Hide and Seek

Tags

poetry, poems, writing, Love, Communication, verse, creative, loss, Fear, Mask, Hjdecand Seek, Self-preservation

Waiting for the day

Waiting for you

To reach out and touch me

And never to let go,

Waiting for the moment

The veil will fall

I’ll tear the curtain down

And show it all to you, 

Horizons fade away

The dying light

And cloaks drawn tight once more

To hide myself from you.

Footsteps

Tags

Communication, Control, creative, Fear, Footsteps, poems, poetry, verse, writing

My footsteps rang against the stone

As I walked past disdainful stare,

Your eyes upon me from your door

Mocking lips and murderous glare.

The sound that echoed down the halls

Served only as a footnote cold,

An image which you thought you saw

Words that once you had been told.

A fairy tale in all its pain

A warning for you not to stray,

But stay behind the safety rail

And keep the pleasure wolves at bay.

The distance that will keep you safe

Imagine treasures mine to lose,

As jealously you criticise

Still dream your feet within my shoes.

Small Provincial Station

Tags

Communication, Connection, creative, Crossroads, friendship, loss, Love, poems, poetry, Small Provincial Station, spirit, Strangers, Trains, verse, writing

We met when we were strangers

On platforms changing trains

Time would never be the same

No season spoke the dangers,

Our faces wore expressions

Of kindred spirit found

Our voices made no sound

No doubts and no transgressions,

We stood aside the crossroad

And looked along each way

Hoping for another day

To break the secret code,

We met when we were strangers

On platforms changing trains 

But I could feel the hurt and reins

Beneath my feet the dangers,

We met when we were strangers 

But I knew even then

That I was nothing more

Than a small

Provincial

Station.

No More

Tags

Awareness, Belief, Communication, creative, faith, hope, loss, Love, Mental health, No More, Prose, Realisation, Self-awareness, Short, Social, story, Understanding, Words, writing

I think that I have come, at last, to a crossroads; a point of uncomfortable realisation. A crossroads which leads, in every direction, to a dead end and a realisation that I have finally reached the last page of my own, personal dictionary. I have come to the point where I have used – and abused – every word that was ever known to me. I have twisted and contorted them into myriad sentences and phrases until all meaning that they might have once held has been lost, all connection to anything other than themselves distorted. As I sent each one on its way, safely wrapped as it was, like a child in a winter coat, cosseted by others to which it bore no relation, I watched it drift away. I watched as they gathered and then dispersed high, high above my head, dipping behind the clouds, never to reappear.

And, eventually, as I reached my hand deep into myself to take hold of another random collection of letters, I found nothing between my fingers, nothing within my grasp. My fist was filled with the emptiness of silence, the silence of a stilling heart.

And then the empty words within my head, the final ones that would leave me, spelled out their message: there was no more to say.

The Wrong Story

Tags

Acceptance, Communication, creative, Falling Sleet, inspiration, loss, Love, poems, poetry, The Wrong Story, Understanding, verse, writing

It was the wrong story that leapt up and out at me,

From the page that I saw behind your eyes –

Its tumbling words sang to me as if I were the one,

The only one to whom they spoke.

They wrapped themselves around me like a Winter’s evening shawl,

A warmth and comfort my insides craved,

A tale unpicked for me.

And as my mind began to weave and tangle a missive in which to grow,

My eyes closed blind to those I saw and

Nurtured futures fruitless.

I turned and spread each leaf before me reflecting as I did,

On every word that I planted there,

And every root that you pushed deep.

And only when the stems had grown and twisted every one,

About and through my aching frame,

Did my eyes, at last, loose their lustre –

And only then did I recognise that,

The story I had read was wrong.

A Farewell

Tags

A Farewell, Another Tease, Book, Communication, creative, fiction, flash, flash fiction, Leaving, loss, lyrics, music, poetry, Prose, Published, short story, stories, story, writing

A very short story today taken from the collection of poetry, prose and lyrics: ‘Another Tease’ available via the links below.

Hope you enjoy this.

I thought of you then, on the day that I left, knowing, despite the words, that we would never meet again. I thought of you as I sat in the darkness, as the Sun dipped like a dying friend beyond the horizon for what might as well have been the last time. I knew that I, like the errant Sun, would rise again, but that neither of us would ever be quite the same: the Sun would burn fractionally less brightly, its gaseous source ever so slightly diminished, and I, with less reason to rise than before, would begin to become a shadow of myself. I thought of you and the words that we had shared wondering if you had ever truly understood my meaning. Had you thought of me as a friend or merely an acquaintance, and had I ever truly understood what lay behind your eyes? I thought of how close I felt that we had become, our shoulders brushing against one another as we shared a joke, our laughter spreading its roots between us connecting us forever, or so I had imagined. But did you leave me behind along with all the other artefacts of work when you closed the door behind you and returned to your home?

I thought of you and wondered whether I had been too obscure, too subtle in my words and looks, for you to see me. And what exactly had I felt? Was this a connection that I felt that I had needed or something that had burst upon me unexpectedly and had opened a new door which whispered quietly for me to go through? Perhaps the moment had come for me, after a life of living at a comfortable distance from the edge, to finally take a chance, a risk. But, of course, caution is a powerful bedfellow, and, by the time I had recognised the chance, if had closed its eye for ever.

I thought of you then and wondered if you had ever lain alone in the dark beneath the Summer’s heat: I wondered if, like me, you had lost yourself to imagination; and I wondered if you had ever found yourself with your hand between your legs, wishing its fingers were mine.

Another Tease – poetry, prose and lyrics

LULU

AMAZON

BOOK DEPOSITORY 

ABEBOOKS

ALBRIS

What Use Are My Words?

Tags

Change, Communication, conflict, creative, Depression, Inertia, loss, Peace, poems, poetry, verse, war, What use are my words, Words, writing

This one is a few years old, but sadly as relevant as ever, I feel.

Anyway, it felt like it needed to be out once more, so here goes:

What use are my words
If the shells still fall
From black-heart open skies
And bombs still separate limb
From torso
On a whim?
If lover’s nights are torn asunder
Each phrase of love declared
And punctuated by the rifle’s kiss
As bullets fly through skies
To deafen out the
Infant’s cries?
If families fractured fall apart
Their bodies as their homes
And stuffed in ragged bags
They walk on paths anew
Hopes and lives askew?

What use are my words
If every judgement still
Depends on colour, race or creed
And not on who we are
Those who act so blind
Injustice our own kind?
If passion is fuelled by hatred
And shouted from the stands
Evolution’s backward stare
Feet that stomp and pound
Like we never left the ground?
If all that we can show
Is intolerance and hate
To mask the failings in ourselves
To stick within our clan
And say this is the Plan?

What use are my words
If all that we believe
Serves not to heal but pull apart -
Words lost behind the rhetoric -
And sets us off to goad
The wrong way down the road?
If our deities stand toe to toe
As we become the baying throng
Applauding every blow
Forgetting that it's all a game
And they are all the same?
If faith is lost behind the mask
And we think ourselves the show
Where Glory resides in riches
And ceremony makes us tall
Hidden safe behind our wall?

What use are my words
If those who shout the loudest -
The basest of our kind -
Earn mandate over all of us
To wield the sharpened sword
And cut the final cord?
If none of us is equal
And power comes through privilege
Whilst on green fields they scheme
To hold on to the wealth
Through division and through stealth?
If birth outweighs our merits
When change is just a word
And nothing brings a greater good
As islands we shall ever stay
To never see a brighter day?

What use are my words?

Nobody Reads

Tags

Communication, creative, Disconnection, isolation, Language, Nobody Reads, poems, poetry, Reading, verse, writing

Nobody really reads

Anymore

And I sit here with my pen

And page

Quartz-white and aching

With the longing to be heard

With the longing for the scratches

Of life and love and pain

To leave their trail 

Like the snails who emerge

To the freshness of the rain

With a purpose and a will

On the fences and the leaves

On the skin of another.

Nobody really reads 

Anymore

Eyes scan screens and pages

Lifeless

As if expecting something more

To leap out from the words

To seep from the page

And settle beneath the skin 

Like a message or a meaning 

Or something better to take

The time away

A quiet infection of purpose

Or entertainment or something 

Something other than this.

Nobody really reads 

Anymore 

As a colourless wash paints over

It’s grey

Face recycled with the same words

That we heard before

That we heard tomorrow 

With no more meaning than the clouds

Which spin and scuttle

Like frightened crabs across the sky

Across the beach

To the sea that swallows them whole

As the language slowly dies

Behind our eyes.

Nobody really reads 

Anymore.

Faces

Tags

Belonging, Communication, creative, Faces, Fitting in, poems, poetry, Survival, verse, writing

I hung my face

On the hook

On the back

Of the door

Unsure as to when

Or how

Or why

I would return, 

And took another from the shelf

That was laden like the willow

Before the autumn knocked upon its frame 

And sent its cold reverberations 

Shivering like the future’s ghost 

Through its aching spine,

And pulled it on as if to say

A new dawn had begun

With new words to be said

And fresh eyes to be shown 

All the things that had been seen

A thousand times before,

I took my face

And wore it well

And fooled the crowd

That huddled round

With nothing else to do

But hope,

And when at last

Even the sun grew tired

Or bored

I hung my face up once more

Upon the hook

On the back

Of the door.

Jackdaw

Tags

Communication, creative, Flight, hope, Jackdaw, Mask, poems, poetry, Quest, verse, writing

I pulled upon my mask of black

And set upon the day

The air beneath my outstretched wings

To carry me away,

I flew from spire to treetop high

Over city, wood and field

And only when I spied my goal

Did I to rest but yield, 

I took the prize my eyes had seen

And settled on the stone

Then left without a passing word

To those I’d left alone,

My blue eyes saw beyond this life

The fate that comes to all

But no-one heard the words I spoke

Or shivered at my caw,

So I will wear my mask of black

And watch you from my perch

As vainly through the days you fall

In hopeless endless search.