Green Swallows Me

Tags

creative, Desire, Journeys, loss, Love, lyric, poems, poetry, Sailing, Search, verse, writing

With the wind at our backs,

And hope in our sails,

We left these dead shores,

To mariner’s tales.

And under your watch,

We found ourselves led,

From cold weathered deck,

To comfort of bed.

 

I charted each course,

And marked every night,

Kept count of those lost,

Or stricken by blight.

I conquered the tides,

Or so it did seem,

Kept buried the fears,

Held fast to the dream.

 

And this ship will go down,

And all hands will be lost,

And the blind will still swim,

As the green swallows me,

‘cause I never knew when,

To let go.

 

We welcomed each shore,

Set foot on the sand,

And offered our gifts,

With quivering hand.

Whilst still in our ear,

The whispering wave,

Kept pulling us back,

This wasn’t our grave.

 

I clung to my map,

With bullish resolve,

As each new horizon,

Began to dissolve,

I saw myself then,

A mast that won’t bend,

A rudderless ship,

On a course that never ends.

 

And this ship will go down,

And all hands will be lost,

And the blind will still swim,

As the green swallows me,

‘cause I never knew when,

To let go.

 

© All original writing copyright Chris Nelson 2000-2019

 

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Walk Away

Tags

creative, death, Ghosts, Longing, loss, Love, poems, poetry, verse, Walk away, writing

And when you leave

Don’t turn around

Or leave the door ajar,

Just walk away

Without a smile

Don’t look me in the eye.

I’ll strip away

The years between

And hold them in my hands,

The days we stole

Without a word

And meaning in a glance.

I’ll carve them all

Into my skin

The hours that we shared,

The joke we knew

Would always end

When laughter turned to tears.

So when you go

Don’t blow a kiss

To ease you on your way,

Just walk away

I’ll watch you leave

Through gently drowning eyes.

 

© All original writing copyright Chris Nelson 2000-2019

 

Too Much to Lose

Tags

creative, Fear, loss, lyric, poems, poetry, Premonition, verse, writing

Too much to lose

Too much to lose

Can’t leave you now

And let you bruise,

Too much to lose

Too much to lose

Don’t want to fall

Or have to choose.

 

Waves come,

Crashing through the walls

I built in sleep,

Feel the tremors rise

I cannot close,

My eyes.

 

At night,

Even though I feel you

Close to me,

The nightmares take control

I cannot shake,

Them free.

 

Eyes wide,

But I can’t see a way

To end this fear,

Which burns within my chest

I cannot still

The beat.

 

Too much to lose

Too much to lose

Can’t leave you now

And let you bruise,

Too much to lose

Too much to lose

Don’t want to fall

Or have to choose.

 

Sometimes,

Even when I talk

Myself to sleep,

The demons still have hold

I cannot talk,

Them down.

 

Would I,

Give all that I know

To choose the time,

To open up the door

When I had served,

My time?

 

Or would I,

Close my eyes once more

In silent prayer,

To gods I cannot trust

To beg to keep,

Me here?

 

Too much to lose

Too much to lose

Can’t leave you now

And let you bruise,

Too much to lose

Too much to lose

Don’t want to fall

Or have to choose.

 

© All original writing copyright Chris Nelson 2000-2019

 

Afraid

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

 

A Farewell

Tags

creative, fiction, flash, flash fiction, Honesty, loss, short stories, story, thoughts, writing

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.

 

© All original writing copyright Chris Nelson 2000-2019

 

Watching Suns

Tags

age, creative, faith, Life, loss, poems, poetry, Remembrance, Strangers, Sun, time, verse, writing

She sat and watched the suns

Come and go as if they were

Strangers passing on the bitter streets:

A nod, a glance, perhaps a smile.

They rose in the levelled east,

Fought their way to the highs of their days,

Then struggled to climb each obstacle,

The mountains of the west.

She watched from the window

The porch and the gate

As the clock stole the hours,

Spirited them away,

And filed them under ‘lost’.

Emerald vines grew like memories

Creeping slowly over the garden fence,

Tendril-fingers seeping into the grain

Tenderly choking the life unlived.

She watched the marks of the years

Engrave themselves into her hands,

Pathways followed and gone,

And so many dreamed,

Her face the scorched and dried

Map of ages,

Marked, but abandoned before the mark of treasure

Had burned itself into her.

And the suns still came

And the suns still died,

And someone else took her chair.

 

© All original writing copyright Chris Nelson 2018

Kitchen Window

Tags

creative, Life, loss, poems, poetry, time, verse, writing

She stood at the kitchen window

Still her eyes looking out

Over the fields of wheat

Now clothed in concrete and stone

Salt-moist with the days

She had given away

And moments she had sunk

Her tired hands into

Too deep to ever catch the dreams

Which swam in the shallows

Transients in the currents

Which left their lip-stain

On shores she felt that she

Could never reach

Not seeing that they

Like the hours lost

Were nothing more than shark-bait

Driven onto rock-scarred shores

Wishing that the story book tales

Had not been quite so tall

And that true love’s lips had kissed

A promise of truth

That the dragons had left some bridges

For her alone to burn

And that the rainbow had borne

Her happy ending

Still, her eyes looking out

She stood at the kitchen window.

 

 

© All original writing copyright Chris Nelson 2018

Losing You

Tags

creative, Distance, Fear, Losing you, loss, poems, poetry, separation, verse, writing

When did I first begin to start

Losing you?

Was it the note that you said I

Never wrote?

Or was it the favourite tune you

Couldn’t name?

Perhaps the day you looked away

At the trees?

Or when we passed upon the stairs

Like strangers?

When did I first begin to start

Losing you?

Was it when you looked at me and

Said his name?

Or was it when your lips forgot

How to smile?

Perhaps the day I was not there

Within your eyes?

Or when I felt the final cord cut

From my heart?

When did I first begin to start

Losing you?

 

 

© All original writing copyright Chris Nelson 2018

Gone (Light and Dark)

Tags

creative, death, Gone, Human nature, Life, loss, poems, poetry, thoughts, verse, writing

I read the fickle words you wrote

Scribbled on a post-it note,

False sentiment caught in my throat

Made me gag and made me choke.

I heard the flowing eulogy

The standard one and not for me,

As standing there for all to see

You hung your words upon the tree.

I watched you talk of you and I

And look so meekly to the sky,

And as you spoke of when and why

To my replacement you mouthed ‘hi’.

 

I read the fickle words you wrote

But what more did I expect?

A heart torn open

Bleeding free –

A life cut short to be with me?

I heard the flowing eulogy

But I was only lost at sea

And ships will sail

And ever will –

And life goes on without me still.

I watched you talk of you and I

But true I never let you know

The secrets that

I hoped you saw –

And now I’m gone, forever more.

 

© All original writing copyright Chris Nelson 2018

 

Beneath the Bridge

Tags

age, Creative writing, faith, Life, loss, nostalgia, poems, poetry, Truth, verse, writing

Beneath the bridge

Below the waves

With all the things

We threw away,

The faces and

The names we knew

Our fallen dreams

From younger days,

The bitter roots

We never killed

They twist and turn

Begin to grow,

Creep up our spine

And choke our bones

And root us here

As if to show,

How all the things

We ever lost

Will anchor us

And mark our place,

Beneath the bridge

Above our sighs

We are as all

A fading face.