Saturday 20 February 2010

Hurt

I'm sorry
Doesn't take the hurt away,
Rub out the scars
And pick the grains of salt
From your wound.

It doesn't erase
What I did, and
It can't take the
Letters away
From the text I sent.

It doesn't mean I regret
What I did,
Or that I didn't mean to do it
Either,
It was the right thing to do.

I'm sorry means;
I never meant to hurt you
The way you
Hurt me.

And I am,
Sorry.

Monday 15 February 2010

Mend Them

The world is
Hard and icy, cold-concrete-covered,
Glaring, glass-panelled spires
And streets,
Filled with rushing people,
Like rivers over the stones
Of folk too weak to care about,
So frail, breathe any warmth on them
And they might
      expire
Like a rush of wind out a door
Onto a warm, dark, soft night,
That hangs heavy over the world.

These are the invisible people,
The thieves, the muggers,
The conmen and junkies,
The wretched and the aching and the hurt and saddened.
And all they can do
Is hope one day,
A heart-born fluttering wind won't break
But mend them.

Saturday 13 February 2010

Ice Skating

Glide, slide, slip
Toward and tumble over
Speed and dreams on
Blades of metal-thin strengthened thought.
Let the patterns reel out
As you slide through the ice;
(you can't create without cutting)
Watch the images paint out
From your palette of creation,
On the soles of your skates.

The session's over, the siren says.
The business is back and the boots are off,
But do the dreams remain?

Tuesday 9 February 2010

Meant to be

I want to feel the beautiful, deep melancholy of everything that's happened.
I want the rainforests to grow again and I want the concrete to
Sink into the ground and never be seen again, be swallowed up by the land it
       swallowed.
I want the seas to wash us clean, so we can be
The Beautiful Freaks we were meant
To be.

Monday 8 February 2010

Insect Song

The buzz and beat
Of wings, and feet
Intertwined with air lift
Fear and madness, when we
Sting and drape
Our weaves

On clumsy heads and minds,
That see no shine
In carapace or patterned
elegance-stranded between two walls.
Where are your
Higher-vaunted virtues

now? When you crush
And stamp and crack -
This is genocide, with gas and spray
The panic-squealing stricken
Flee to crannies.
-There's no escape from your poison.

We are fleeing now,
But remember this;
We were here before, singing
Our buzzing-beating,
Winged-fleeting song
And we'll remain.

Sunday 7 February 2010

Like Honey

Two people stood in the busy street, the hustling thunder of the traffic an ostinato to their symphony of conversation. "you look well" he said with the awkwardness of memories lying on his tongue, as thick and sweet and decadently shaming as honey, and everything seemed to click back into place, just like two summers and 900 kisses ago.
"thank you" she said, and the love they felt for each other trailed behind them like scarves in the wind, twisting up into the sky above them and trailing around the tenements and apartment buildings, buzzing with life and electricity, intertwined and indivisible.  All around them the traffic danced and the peopled buzzed forward and they just talked. And it was like all there was about them was a field, and a beacon and the grey sky above, telling them to long for the ground, and each other and their lips and kisses and-
His phone rings, she jumps and the spell is broken, the strings of violins snap, the conductor gasps.
The symphony is silent and as they realise what they have been dreaming, and how dangerously close they came to connecting, he answers the phone and the signals of reality and boredom seep back in. A hand goes up, an absent-minded "bye" and he hurries away.
She stands in the street alone and begins to wrap up the tangles of her scarf, winding back the kite. A tear falls, or is it a raindrop. In the flood of a city, who can notice the difference?

In the Spirals

In the spirals of your gently spreading anger,
I'm lost for a bit, while you spit the seeds of hate from your paperback copy of the Grapes of Wrath, and shout literary pretensions at me while I just stand and stare.

You’re not individual, was all I said, muttered in the marble veins of the ground,

That’s how deep and hard it was too hear - but you latch and you tear and you screech and you scream about how it’s all boring, and the same and plastic out there! While in your head it’s new and it’s grand and it’s true and it’s better than before, when you read the books fifty years old and hear them speak to you, and only you! Like they haven’t to hundreds of thousands of teens across the world before.

For God’s sake - don’t be so clichéd.

Formaldehyde

Formaldehyde faces
In the streets of New York,
I can see on the news
In quite provincial England.
And I’m struck by the aliens
That live beyond the pond
(not my pond, a fern-filled, frog home,
 a charity centre for amphibians)
But the pond that isn’t a pond,
A moving, restless steel grey
Monster, with white-topped fins
That crest and claw at ships
In the emptiness of storms,
And that seems so much bigger
With a small sounding name,
Like it’s swelled and stretched it out,
Like ice in a crack.
But the aliens live there
And their lives are so odd, filled with difference
And vastness and vistas
That seem,
In quite provincial England,
Like spaces between conversations.
Unending.

Measures

How do you measure
Your life?
Could you measure it in minutes,
That trickle through your fingers and brain
Like grains of sound.
No, not in minutes, so many passed in boredom,
Waiting for better things,
In queues.

How about in expectations?
The joys we’ve hoped for,
The moments of gossamer,
Suspended dis-suspension,
The minor surprises,
The unwrapped presents,
The still locked doors.
Hmm, perhaps not;
Think of every bad surprise and
Poor tasting meal served
In place of
A banquet.

Maybe we should measure
In experiences?
In bell chimes that echo in
The frosted silence of a new morning?
Or the kisses of an old love,
That still feel new?
No, not in experiences, as
Many sour as frost-snow sweet,
As like to cut like glass as reflect
Happy times.

Maybe the trick isn’t
In measures, or seconds,
Or experiences born.
Maybe we should just
Dangle and let
History stream back
And the future float forward,
Like the ribbons of youth.

Cornered

There’s a ghost in the corner of my room.
He stands by the wall,
Quiet and sedate.
Just a whisper of colour,
A flicker of light
In the dark.

He never quite speaks -
Just whispers half faintly,
And the rustle of time
Lulls me softly to sleep.

There’s a shade in the shadows,
At the edge of my sight.
He’s a blur in the day
And a twist in the night.
And I never know whether
To say hello or goodbye
Each time I see him

Or whether to cry?

Ideas

Would a rose smell as sweet,
If it looked more like the nettles?
Would the idea of the rose still make us
Smell it, touch it, send it on,
If instead of thorns and blood red petals, just
The stings and leaves
Of nettles were the norm.
Would romance change, or cheat, as it does now?
Would love?
Would valentines be green ?
And would they smell as sweet?

Hello, Heart of my Sorrow

The stars are out in hordes tonight,
And they light up the world,
Like fireflies that hang, delighting.

They have their motions
Unknown, whilst
Beneath, we wheel and turn.
(Hard hearts know that stars don’t move,
But stand as fixed spectators
For the games we people live.)

Yet for you, in my techni-hued mind-frame
That only your presence evokes,
I would pick them up and
Spell your name, with
The rhythm’s of the sky.

You would have wished on each star,
Thrice,
And coloured the air in,
With all your fancies.
If you were here.
But you have gone, to a world
With a veil that
Shields your eyes
And hides your ears in swathes
Of a cotton silk, that’s as
Red as my anger,
At the heart of my sorrow.

And because of this veil,
You cannot hear my words
Paint light onto the wind
Or see my voice
Dance smoke,
So that the birds wheel,
As though through dreams.

So goodbye,
To your smiles
And hello to the sun
That will hide the hordes of stars
And put away my melancholy,
Till the night comes
(And I greet again, the heart
Of my sorrow).

Grasping After

Scribbles in the night
That have profoundness in the evening,
When the stars are your compass,
Rather than the blaring of traffic
Seem to have meaning so
Ethereal (like a whisper from a friend
In an exam hall,
Not quite heard).
You want so hard to grasp
For the intention in the words,
But reach too far,
Let voice ring out in silence,
And meaning will escape you.

In the night, we do not grab at words.
We let them float,
And even on our own,
We treat them with respect.
A silent solitude, a rest for them.
Gratitude for the services of the day.

So in the night, we write
And what is bible-truth and gospel-word
Is in the day
Just scribbles in the night.