And yet one holds it with all earthly grip,

as the more words we use...

21/4/09 No.2

There's a space that's frozen,

we all walk and think right through it.

26&29/4/09

The smoothing sun's shackles, they're

all about keeping waves from conscious oceans,

when nothing has come clean,

when the battle's lost and won

and yet thoughts of which the mind grows fonder

wander through neurological cobblestoned lanes,

lost, and glad to be so,

eyes cast beneath a passing bird

which will proceed to do no more than die.

30/4/09

My lungs, that would see air's ill-tempered substance

saturated with joy, have slept

in dismal ocean currents, known too well

the liquid substance of Earth's knotted disorder.

Heads have lain on pillows of wounded stone,

hearts, with all their might, kept time with phantoms

of pursuit,

only to conclude with giggles of palpitation

which leave one eye forever exposed to the wind,

and the other tightly shut.

9/5/09

I've felt so strongly

and so merely present,

the illuminated ochre bottle

locked inside the nocturnally toned mahogany cabinet,

eyes marching through my path of thought,

the teeth of a caged dog piercing, in its mind,

through the soul of an offending onlooker,

right foot tapping impatiently and left pointing to the door.

I've been dormant.

Put to sleep by public immobility.

9/5/09 No.2

I've spoken to the creature who watches you from rooftops.

Don't worry,

it gets pleasure from the pure pursuit.

Time is on a chain attached to your thoughts.

20/5/09

The air gathers as behind a dam of indecision,

breathes as if retracing its steps over every moment,

yet again to turn and observe its path.

They're incomprehensible,

the dimensions suspended in the projected light of a thought.

Often one may have been better stricken blind.

21/5/09

It's a maze of soul-grating grey,

every inch more a victim of apathy than the last,

somewhere a pipe drips continuously and God

bless every dead spider like fallen troops,

bright eyed poets and a place on another planet.

It's the passage to death that's too small to get through.

21/5/09 No.2

It's a "time for contentment" moment, one on which

to draw back the corners of my mouth with my fingers,

to gaze wide-eyed at the air before my face.

I've probably had a drink.

28/5/09

It depends on the weather;

emotions build like mortarless bricks

upon a tidal foundation,

a tightrope walking breath that varies

between rosy-cheeked summer afternoons and lost parasites.

29/5/09

I'll run to the very last syllable of tomorrow

until it is no longer burdened by the cowardly question-mark.

I'll feel razor blades in transient smiles,

and under your grave will always grow

the roots of another

barren, self perpetuating tree

with nothing to show for its ever flailing limbs.

30/5&2/6/09

Beware conclusions drawn by the fleeting hands

of sweat-glued tunnel-vision moments.

Stars debate amongst warring colonies of light,

dreams hide beyond the horizons of dreams and

every breath that reaches yours

lived long behind another set of lips.

5,11,12,15,16,17,18&19/6/09 

I'll speak of the parasite, though it's not my art,

by which this pus oozes from a wound in my thoughts.

It perches its profound effect

first vulture-footed on my Earth-set eyes,

and with its screeching, groaning nails, denies

all reason that I may detect,

my constructed, sunlit thoughts, sculpted by an intrusive hand

to the cruel curves of yet another night.

The mask it wears depicts a man about to break

helplessly into a fearful fit of laughter,

maybe about to suffocate,

maybe hanging from a cliff's crumbling side

wondering how he ever came to hide

in such a dull and morbid state,

he that would mindlessly pass his life to another

and cast away the rest.

It's pitiful, the sickness to which I succumb,

by what is but a hormonal trick of the light.

Limbs that I myself do not miss

reflected in barren tears of desire,

my stomach forced to turn, and how I tire

of losing time to all of this,

of watching films with no ending on the inside of my eyelids,

of watching even direst enemies through a shameful lens of jealousy.

There's a darkening shade of grey upon my past

where lust's periphery has been beaten to death,

memories, veiled by charcoal clouds,

of days on which the sky seemed blue and bright,

sweet sounds that were made dissonant by light

and thoughts that became lost in crowds.

The blood being drawn from my soul by this monster

is dripping over my eyes.

I often cast my thoughts to hopeless ideals,

bare my fists at desires by which they came to be,

which distance the frown from the smile

too far to cater for the platonic

so that the ecstatic and the chronic 

are left fighting for blood and bile.

I float like an unseen, transitory cloud

through dreams of freedom from beginning and end, cause and effect.

What is this futile, sickly moment of repent

compared to the years that I've lost to this disease,

running to dead ends through wide eyes,

tripping over steps I could clearly see,

wasting hope-charged breath so ignorantly,

balancing on a rope of lies?

It's a single, excruciating five second break

on the repeatedly enforced sprint between one's first and last breath.