If nothing I say is heard
And I fall alone unseen
Was there value in my words
And what did I mean?
Did I exist if when I fall
Nobody hears my cry
Did I mean nothing at all
If alone I die.
If forever I preach
To empty chairs
Was there value in my speech
Or was I never there?
This is laden with philosophy and religion, and shit.
The Garden
We never left the garden; it’s still here in our hearts.
The man who owned the house he built it beautiful and full of life,
With flowers fetching sunlight just to feed the eyes
And grasses where the children of enlightenment could learn to play.
Trees gazing ever-upwards for one day they’d reach the skies,
Propping up its canvas so that nighttime could dance on to day.
He hired me to weed and manage all the beauty there;
To pull up all the roots which goodness left alone, too scared
To touch with righteous fingers and commend as beauty’s own:
Never dipped into the Styx and sentenced to be rid.
But when I looked, I never did find evil’s rotten groan;
And within all the plants a beckoned brightness hid.
And when I turned the house had gone, and never have I found
His face again; the property a project without profit.
But gardening, unnoticed, I went on and worked the lands
As if it was a punishment he’d left to me to do.
Yet I could never weed up any plants, for guilty hands
Would wring my soul and bury me, I knew.
Many came and talked of how before these weeds had spread
The garden was a beacon bearing beauty in its every seed.
Their eyes, they never saw me; I guess that they preferred
To think no gardener could let such havoc wreak its course.
But there I stood and only beauty saw and only heard
The voices of unopened eyes, so hoarse.
I can’t decide if I am mad or if he tricked me from the start
And made sure everything that grows upon this land is beautiful.
But I have always shed a tear as I am growing older
That no one else will ever truly notice how I see,
And maybe beauty’s in the eyes of the beholder,
But it is all still beautiful to me.
In the corner he sat
All evening, holding
His glass to his hand
And his eyes to the glass.
Nobody asked him his name.
He was someone
From somewhere else.
And nobody knew his look;
His empty eyes staring into the glass
Hoping to see something stare back.
His hair dishevelled from the heavens
Unloading their tears.
He must have been out there a while,
He must have walked a while.
He looked cold
He kept his coat on.
And he played with his hands
Like they had answers
Hidden in the fingertips.
Or the palms,
Or adjoining the arm.
I wonder if he found them.
An epiphany in the dim light
(That one always did flicker)
Struck him like the bell for last orders
Had sung into his soul
A hymn of some sort;
Who am I
To know.
And he stood with those empty eyes
Staring as if answering
A question from a ghost ahead.
But there was just
The pinball machine:
It’s broken but
Sometimes strangers try anyway.
He left like a decision;
Marching off as a hollow soldier
With a stare from the trenches
And his hair still wet
And his coat undone
And a blank expression
Wrapped around his face.
I thought that he’d freeze
If he had to walk home.
I think he lived far away,
He’s from somewhere else;
He left his keys
On the table.
By the beer he hadn’t finished
And the coaster he hadn’t used.
Who uses coasters anyway?
Sure the table gets wet
And it might make a mark,
But I don’t mind
I guess you are
What you leave behind.
A mark on a table
From the man who left his keys.
A poet without a pen,
A quill without the ink;
Yet time and time again I’ll try
To build the bridges from my head, I think
I’m hopeless. A lost cause.
A ship destined to sink,
A dying man’s final pause.
A broken bottle sent to bear
Love-letters, no better way
To waste my final words
Than stuttering an utterly unconvincing
Message of pseudo-intellectual
Hopelessness.
Inspired with no inspiration,
Head swarming with thoughts,
But no net or better yet the concentration
To catch them; write their nectar into beauty.
A crying man’s tears don’t make a tragedy
And a dying man’s final words don’t make an obituary.
Just a tongue-tied man trying to talk in the forms
And bring them back to paper;
Draining dregs of ideas from a keg of concepts
Left to lie in mortal feelings of frustration.
Being a poet is the slow acceptance of mortality,
Being human is pretending that’s a lie.
Lines torn from my mind;
A different person left behind each time,
A former version of myself shed like snake skin.
Waking where a previous incarnation lay,
Each day drilling deeper in my mind
To find thoughts to spread like butter on my empty page;
An age spent searching, a life spent waiting
For that elusive perfection to hit me.
Creating trails of torn up paper in my path
I crawl on, surfing on enjambment to a blistered next step.
But rounding up footprints and finding their feet
I know that I’m six lines
From bliss. And poetry is
Making madness from the trails of ideas
That raced on leaving just tyre tracks behind.
Spelling out from burnt rubber in your mind
And moulding the mess into a sentence.
Crawling on and dispensing beauty in your wake.
For God’s sake, it’s beautiful.
You’re beautiful.
It’s a director’s cut
To your own life,
Should I be ‘loved by all’,
‘missed by wife’ or
‘lives on in spirit’?
I think this will be the death of me.
Wake
To a another day of daytime television, takeaways and
‘For God’s sake pay the damn rent’.
Eyes open, mind closed
And the cupboards ajar.
Preserving your own crime scene
With biscuit crumbs and carpet stains.
The clock in the corner giving up
Because you never listen
And a stray sock slowly drowning on the floor.
You could have tidied up more,
There’s a world
Spinning round your apartment
And you’re trying to pry up the remote
With your foot.
