Moving too fast across the Moon’s face

Drums pound.
The world is dark
save for the moon
and the clouds
moving too fast
across its face

Hours pass and years
mistakes are written
and erased, written and erased
and rewritten again.
Life fritters away
to nothing but
a dozen or so
cheap party tricks
without punch line or
any discernible moral value
and what it all comes down to
in the end
is how many times you’ve
held your breath
and prayed for
a single moment to last
for all the rest
of the moments
you have left.

Isn’t that living?

Tuesday Morning at Half Past Midnight

Your dress was covered in polka-dots,
the straps hanging loosely from your shoulders,
as I stood in the doorway with the light
from outside splintered across
my solemn face.

Your eyes were deep encased with
black rings from the make up you had
worn. You hadn’t expected the tears,
although we both might have known.

I didn’t know what to say
as I watched you
draped on the bed,
the epitome of sorrow.

And instead of holding you hair back
and kissing your forehead, as I
should; instead of holding your shoulders
and asking what went wrong,

I walked off to the rest of this lonely house
and left your tears with you
and my fears with me.

Love as a Metaphor for Life

January days are wet
and love-soaked,
like my heart.

Walking for hours:
god’s face appears
as a carpenter or
a stonemason.
A magician
or the dead.

Calmly removing raisins
from the sky, words splash
against my awkwardness,
leaving it bare and
essential.

Maybe it wasn’t you,
per se. Maybe you were
just an instrument. A
vessel for my fear.

Corners are crooked
and dark. Decisions
are easily made and
quickly regretted.
The day begins again.
And you weep for the end
of it, every night for the
rest of your life.

Midnight.

I look into the white eyes
of the purest of girls,
the purest of women.
She turns her face away in scorn
as words wash over me,
Making small incisions in my tongue,
in the spaces between my teeth.

In my mind,
all the wide open spaces of my heart
are as fields seen from the windows of a car.
I am driving with people
whose language I do not speak
and who’s faces and feelings
I will never understand.
Not in a million months of tears.

Their hands
which are covering their mouths
are nailless
and pockmarked.
Their mouths,
toothless and hollow.

But I have been bleeding all this time
and now my face
is empty too,
and pale like the faces of
the purest of girls,
the purest of women.

 

Untitled

‘Cos dreams are full of
long lost friends
and good days come to
weary ends.
And while I may have danced
and thrown my head back in delight,
it wasn’t me you loved
that night.

Christmas

I strode out
in the night
to cut down a young spruce
and steal its moonlit heart.

The snow glinted
and my axe-edge keen.
Tearing away at bark skin
like a ravenous dog.
I do not know how
to use an axe.

In long folds it came away.
And i lifted the heart of the young man
to the sky
where it hung
and bled.

Each of my careful footsteps back
was stained red with
my betrayal.
Each of my tears frozen
hard and stinging my cheeks.

Routine

The movie is over.
The dog has been put out
and the cats are curled away together
in some dark nook of the house.

I have put out the lights
deliberately, one by one
in all the rooms.
Becoming a little darker as I go.

The appliances thunder away in the night,
cheaply and cheerfully.
Somewhere a toilet trickles full.
Somewhere a water tank is still awake,
I am sure.

My bedroom is cold and quiet.
I sit awake after the
well ordered evening time
listening to the sure, steady beat
of my own heart,
in my own chest,
without you.

Those Nights

When your fingers and toes curl 
and you screw your eyes up tight
to get to sleep faster.
Hit by wave and wave of
anxiety and fear
in your chest and
in your back

That utter loneliness when you
throw yourself around your house
and eventually
about 4 in the morning
you fall asleep from pure exhaustion.
Too scared to keep going.

You know,
one of those nights.
I know those nights.

Still?

Just lying here on my back
in the dark,
listening to Fionn Regan and
looking out the window at the clouds
where the stars should be.
There’s some dark hair in here somewhere.
If I
push some buttons
and concentrate
on a point just above the display
everything is
white and silhouetted and
I can’t see much.

When you get this
you’ll be awake,
but I shall be fast asleep.

Tag poem.

I got asked to do a tag poem a little while ago by Kim over at Good at Getting Better
on the words “bees, orange, laughter, tree, and blanket”.
( The official post is here)

Everyone else she tagged wrote really good poems, most of them very happy or idyllic, all quite sweet and perfectly innocent
and because I kind of liked the idea of there being something sinister about the words
and because I like to be different, the seemingly unshallow person that i pretend to be,
I didn’t write one like that.
I enjoyed the first line the most, i reckon, because I love blood oranges,
but it’s also a little hint of what’s to come.

Fruit and Needles

Oranges
taste nothing like blood.
Despite what they call themselves.
And I didn’t know they even had a voice!

But bees? Well they can taste like anything,
when they put their minds to it.

I can still hear laughter of little ones.
Well those bees made short work of that
with their voices.
And every child wrapped up in earth,
the final blanket,
and at the foot of their beds,
a tree grew.

But it didn’t grow well.