chrisnelson61

~ Poetry, stories and some random words…

chrisnelson61

Tag Archives: Change

Change

02 Saturday Jan 2021

Posted by chrisnelson61 in Uncategorized

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Change, creative, poems, poetry, verse, writing

A change is coming.

I can taste it in

The butterscotch sky

Hear it in the song

Of the midnight clouds,

As the winter birds

Cast their wings out wide

Leave these barren shores

Steal a final glance

Frozen in their eye.

A change is coming.

I can feel it in

The dancing willow

And for a moment

Hold to me the scent,

Of dreams taking flight

Their fingers touching

Rainbows in the blue

To drift their passion

Falls like rain to us.

A change is coming.

© All original writing copyright Chris Nelson 2000-2021

Shells

03 Saturday Aug 2019

Posted by chrisnelson61 in Uncategorized

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Change, creative, faith, history, Humanity, Life, poems, poetry, Revelation, Shells, thoughts, time, Truth, verse, World, writing

She sells shells from off the beach

Lifts the pennies from their eyes

And then fades away,

Slowly drifting through the crowd

Clothes that cannot mark her time

Whispers in their ears.

 

Hand scratch scars upon her face

Trace the days she never had

Curled upon the ground,

Rock-pool tears that kiss the shore

As the sea calls out her name

Disappears once more.

 

And for awhile we see

All as it’s meant to be

Until we turn away

Back to the world we made

And all the things we see

How we want it to be

A world we’d never change

Or seek to rearrange

 

Angry tides rise up again

Sweep away all that she knew

Kisses on the sand,

Faces lost amongst the clouds

Trapped forever in her box

Buried out at sea.

 

She sells shells from off the beach

Lifts the pennies from their eyes

And then fades away,

Slowly drifting through the crowd

Clothes that cannot mark her time

Whispers in their ears.

 

© All original writing copyright Chris Nelson 2000-2019

 

Coffee and Friends

09 Saturday Feb 2019

Posted by chrisnelson61 in Uncategorized

≈ 25 Comments

Tags

Change, creative, fiction, flash, flash fiction, Friends, Prose, short story, stories, writing

I had always believed that the city would never change; that it would remain a constant in life, a place to which I could return again and again, knowing that it would hold the footprint of my life forever. Yet now, as I sat in the coffee shop, itself now merely a child of an international chain which offered identikit refreshment regardless of location, I realised that I knew nothing of my surroundings. Monolithic buildings had risen and now towered above the remnants of a much older city, a city which seemed to hide its face as if in shame. Giant mirrored panes reflected sunlight, cars, buses and pedestrians alike. Leather-clad riders wove their motorbikes deftly through the traffic, their deliveries already cooling in their carriers, their reflections appearing, distorted and twisting in the glass, before vanishing from sight. The facade of the station stared out across the city streets, its advertising hoardings boring holes into passers-by as if they had some life-changing message to impart. I tried to think back, to remember the city of my youth, the city in which I had learned to become a man, the city that would forever be my home, but I could not connect my memories to the vision before me. The street names flooded back, each one triggering a recollection, a remembrance, and, yes, none of them had changed, but none was truly the same. It was as if, during my absence, the entire city had undergone massive cosmetic surgery: the creases and wrinkles that informed my memory had been smoothed out, erased, as if I had never been here before.

I sipped my Americano slowly, its bitter tang already lost to me, and wondered what had happened to plain coffee and the corner cafes which served beverages unencumbered by exotic language. Names began to form themselves in my mind, drifting slowly into my consciousness, begging for recognition, and, for each in turn, I formed an image of what I believed their physical forms had looked like. My accuracy in this task lay somewhere hidden in the depths of a memory which I was beginning more and more to doubt. I was, of course, secure in the knowledge that these people, these characters, had, at some point, come into my life. Some, perhaps, had stayed a while, may even have fallen beneath the blanket term of ‘friendship’, others would have been acquaintances, interlopers who came and went, leaving nothing but the shadow of their name. I had imagined each as being inexorably connected to the city, as if their very existence relied on that of the city. What, I wondered, would have become of them as the city as the city underwent its rejuvenation? Perhaps they had been absorbed into the very essence of the city, become part of its fabric. I imagined their eyes, eyes that I was unable to picture as physical objects, staring at me from the walls that surrounded me, eating their way into the heart of me. I could feel their presence gnawing at me, unearthing more and more names that had lain buried within me for years.

One name seeped forwards to the front of my brain, chalking its outline into my consciousness. It belong to one of those people who had had the distinction of falling into the category universally defined as ‘friend’. I had grown up with this friend throughout the now distant days of our schooling, and our friendship had endured the days of change when school life ended and the threat of adulthood reared its head. It was true that we had followed different pathways – he had plunged headlong into a world of employment and responsibility whilst I had sought to avoid such ties by attending the city university. We continued to drink at our usual haunts and waste our free hours with the same distractions that we had grown up with: it was as if we were children of the city and it, as any dutiful parent would have done, was holding our hands as we grew. And then I completed my years at the university, my now qualified status hanging from me like an anchor rather than wings, and the door opened up on my future career. At the same time another town came calling, your name on its lips, and you were gone.

Eight years. Eight years out of a lifetime. Eight years during which it had seemed unthinkable that we would ever not be friends; not criticise our local teams; not put the political world to rights; not drink away the long summer nights. And yet eight years disappears beneath the days as they pass by building walls behind which we can no longer witness the change that creeps silently all around us. Before I had even realised it, as life guided me along pathways that I could never have predicted, pathways that monopolised my hours, years had passed by and what we had once shared became nothing more than distant memories: memories that I could no longer trust. Memories that, for all I now knew, may be no more than figments of my imagination. Before long the city had shaken me off too and, under the guise of ‘career development’ my life led me to different cities, all of whom welcomed me like a prodigal son. Roots were cut and roads forgotten.

And now, as I drained my second Americano and watched the reflections of passing strangers appear and disappear in the mirrored glass, I wondered how much of my own life existed only as mere reflections in the lives of others. The faces that had drifted through my life had been no different to my own: they had come and gone in a constant state of change and I, who had thought that somethings would never change, had been wrong.

 

© All original writing copyright Chris Nelson 2000-2019

 

Afraid

19 Saturday Jan 2019

Posted by chrisnelson61 in Uncategorized

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

Afraid, Change, creative, Fear, loss, poems, poetry, Truth, writing

Afraid

Of the night

The truths that hide in the shadows;

Of the day

And the light that reveals the flaws.

Afraid

Of the sounds

Which fill the rooms with laughter and tears;

Of the silence

And the demons which it feeds.

Afraid

Of the crowd

The sense of estrangement which grows;

Of the solitude

Which settles like an unfriendly ghost.

Afraid

Of inertia

Trapped in the mire of eternity;

Of change

And the loss of the ground beneath.

Afraid

Of the page

Its whiteness screaming in my ear;

Of the words

That give away far too much.

Afraid

Of death

And leaving so much left undone;

Of life

And all the doors left unopened.

Afraid.

 

© All original writing copyright Chris Nelson 2000-2019

 

Ice-Ribbons

01 Saturday Sep 2018

Posted by chrisnelson61 in Uncategorized

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

age, Change, creative, dreams, faith, Life, Planes, poems, poetry, verse, writing

I watched the planes trace ice-ribbons

Across the sky before

They were lost to the

Cirrus wisped blueness

And their tails faded

Like promises written in

Tide-threatened sands,

And hopes took restless souls

To the promise of utopian shores

Not realising that they

Like all that came before

Wore the mask that hid

The fault-line masquerade

That spread like disease below,

I watched them come and go and

Taxi slowly on the grey

As if discarding the seeds of doubt

That grew beneath their wheels

Like ancient gods burying

Defeated foes unaware that

They would rise again,

And as the stuttered raging roar

Splintered hearts like candy then

Tore holes into the sky

Which like starving angels

Swallowed fleeting flailing dreams

Cocooned within a safety shell

They never saw,

As standing rooted in my

Futures past and present

I watched the planes

Trace

Ice-ribbons.

 

© All original writing copyright Chris Nelson 2018

 

Stations

20 Saturday Jan 2018

Posted by chrisnelson61 in Uncategorized

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

age, Change, creative, Life, poems, poetry, Stations, time, Transience, verse, writing

Young man stands

Shoulder propped against the pillar

Its concrete cold, harsh, pock-marked

Echoes his mood

Like the burned tar smoke

That spirals like a dragon

From a hand which hangs,

A pendulum weight within the sleeve,

Detached at his side.

The girl waits

Hair scented with expectation

The flower-musk brushed skin

Alight and aglow –

She knows that he will come

And lay his cloak across her fears –

Painted hues of love

Which grow like the wisteria

Around her heart.

A man forgotten by time

The pages of his days

Scattered on the dust

Like flakes of decaying skin

No testament to the things that passed his eyes

And cut their mark into his flesh

Knows that days are numbered

But he no longer counts

As he waits for welcomed arms.

A restaurant doorway

Arms flung wide like a distant aunt

Two lovers embrace

Clinging to the space that grew between them

Remembering it like childhood

Before they squeeze its life away

A moment that they trust

Will hold them in the perfection that they feel

Their private slice of heaven.

And the trains they come

And the trains still leave.

 

© All original writing copyright Chris Nelson 2018

 

Broken Rainbows

06 Saturday Jan 2018

Posted by chrisnelson61 in Uncategorized

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Change, creative, faith, Life, poems, poetry, Truth, verse, writing

I saw you in the quiet light,

The shadow of your disguise,

That slipped away as long days

Withered on the calendar pages,

The numbers that were once laced

With the beauty of mystique,

A stairway to the clouds,

And angel’s voices which swept

The cobwebs from our eyes

That hang now like veils across our hearts,

I watched you count those special days

And hang on those yet held

In infant arms,

Unaware of the quicksand which kissed your ankles

And seduced you as you slept

Whilst the snow fell like broken rainbows

And froze the party-promises,

Which we never truly held,

No song, no spell, no magic door

Ever rose beyond the mist,

And even though I saw you,

In silence and in chaos,

My hands still stretched forever

Grown tired with impotence.

 

 

© All original writing copyright Chris Nelson 2018

Different

21 Saturday Oct 2017

Posted by chrisnelson61 in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Change, creative, poems, poetry, thoughts, verse, writing

Is the world any different

Now

Our hands and heads are bound

By circuitry,

Invisible waves that pass

Above, through and beyond us,

Weaving webs spider-like

Catching us all with a silk that we are

Powerless to resist,

In wonder gazing at the virtual

World

Ever expanding

Its horizons and ours,

And communication exists

In waves unseen –

Yet hasn’t that always been;

Words face to face lose meaning

Somehow

So why not talk to the invisible,

The creations of wishful desires,

The imagined fulfillment of

Imagined dreams,

The love that was always an illusion

Born on the ether,

But isn’t this the world

Unchanged from when youth held promise

And dreams fell from one hand to another

And to the ground,

So we move on

Ever led by the New

Which searches just as we do,

So tell me, please,

Is the world any different

Now?

Nighttime

27 Saturday May 2017

Posted by chrisnelson61 in Uncategorized

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

age, Change, creative, Forgetting, lyrics, nostalgia, poems, poetry, time, verse, writing

Looking at you there

Laying on the floor,

Never thought such little time

Thought there would be more,

Eyes that see right through

Packed your thoughts away,

Never found the words I need

Thought I’d more to say.

 

Sun chases dreams

Across the sky,

We look for wings

We try to fly,

And we won’t let the nighttime

Steal the hope from our hearts,

 

Time shows its hand

Sweeps us aside,

Seducer of all

Love’s promised bride,

But we won’t let the nighttime

Steal the hope from our hearts,

 

Face falls away

Etchings of age,

Bodies so frail

Burning with rage,

And now we feel the nighttime

Steal the hope from our hearts,

 

Looking at you there

Laying on the floor,

Never thought such little time

Thought there would be more,

Eyes that see right through

Packed your thoughts away,

Never found the words I need

Thought I’d more to say.

Never Change

20 Saturday May 2017

Posted by chrisnelson61 in Uncategorized

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Change, creative, nostalgia, poems, poetry, verse, writing

He watched the shadows lengthen

Like an old man’s coat

Tails torn by the wind,

Stained by love and loss,

Gone the Alaskan Summer

He’d wished would never change,

When high-hung Suns like mirrors

Kissed each waking hour,

His child-eyes blindly clinging

Translucent lids now closed

Still see the dreamed of constants

Beneath the milky dew,

And as the shadows embrace the night,

A lover’s furtive tryst,

He feels the loss ripped from his skin

And draws his own coat tight.

 

← Older posts

Writing

  • About
  • Recent Stories
  • Older Stories
    • Postcards
    • Katie’s Things
    • Remember the Seahorse
    • The City of Possibilities
    • An Open Box
    • Slugs
  • Poems
    • Because of You
    • You Never Saw
    • Embrace
    • False Expectations
    • Inuit Prayer
    • He Waits
    • The Beast That is Our Love
    • Winter’s Kiss
    • Gypsy Princess
    • To Dream of Alice
    • Smile
    • These Things
    • Marble Towers
    • Mercury Glass
    • Desert
    • Darkness Long
    • Who I Must Be
  • Acknowledgements

Search

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 1,772 other followers

Follow chrisnelson61 on WordPress.com

Archive

Some of the fantastic blogs I Follow

  • Hidden Bear
  • The Vision of Poets
  • HARLEY HOLLAND
  • Artemis and the Moon
  • Grumpy's Gifts (poetry corner)
  • Blueprint of a Storm
  • In mind and out
  • Daydreaming as a profession
  • Treacle Heart
  • Raw Earth Ink
  • Musings
  • WordMusing
  • Stories From the Edge of Blindness
  • Incarcerated shadows
  • herschelmann fotoblog, bestpixel-photowerkstatt-hamburg.de
  • Objects, and the Distance Between Them
  • Zoolon Audio
  • MORALITY PARK
  • A Blind Bird
  • EWIAN
  • theherdlesswitch
  • TheFeatheredSleep
  • VIEW FROM OUR SOFA
  • The Brokedown Pamphlet
  • cakeordeathsite
  • Havoc and Consequence
  • I am Lovely and Lonely and I Belong Deeply To Myself
  • As it Comes
  • countingducks
  • Poet Girl Em
  • mindfoxblog
  • stu ART photo
  • hijacked amygdala
  • unbolt me
  • Weave a Web
  • jdubqca
  • Grandpa's Way
  • Muse Writer
  • THE BROKEDOWN COMIC
  • Alex Raphael
  • Changing Skin and other stories
  • johnpoetflanagan
  • Wordifull
  • scottishmomus
  • Spartan Eye

Blog Stats

  • 37,002 hits

Blog at WordPress.com.

Hidden Bear

A Mechoopda poet

The Vision of Poets

The Poetic Stories of Michael33

HARLEY HOLLAND

Artemis and the Moon

short stories about life

Grumpy's Gifts (poetry corner)

a space cleared for sharing words well worth their share.

Blueprint of a Storm

writer — poet — word and reality rearrange(r)

In mind and out

Read my mind

Daydreaming as a profession

Daydreaming and then, maybe, writing a poem about it. And that's my life.

Treacle Heart

poetry & prose by HLR

Raw Earth Ink

spit, mixed with dirt - muddy words flow

Musings

What comes to me as a still, small voice in the atmosphere of daylight and evening. © Mario Savioni and Musings, 2013. Unauthorized use or duplication of this material without the consent of the author is prohibited. Small (100 words or less) excerpts or links are permitted as long as credit is given to Mario Savioni with direction to the original content. Please refrain from “reblogging” posts.

WordMusing

...a world of poetry and spokenword

Stories From the Edge of Blindness

In 2002, Retinitis Pigmentosa changed my life. This is my story of a slow approach to darkness.

Incarcerated shadows

"Something wicked this way comes"

herschelmann fotoblog, bestpixel-photowerkstatt-hamburg.de

einige mehr oder weniger tolle Ideen um die Fotografie und die Bildbearbeitung

Objects, and the Distance Between Them

Dreams, thoughts, and experiences expressed through poetry and prose

Zoolon Audio

Guitarist / Songwriter / Blogger

MORALITY PARK

A.G. Diedericks

A Blind Bird

There's no sky, just stars.

EWIAN

Independent audiovideo artist

theherdlesswitch

If you search for the light, you will find it.

TheFeatheredSleep

Tigers not daughters

VIEW FROM OUR SOFA

The Years of Watching Avidly

The Brokedown Pamphlet

war some of the time

cakeordeathsite

What would you choose?

Havoc and Consequence

(overcome your fears)

I am Lovely and Lonely and I Belong Deeply To Myself

May You Touch Dragonflies and Stars - Dance With Fairies and Talk to the Moon

As it Comes

A New Era

countingducks

reflections on a passing life

Poet Girl Em

Heartspeak

mindfoxblog

Poems from life

stu ART photo

Urban Minimal, Urban Abstract, and Urbanscapes by Stuart Allen

hijacked amygdala

unbolt me

the literary asylum

Weave a Web

Stories poems music thoughts magic

jdubqca

poetry by j matthew waters

Grandpa's Way

Muse Writer

harmonious volcabulary to substitute for the cacophony of life

THE BROKEDOWN COMIC

KINDA RAMSHACKLE

Alex Raphael

Entertainment, travel and lifestyle blog

Changing Skin and other stories

Creative Writing and unfinished business...

johnpoetflanagan

Wordifull

...poetry, stories & rants.

scottishmomus

What I See

Spartan Eye

Picturing the bleak

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy