Poetry
I apologise for using the “P” word for the title of this segment of my blog, I would never claim to be a poet nor say that the assemblement of any words I make would constititute as poems. Thought vomit is a better description, but let’s keep this simple. Here are some “poems”.
- Somewhere Else Entirely
Start me in a foreign field,
One which I could not find.
Teach me how to lose and yield
The road I’ve left behind.
I shall observe on fresh new soil
The range of my desires.
I’d strip myself down to bone.
And cast my strife in fires.
To start anew and revel free,
From sex, smog and sirens
I’d give myself the chance to breathe
And hear the sudden silence. - The Gift
She makes me hopeful,
A life offered in a grin,
A future given.
- Spectators
Wheat fields glow brighter in the summer sun.
Mushrooms glisten in the morning dew.
Rockpools guide the way for dancing waves.
And clouds spectate their relaxing view.
As everything changes, the heartbeat beats still.It all continues, that of nature’s will.
- London Is Waking
London is waking back up,
Trembling at the joints,
This wounded beast is stirring.
Long sighs and deep cries
Are all that are uttered,
As she lies vulnerable.
There are maggots nested in her heel,
Their long sleep disrupted by
Pumping organs and a slow ticking.
I look into her eye,
It’s alert with a ruby stare,
With her gaze focused solely on the horizon
- Material
I am pushing through,
Clear of jewelled spiderwebs,
That surround me still. - I Knew Her
Down at the cafe
She worked in a summers gleam
I loved her glow well. - Passing Ships
We are not all in the same boat,
But are all caught in the same storm,
On the same vast sea.I hold on to my single mast,
My boat is worn with flaking paint,
And loose planks.I dream one day to do it up,
To varnish the floors and
Give a shine to its dull hull.I am away from the harbour,
Along with one like me,
I can see their shape on the horizon.There’s a troubled captain,
Pulling on the same ropes
But with a gleaming coat.And another, in this grey ocean,
An aged vessel,
Homing two lovers,
Who have known the sea all their lives. - Crossfire
Control or desire, Which invites me the most? I am a being of desire, flesh swollen And sweet-toothed.
Yet control is what I aspire to wear, Like a bulletproof vest in the fields of temptation. Desire holds me more as it seeks Control, Whilst Control works to achieve my desires.
I am in the chaos of both, Caught in the crossfire Of want and am, And I become more whole in times of peace.
- Buy
New marvels of old ideas.
We are living in a world of repeats;
Carefully and lovingly moulded,
With the shiniest coat.I’d like to think I’m invulnerable
From the bright lights
And serotonin kicks
Of modern day phenomenon.But I’m no stranger
To the 10,000 things,
That ranks my standing
Against my loved ones.I’ve severed the cord
From grunts to hums.
And will happily inject the stimuli,
With empty denim pockets. - Full Moon On The Quiet Valley
In this view of complete silence,
All I hear is the cracking of my leather coat,
As I breathe the scene in and out.
My phone lights my face,
Making it’s blue dull gaze,
Visible to no one.In this, the moon is so harsh,
Like a spotlight down on this valley,
Showing shadow in all its anxiety.
The town below is half awake,
And the people in it, half aware,
Failing to see the significance.A person has gone over the edge.
And the begrudged,
That still walk in this twilight,
Are searching for them.
How easy it is for me to push the handbrake,
And make their night longer.But I’m a spectator tonight,
Watching the freckles go out,
On a once pale face.
And here on this soil,
Where I now can’t make an imprint,
I have to witness it.My jacket creaks,
As I breathe the scene in. - Mt. I
Don’t knock down the mountain,
Its peak holds all of me.
This remains my scope of happiness
Where I feel sheer ecstasy.
I thrive for the climb, and live for the view
And reside on its highest level,
Where I monitor what came before.
At its feet I am a small man,
But my hopes are 10 times its height.
So don’t knock down my mountain.
So that I once more and time again,
Can embrace the light only felt at the top.
But I know I can only linger for so long,
The icy slopes and knife packed breeze,
Will knock me further than I would,
If I were to simply pass down its edges.
Just don’t knock down this mountain,
I’m coming down I swear,
I am not myself without my summit,
I am not myself without base despair.
- London Is Paused
London is paused.
The great grey sky lays dormant
Over hollow towers and eerie streets.
Our buildings now lack neighbours,
And are held now by a purple aura
Which lingers in the air.I miss the screaming of the city,
The pulse that runs as deep as the tubes,
And as high as the cranes.
The chimneys are empty,
The trains pass like gazelles,
And the people, usually distant,
Have taken the life from their eyes.I’m leaving for a while,
To play nostalgia
On livelier shores.
Now, we are all waiting,
For London to rise,
From it’s ‘Snoring 20s’ limbo. - The Fisherman’s Quartet
Music is the best medicine.
I can feel the vibrations
Scattering across my skin
Like ten-thousand tiny hands -
As my body is conducted.
The eyebrows are puppets
To the strings of a violin.
The drumkit is my childhood,
With old cymbals of the sea.
And a voice of a man
Making his life his own,
A life in the bright sun
Atop the golden ladder.
And a double bass;
Which in sheer ecstacy
I did not hear,
As it beat in my blood. - I’m Alone Here, And… I Hate It
I’ve had a longing for this moment,
A clear view of what I would see.
A lake shimmering in the morning light,
With great trees that surround me.I’d hear the morning songs of birds,
In the brilliant blue sky,
And feel the warmth on my face,
As I’d sit there and cry.The tears I’d shed would then flow down,
Into the glimmering waters below,
Burning bright, I’d carve a frown
And be blinded by the glow.Nestled among the regal pines,
(A beautiful space and completely still)
Nature’s solitude begins to grow,
But I can no longer feel my will.I’m taken to a stabbing place,
To see the blackness of my heart.
Once a retreat for my own mind,
Now it’s severed from the start.For if I were to enter this lake,
I’d surely taint the water.
I’d cause the trees to rot and fall,
And be this graveyard’s author. - Self-Portrait
Within these walls I lie,
Working through my cycle.
It’s an entire book of mirrors,
That can’t catch the view outside my window.I’d add a new entry, if there were space,
But there’s no room, for a third page.
The first shows me as I am,
And the second just reflects.Would that a small moth
Enter my periphery,
So that I can stop staring
And freshen my eyes.But I watch this burnt face,
Cracked and tired,
That smiles beneath swollen cheeks,
And holds all of me.This is the first time,
After years of self-torture,
That I’ve seen my face,
With the scars I’ve left. - View From Here
And in my head,
Like a spirit I travel –
Often to distant rooms
That I’ll never quite know.
I’d give myself
A blank cheque,
To know the world
And taste its delights.But in my self,
I’m stopped at the border,
Made to spectate Eden
Through a cracked screen.
I search my pockets,
And find an orchestra of copper –
I’ll know the world
Through a feed instead. - Confession
I am a self-saboteur
I’ve known it for a while,
But what good is being aware
If you only look at it and smile.
A killer of hopes,
A delayer of dreams,
This screwed on guy
Isn’t quite what he seems.
There’s a cap on creativity,
A limit on longevity,
But when push comes to shove –
I’m flying the flag for self-love. - The Golden Hour
Dawn is for the doers,
An active ritual of ambition,
And I feel like a tourist here.Pacing through the golden streets,
Treading ripe steps on waking concrete,
I see the ever confining city, expand.
Like a clenched fist opening for more.I’m aware of the piece of me left behind,
Still covered under the sheets,
And indulging in electric dreams.
Today I’ve turned left, rather than roll right –
Into the freedom of the unknown.But as I wade,
Through screeching bridges and withering trees,
The masses begin to march.
With stiffened faces and dry palms
They scour the streets for pearls.The golden hour is turning murky,
And that moment of tranquillity fades,
It leaves behind a warming touch,
And an everlasting day.This sudden change is better suited to my other half,
Conversations of constant ideas
And cravings of commercialilty.
As for this side,
I’ve just managed to escape, but only just.
I’m sheltering amongst Gods. - She, the story of an imprint.
On this long Summer day,
She’s turning for the door,
The day is setting as she holds the handle,
And my warm days turn to cold nights.She’s leaving behind a fond smile,
Like a humid night with it’s gentle breeze.
It’s a knowing grin, with a secret I can’t place,
A hidden trick or vibrant thought?Like she already knows the power of her steps,
To whether she’s there or not.
In my mind’s eye there’s a ghost,
Sat on the bed, smirking through a mug.The vision I’ll have is a constant memory,
And as I’ve grown older, and learnt beneath the sheets,
I know now that a memory lasts,
While a touch or a voice, is incomplete.One touch that will linger for each I make,
But I know now that it’s not you.
And I know this sun will rise again,
And she’ll be back, rising above your faded star.I’ve entered the Spring from my Winter.
And grown back the buds that Autumn ripped.
Ready to bask in the long Summer,
To wrinkle my skin and make me ash.Look at what you’ve done to me,
Throughout this honest typing,
And self-indulgent waling
I’ve become a pastoral poser. - Whitechapel Road
A sweltering night in busy streets,
Dictated by a day setting too late.
With hard sun through heavy smog,
It rains down a sauna of songs.
My days of passion turn to fatigue,
Slow-dreary plays acted in weariness
And a fantasy of ecstasy
Is suddenly shrouded in come-downs.So I set about down Whitechapel Road
With the heat holding me back.
And I walk these hot tiles
Flanked by sour faced articles.
The area is a cultrual collaboration,
A sheer celebration of everything together.
But the aging land shows hopeless homes,
And parliamentary projects rusting.
But it’s better now, she says
Through an open smile,
It’s much better now.For 20 years the sourness softened
Like a hard heart for love.
Fires in the streets turned a home to hell,
With angry youths demanding their change,
But it’s better now, she says,
As I see the irony,
Is it better now?
When the angry youth still hold fallen names in their mouths,
Under threat by their own shadows,
To a higher state, it’s simply their own,
But they never asked to be followed.But she has warm eyes,
As I wipe the sweat from my brow,
And the change she sees warrants her words.
Streets melt from above and not below,
And shadows will use their voice with pride.
Things are better now, she says,
As she turns to the butcher,
Things are better now. - Shut Up
Heavy brows hold active eyes
And keep my body from falling –
Imagination runs freely
Like a infinite slideshow.
Any chance to start the silence
Is shortly met with colours dancing,
Future woes and past loves,
An unavoidable bible of me.I wish to collapse into my nothingness,
My beautiful realm of unparalleled fiction.
To stand in the waters of home, refreshed,
While I lay lifeless in my concrete cradle.
My fingertips slow with every breath,
However short and stifled it may be,
They’ve worked to the bone,
And overnight their flesh can remould.Darting eyes shift through the electric night,
Catching objects faint in sight,
A gallery of home relics that morph,
Hunting a new meaning for sport.
But if these visions could just cease,
And remain still behind my eyelids
My mind could start to power down,
Knowing it can rest and lower the threat.But all of this is a further delay,
Because I should be fucking sleeping. - Day To Day
Hard thoughts push through numb days,
An urge to get up and go
But that weighing force is ever present
On a lonely summer’s day.
Control shoots out at blank range,
Achievement is little and unseen
Like a blunt dart that falls from the board
But you know this would happen when you woke up.If looks could kill
I’d be a pacifist,
Feigning contact from eye to eye,
But ever present in my head,
That with one thought I could make you explode.
It’s a full-time job,
The ever present anti-sociallist
To hide in the shadows in clear light
And hear every word but react to none.It’s hard work, but someone’s got to do it.
- Luck’s An Arse
Luck is an arse, A posing, pretentious scene-stealing arse. Luck makes you believe in something other than yourself, Makes you fantasize over it’s power. But it’s a fraud, a lazy worker Who gets praised for showing up, Not even on time.
It rains on the parade of coincidence, Taking the glory from chance, And is worshipped as an eternal blessing – Making one day of the year, Slightly less mundane.
It guises itself in objective reality, Luck would have it that the bar was still open, That your bus arrived, Or that you didn’t have a spot today. Like a restaurant that has a table, Like the weather being good, Like you owning an umbrella if it’s not. Like a book with all its pages, Like bumping into a friend Or like buying the last lottery ticket the shop has to offer (And still lose).
Luck is a facist arse, Never sharing the wealth with all. Like when it steals the credit Of your best life achievements. When you chose a good balanced life, Full of joy and hard work. You’ll take your best moments and give it to luck, I couldn’t have made this happen, you’d think, Wading through life waiting for it’s next gift. But you’ll wait a while, because it doesn’t exist, That’s your power, and you know it.
- Procedure
Take your tablet, Swallow it down, And ingest the plastic feelings. Bring life into that hollow husk, By a steady course of orders.
A mirage of false emotion sweeps Like a gushing of water through an old canyon, Bringing temporary life to a relic of the earth; Rinse and repeat.
Feeling better or anything at all, And that’s what we call progress. A sudden and factory-led happiness, Solving nothing, but postponing.
Delaying a growing mould Of black whispers and troubled hearts. An ever spreading thought, Solidified as a wave.
I’ll take two, just to be sure, Let me stop the over hanging cloud By this sugary sensation, And fight off this hurricane, With a small gust of will.
- Bastogne, Belgium
Crows nest overhead,
Their gruff tones rebound against the grey houses.
Feeding their young,
Singing or bragging.
It’s Spring now,
And the fresh young eyes see their first sights,
And they are lucky to see this.
A peaceful town, a quiet town, with a bloody history.
This place lives,
It is burdened by its life, but profits from it.
What town doesn’t have a hellish foundation?
Bastogne is a novel, and the narrator’s are many.
The young crows born in battle,
Saw more than any eyes should.
Nature erupted, people at war, bloodshed and fear.
Flying high enough to stay clear,
But always in range of the screams.
The hungry crow circles the battlefield.
What would they have thought?
Food, pity, or nothing?
Man has fought so many times before, why is this any different?
Warfare had changed.
Tanks, shells and rifles all updated for the innocent eyes.
The harsh winter beat through men, turning their warm blood, ice.
Pity.
And as I sit here absorbing the sounds,
The harshest is the crow.
What bliss would that have been for the soldier.
To hear a new crow on a Spring morning.
Than a missile screaming in the bitter Winter. - Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Booming voices echo tradition,
Voices from different ages, races, creeds.
Celebrating a saint whom they can’t relate.
But a tradition for all rather them some.
In some sense.
I’d celebrate it with the passion of a man who knew what it meant.
But create my own stories around an old one.
A day of wonder,
I’ve found it to be.
More of a gathering reflection of my life,
More significant to wonder where I am than a birthday.
Even that tradition is almost comic.
But I look on today with a growing smile,
To count the trinkets of annual adventures in my mind.
Short romances, mistaken identities, drunken writing and cold days in uniform.
These are my personal memories, recent adventures that have occurred on this very day.
Looking around at each face, the young couple semi-engaged in reality take a trip.
Mother and daughter create new tales for themselves.
Groups cheer to the same enigmatic saint.
It’s blissful to be around the bliss itself.
It’s liberating to liberate with others,
I may look like the lonesome man,
Hunched over his phone,
Punching keys with thumbs.
Brewing over the barely scraped Guinness.
But I too,
I too am in that liberation, that bliss.
I celebrate with friends gone, or away.
With memories of ecstasy and some confusion.
I’m here too,
In my own way. - Guincho, Portugal
It steals the show,
All concentration and every sense.
There’s nothing I can hear more than the crashing and thundering claps.
Louder than my own head.
It’s like a child is screaming in my ear,
Filling my head with something other than the words I put to page.
It’s not subtle,
Bold and clear,
It makes the statement of a thousand voices.
It’s powerful,
And there’s no status to share.
What could be a retreat feels like a graveyard.
Large tombstones petrude from the surface of each freshly born wave that hits the sand.
A warning,
A clear declaration that it cannot be conquered.
I walk in,
Feeling it’s sharp and refreshing touch as I wait in the water.
Just tipping my toes and freeing my thoughts.
It brushes like a heavy dog,
But with each stroke it packs it’s punch,
No solace to have within it.
It is a constant force of change,
And man has no time in it.
It is liberating, to be this close to death.
I plunge myself in further,
To be taken so swiftly,
That it could feel like angels wings,
Comforted by a sudden desire to let go.
I let go,
And with the titan force, the light goes out.
And the angel drops me,
With a force that silences the thoughts,
And any hope of stillness in its embrace.
I am a tombstone, resting at the depth, I am another voice added to the thousands.
A single roar in its cloudy strike.
Or I wade, and I wait.
- New VibePutting the dusty creative hat back on reminds me why I keep taking it off. I get into a rhythm and I start to notice my style as a writer. I’m failing to do a draft each day, mainly because I don’t want to, you know how it goes. But when I do, I see a correlation in the way I write. You’re only ever going to be one mind, so it’s not like you can change that. It’s a bit frustrating I guess. Then again, on the flip-side, I’m not a poet, I’m not a writer, I’m an actor who keeps a regular diary. Words are in my head, so, only when I feel like it do they get jotted down. If you’re looking for someone a bit more pro, you’ve come to the wrong place. However, thanks for the interest so far, I’m happy to see the posts have uploaded all right.
- Vilanova i la geltru, Spain
It seems a little off,
Distant in a sense.
The warmth of the sun and the rustle of the trees.
The small birds singing through the Spring air.
It’s peaceful, and it’s there, but I’m not.
A whole ecosystem is bustling
Whilst I’m rustling inside
What am I doing? What’s next? Why?
To sit in nature is so pure,
To find a stillness in natural chaos,
I,
I don’t think that’s for us.
For us to be chaotic in a natural stillness.
That feels more apt.
Maybe I should just go outside. - Wetteren, Belgium
A cluttered car,
That’s what you’re seeing.
Just the image, nothing more.
Naked to the human eye,
More fills the space of this compact carrier.
Humour, voices, struggles, distances,
Rage, dreams, discarded snacks and a smell so faint.
It’s a collaboration, a mixture of the life lived on the road.
Hard to say exactly what, not to list it all –
That’s the difficulty.
To name every sight, smell, taste and word heard, would be a book.
Not a book, a poem, of sorts, a short and brief tale.
But to say all of this is to bore you,
To bore me.
Can it be enough to know this, just this.
That’s enough.
It’s more than enough.
To take the journey is to carry it with us,
To let is change and mould us.
To be better, to be private.
To change is nice, I’ve had enough of that stone face.
Isn’t that the life of the road? To be open to it?
A traveller is always weathered,
A stoic man is made of stone.
It’s an easy choice. - Winkelken, Belgium
I’ve been here before,
Not here exactly,
Never here exactly.
To be here is to be everywhere else,
Just the same,
Another room in another place in another time.
That’s the way it is, the way it goes.
The way I relate it,
The way I continously feel.
Memories don’t just end,
They continue,
They morph,
They come back. - Something NewSo, I looked back at my old Tumblr account recently. And noticed some actual posts of mine, muddled in with reposts, pictures of cats, abstract photography and the pastoral. But yeah, there was this poem just sat there. And I remember doing it, a little depressed at the time or reflective, it’s hard to pinpoint the difference in your 20s. At the age of 25 I’m going to start revisiting that side of my brain. And whenever I feel like it, I’ll upload a poem. Now, I’ll say one thing. I take a random photo, when the mood strikes, and I write a poem there in that moment. The photo is my eyes. The words, my thoughts. My often wanky, nonsensical thoughts. Here’s project 3.
tale to tale 