'A Sad Tale's Best for Winter'

Just beyond the mirth of great Nature’s rebirth,

Bitter winter beckons to confine the shining sun

And stamp out all life young. It tears each leaf

From each limb, letting each fall into the grave

Of all that’s nothing, where the putrid stench

Of decay is as potent as the plague of darkness

That reigns over all like a tempest of tyranny.

But, in the midst of nothing, some life interred

Stirs to inch slowly upwards through benighted

Daylight, shooting through the earth’s melting

Mantle to bring spring forth and rot the root of

Flowering winter. So I do not sit above the grave

Of all, but the great womb of all, where all that’s

Nothing swells Nature like two mingled bloods

So that it may soar beyond our horizon of time

To create, from all that’s nothing, all that’s great.


Published in The Monktonian

Abiding

The nightingale would be robbed of its song

If it heard this sigh of deepest despair,

And all the heads of the springing snowdrops

Would hang lifeless, inert in our Sun’s glare.

Death is what gives life to my flowering

Sorrow. It paints the midnight hour black and

Presents dawn with light for later morning

So that life may extend, but Death is the

End. Sometime I will see through the veil

Of truth to define my uncertainty

And see, without eyes, the image of Truth

When I am robed in man’s eternity.

But I wish to not part with Time just yet,

And become a part of its ticking face,

For I stir a love of greatest regret,

That singes my soul, longing to be chaste.

So when the flame of your candle is blown

Out by the whisper of Death, relight it

And see the life of your silver breath shown

In cold darkness, and fear Death, no longer.

?

Midnight glistens bright,

Silence shines still. Below

The concrete chaos straddles

All darkness of fear.

And we lie, you and I,

In the uncertainty of state,

Sharing this stage of fate

To perfect the fashion

Of false expression,

Like engraved smiles upon

Embalmed bodies,

Whilst they wait

To become like

Kisses blown in the air.

“Where is the Lord our God?”

Let us walk through

Sprawling streets,

Where the stick-lipped smile

Of small talk greets,

And twists into a savage

Snarl when our feet

No longer

Slap the naked street.

How the flame of frailty

SWELLS in the embers of envy.

“Where is the Lord our God?”

Let us step over

Spitting

Drains,

Clogged with dreams untried.

And wade through the swamp

Of cigarette ends

With sunrise as our guide.

Bone thin beggars stretch

Out to us

But we are as wretched

As they; for the sickly sound

Of pennies and pounds

Is what our lives too evolve around.

“Where is the Lord our God?”

We cannot make stale

The shimmer of this present,

The tyrant of our mortality,

So let us stroll

'Till we are shape without soul,

And the taste on our lips is tingling cold.

Created from nothing,

Cremated as nothing,

“Where is the Lord our God?”

Far behind the veil of Truth,

Innocence feeds the fragile youth.

They cannot see the stare of uncertainty,

Lidless and unliving.

Nor hear the scream of drowning dreams,

Sunk by drought of prosperity.

We stab the silence with our sighs,

And the vein of pain bleeds black.

So, drunk from darkness, we lie

In quiet ‘til light bedews our backs.

But whilst I’m a slave to peace in sleep,

When the ceiling becomes my sky,

The ties of truth b r e a k and un-loose,

And no longer is it my guide.

Shadows satisfy fear no more,

And those foolish rich are pitied by poor.

But these ideas are mere threads of hair,

Grey and dead on the head of despair,

And I wonder if panes of certainty shatter,

And if floods of thought will swell

The sunken stream.

I doubt it, but I can still dream.