Elijah worked at the further end
Of the Port McDonald pier,
His job was simply to keep the light
Bright burning through the year,
All he’d see were the seagulls who
Would swoop and dive in the spray,
As the sea beat up on the jetty piles
On a cold, dark winter’s day.

His mother had died of a broken heart
Long after his father fled,
Had loosed the chains of his fatherhood
For a life on the sea instead,
They’d put him into an orphanage
Where he learned to abide the rod,
And found that his supplications and
His prayers fell short of God.

The universe was an empty space,
A vast, unseeing sky,
There wasn’t a presence watching him
As they’d said, in the days gone by,
He ached for a revelation that
Would show he was not alone,
A single soul in the firmament
In front of an empty throne.

He’d never managed to make a friend
In the long, sad years of life,
And women, though they avoided him
He longed for a sweet young wife,
His isolation was made complete
When he walked back to his room,
After a night on the lonely pier
In the early morning gloom.

One night a waif from the city streets
Sought shelter from the storm,
Huddled against the cabin wall
Where he sat, both safe and warm,
He heard her shuffle and took her in
And gave her tea from the urn,
And fell in love with her sad, grey eyes,
A waif from the city, spurned.

She came again, and again each night,
They talked until the dawn,
And weaved their dreams and their fantasies
Of a world they’d neither known,
But then one night the Inspector came,
A grim, ungiving man,
Who frowned, and he told the girl to leave,
He said that she was banned.

She waited, shivering in the cold
In the lee of the old sea wall,
Til he came hurrying from his shift
As the dawn spread over all,
He wrapped her up in his coat, and cried
He could do no more than this,
But she clung on to his lonely form
And she gave him his first kiss.

He took her back to his room to stay
And he watched her as she slept,
If she had opened her eyes that day
She would see Elijah wept,
‘I won’t go back to those lonely nights,’
Was the thought that gripped his mind,
To lose his midnight companion now
He thought, was most unkind.

That night, he told her to meet him there
At the far end of the pier,
‘Just as the clock strikes one!’ She said,
‘I’ll be there, never fear.’
He’d soaked the pier in kerosene
Just twenty yards from the end,
And when she arrived, he said, ‘You’ll see,
They won’t part us, my friend.’

At two in the morning, up it went
In a blaze of fire and smoke,
The centre part of the pier ablaze
As they watched it, neither spoke,
A gap appeared as it all fell in
Was extinguished by the sea,
But the end stood tall like a sailing ship
That had set the couple free.

The storm that ravaged the coast that night
Kept the lifeboat on the shore,
They wanted to go and rescue him,
The Inspector said, ‘What for?’
While they looked out at the raging sea
Made plans for the world they’d won,
And when the light of the dawn approached
The end of the pier had gone.

David Lewis Paget

Heart tormented throughout the age
Seeing nothing but destruction
Cruelty the best of the worst
Scarred for life
By a mother's emotional abuse

Never feeling comfortable around men
Afraid of anything more indepth than ***
Finding a nonjudgemental man
Thinking to repairing the past
Unknowingly mimics the mother

Finally swept away off the feet
Married, optimistic of the future
A child born early
New mother now turns the page
Happy as can be

Hormones a woman's curse
Cause heartache and despair
Mixed with the abuse of the past
Trying to over come
Badly, wanting to be good

Years pass by like rain
Flooding the family as it grows
No desire felt, yet in love for sure
Lost, scared
Self preservation reigns high

Sins of the mother passed down
Sharp tongue, quick wit
Cutting deeply through the love
Wants despartely to want, need
Tries to hang on to give not take

Illness prevails
Striking down
Hormones and desire all put aside
Attempts to reach out
Just cannot

You stop trying and give up
It gets worse
Make it stop mommy
Don't leave Daddy
Tear paint the canvas

Have I been so cruel
Ungiving and cold
Cirumstances piling up
Body becoming older

Beggs and pleads to try to fix
Isn't just a cold hearted woman
A beautiful soul inside
Just needs nourishment
Don't turn away

Don't toss tthis lifeaway
Not into the trash
Try harder
Meet a quarter of the way
Whatever you decide

Please Don't  turn away

One moment she feels fine,
The next moment she is lost,
Life promises her happiness,
But at hidden costs.

She's been angry for so long,
That she feels tired and weak,
Her mental strength is crumbling,
As her eyes begin to leak.

She has no explanation,
So to you she gives the blame,
Yet you are only a part,
Of what makes her insane.

One second she is sure of herself,
Only to turn around and face doubt,
Her emotions are swelling inside,
Uncontrollably letting themselves out.

You were able to call her depression,
Despite her ungiving poker face,
She tried to hide the feeling,
That she does not belong in this place.

You suffer the repercussions,
Of her unfulfilled dreams,
She feels regret for not knowing,
Why that always seems.

She tries to achieve better,
But it is mostly all hope,
She is unsure of how,
She will manage to cope.

I was staying in the village
That was known as Banzhushan,
In the mountains, in the Province
That the Chinese call Hunan,
It was perched atop the mountain
You could reach, and touch the sky,
But there were no single women,
And the men up there were shy.

They were poor, could offer nothing
To entice a willing bride,
They earned little from their labours,
And their houses, poor inside,
So the girls would leave to travel
Down the mountain to the plain,
Where they’d find a richer husband
Than the farmer, sowing grain.

So the men would send out raiders
To the outskirts of the towns,
And they’d kidnap straying peasants,
All the women that they found,
And they’d target younger widows
Who would not put up a fight,
Then would carry them to Banzhushan
Protected by the night.

I had met a village elder
By the name of Zhang Fan Cheng,
He was ancient, a magician,
One the Chinese call yāorén,
He invited me to dinner,
It was simple, shoots and rice,
He was dignified and courteous,
But caught me by surprise.

In the further room, a mirror
Stood at length, both straight and tall,
The frame was wrought in silver
And it leant against the wall,
He showed it to me proudly
Then asked how much would I pay?
For just 5,000 R.M.B.
He’d sell it me, today!

I reached out to feel the silver,
Was it fake or was it real?
He sensed my hesitation
Then he motioned, ‘You be still!’
And plunged his hand into the glass
The mirror let him in,
His arm up to the elbow
Against science, against sin!

He reached his arm behind and pulled,
A girl came into sight,
She was standing in the mirror,
He was holding her so tight,
And she stared, while looking at me
And she said: ‘Qing bang bang wo!’
I could read it on her lips, and then
The wizard let her go.

She had said: ‘Would you please help me!’
But I’d stepped back in the room,
She was nowhere near behind me
Just reflected, in the gloom,
And I saw a tear forming at
The corner of her eye,
The wizard pulled his arm out, and
She waved to me, ‘Goodbye!’

I paid the man his money, and
I took the mirror down
On a wooden cart he lent me,
And I took it through Hunan,
Then I packed it on a train and went
Off speeding to Nanjing,
Where I kept a small apartment,
And I turned, and locked us in.

I stood the mirror over by
A meagre wooden shelf,
Then I stood quite still before it
Hoping she would show herself,
And I tried to put my arm inside
Like he had done before,
But the mirror was unyielding,
So I stood there, and I swore!

That night the girl appeared,
Standing right behind the glass,
And she pummelled on the surface
As if she’d be free at last,
But the mirror was ungiving,
And I couldn’t hear her voice,
So I took a ball pein hammer -
It had given me no choice!

She could see me through the mirror,
In alarm, she mouthed ‘Meiyou!’
But her beauty had beguiled me
Though I knew she’d shouted ‘No!’
I was fevered and impatient now
To set this beauty free,
So I swung the ball pein hammer
And it shattered, over me!

She fell out through the broken glass,
Lay trembling in my room,
Bleeding, sobbing in the silence,
Like the silence of the tomb,
And she said she’d been imprisoned
Since the days of Qin **** Huang,
Then she writhed upon the carpet
As her flesh turned into sand.

I had wanted to release her
To relieve those tender tears,
But her body, once released took on
The last two thousand years;
She took one last, despairing look
Then withered up to die,
And for years I’ve sought the answer
To the only question - ‘Why?’

David Lewis Paget

(Glossary -
R.M.B. - Ren-Min-bi - or yuan (Chinese currency.)
Yāorén - magician
Qing bang bang wo - (Ching bang bang wor) - Please help me!
Meiyou - (May yo) - No, nothing
Qin **** Huang - (Chin Sher Hwang)
1st Emperor of China - 246-210 BC)

i have this reoccurring dream, it's me,
standing unearthly in the front of the altar, did god bring me to his home or is this just what they call church?
lonesome, that helter-skelter tenebrous loneliness, estrangement all around
pews blessed with the strange vacancy i relate with the open ended depth of my heart, as if people were supposed
to be there, as if people were
supposed to believe
i'm spitting up blood now, this isn't how to mend and no; who are we kidding, this is exactly how we knew it all would end
veiled with
necklaces, wrapping songs of Hail Mary around my throat,
the layered thought that god could look down in any given second
and strangle me with his own prayer,
you see i'm shouting at the ceiling but
tears only result in bent puddles on the floor
faith only results in a plethora of bibles, and the ashes of their contents.
slitting my wrists with every unanswered scream, every unlearned rosary
he's laughing at me, he's laughing at me, this ungiving god, furnishing a strange pigment to the room, staining a strange potency
transmitting this repulsive image- this memory, of this entity, of this effigy- we're all on hands and knees. withering, it's relentless,
tampering with the various degrees of energy and just what am i here for,
maybe that question is it, maybe
it's me,
maybe it's the way i was made and maybe it's the way i never called you back and
maybe it's that the day i was created was the day god cracked and
it's rumored my nostalgia-grade voice grips the air the way his hands hugged nails
i'm sifting through the times when these mumbling statues shattered, every rejected cross was found dropped,
the day i was created god became bilious and vomited for the next 16 years,
maybe it's today that he'll stop

are you at all surprised that i am in love
with your beautiful blue eyes?
it is no surprise that i want to keep them
in my pocket, for just me to share...
make my friends wish that they had a pair
of pretty blue eyes that could make your
heart melt and lapse into spells of infinite
rust, of ungiving trust. o
if i had them back, no sadness would i lack.

A simple text would be nice
That’s all I ask
In your eyes that’s too much
But you can ask for the world
And I will give it to you
Right then and there
Then you will look at me
And ask more

A green, ungiving pond
In an exhausted park
Held with an iron bond
His stagnant equilibrium.

©LazharBouazzi, 30 March, 2018

She has tender dirt upon her fortitude,

I wonder if she's forgiven herself yet...



Push your grief, shopping-cart lady

carry your health in head-lights

island of hide and highways,

I loud-speak in a single look

you're someone's mother, sister, child

a sorrow-go-round ride

in blankets that have not seen

Gain or Tide

push your millions

pop cans, wine bottles,

tin / glass monies

carry that dynamic dust

each piece a street

each spot someone's ungiving grunt

each step in a nowhere hunt...



She has museums in her silence

I wonder if her love has hues of contradictions...



Push on, you ribald mule!

carry on in your refugee stink,

sandpaper sandals and scarlet scars

scabs that slow speak

each winter and Valentine,

to think you're someone's mother, sister, child

sorrow-goes-round

village-wild

your stubborn pride far from mild



Float on, shopping-cart lady

stay in each hair-pin hour

in this bankrupt ballet

is this a way to live...?

Your hunched shadow

has no voice, no answers to give...



She has blossoms and duty in her hands,

I wonder if fate partners her dance...

pushing that cart, this life by chance



she's someone's

mother, sister, child

a woman who's homeless

no choice for the wild.

More or less another beginning
No further forward than before
Side stepping into another dimension
Soon standing at a different door
Unaware of what awaits
But knowing what is left behind
hollow and ungiving
no longer worthy of the time

Before the petals start to wither
And the wine begins to waste
Take a leap out of the window
Remembering to
Always roll with grace

Recover from your wounds
And get clothed before they hear us
No, this isn't fair this isn't human
Please, please spare me
I promise


keep the open faces, like spaces into a divine end
a million assassins and ambassadors of your life
and when the stars are zeroes of polynomials, I dread
a smile at the end when it dies, my love all mine

(The setting was dark, for there were streetlights at a distance. Till then it was all dark. He was eager to make the jump but feared his body, or worse his soul would give up then and there. As shadow passed his sight he gathered his disarray and the ungiving to his fever. He began to mumble,
"Stand tall, for there is a reward
The empty sky looked up and saw a flaw"

He began to pull himself towards the lights away from misery. His walk had a limb and was as if he had walked a thousand miles in a thousand different places a thousand times all at once.

"The empty sky asked Mother Nature, a strange request
A roof must be put above, at her behest
The mother looked confused and asked her child the purpose
The sky replied I have nothing to take nor trust"

Elliott was nearing this run in quite a splendid fashion and his mechanisms were working unorthodoxly. He was blinded by reflections from the mirrors at the side of cars passing through him. the light came from a distance not that far from him. he couldn't describe the cars. he didn't need to in his mind. he was far from observing the world as the world was changing.
He continued
"Mother questioned what her child meant, asked calmly
the sky said that when all are asleep in this crude world, they flee
to the land of dreams, but I, mother am but a piece
Please give me something to dream up to when my troubles flee")

Glancing at an open entrance, there’s was a
second chance at a captivating magic of you.

Hypnotized, Fascinated, Mesmerized and transfixed of a grip..

The grip of your energy of intensity, and heartfelt with fiery, that wild’s me with passion of excitement.

Startle by your daze,
pondering, your impression of your divine  tenderness affection.

Weakling of your soft but roaring laughter.
Setting aside the  essence instincts of your humming tune of delicate communications.

Daydreaming of this remedy.
So tranquilize over my subdues.

Given an utmost twofold of adhesion connection,
within a distance from your easily broken smirk.

Despair of forcibly but yet so inseparably into shattered pieces.
Humbling over mumbling over of an insincere anguish of helpless ungiving devotedness.

For a split second of emeralds of unexplained chances.

Reminiscing the unfenced of enchanting entryway
of how the encountering the beauty of you.

I had stolen them myself,
Cloth of soothing tightness,
Wrapping it around damning proof,
Praying it to close around her pain,
To keep her from remembering.
Clueless and possessed by forbidden sufferings,
Janet grabbed a tuft of my hair and held it sobbing,
Pulling at the root.
Enduring my appropriate punishment,
She cried,
Through ungiving eyes nothing soaked her dignity,
Concealment continued though,
To herself she admitted,
What had happened.

You never forget
the fat preemie.
A perfect revenge of the curse―
at ungiving.


Streaking in
snow, when it
was frighteningly dark.

The moon-bathed
body of the thumb king
running without feet.

How would you―
climb, the black hills
of desire in tragic land
of skulls?

The living god was to
become a marbled statue.

Aquilla. Would you
carry the burden
of ungiving?

Transmuted, I
will find you in portrait
of sublime?

And I will see in your eyes
a cosmos, floating in void.

But a primal question
remained unanswered, who were you.

Through the blue sky
and legends of dark, the
constellations squirm.

And I start believing
in God dust.

Like a
            h
            u
            r
            r
            i
            c
            a
            n
            e
At first a haphazard
                                  d
                                   r
                                   i
                                   z
                                   z
                                   l
                                   e
Then a deadly
           d
           o
           w
            n
            p
            o
            u
            r

Of beak-masqued terrorists
                                     i
                                     n
                                     v
                                      i
                                      s
                                      i
                                      b
                                       l
                                       e

Threatens each unguarded
                 m
                 o
                 m
                 e
                 n
                 t

Fear grows everywhere suspicion
                                     l
                                     u
                                     r
                                     k
                                     s

Yesterday’s mosquito makes tomorrow’s
               g
               h
               o
               s
               t

It’s the season’s ungiving
                                      p
                                      a
                                      n
                                      i
                                      c

No remedy : only the sky’s massive closed door and
                  t
                  i
                  m
                   e
                   l
                   e
                   s
                   s
                   n
                   e
                   s
                   s

matteus is dead
a flower lays next to his head
as crimson as his lips
paper-thin and spreading rigidly.
his smile is small and ungiving as he would will it
so short-lived in my favor
so indifferent to my sentiments.
i am a shadow dancing on his gravestone
clutching needless memories as if they were a cornerstone.
i used to want him as mine.
crave what could never be
stoking and kindling
what never ignited.
matteus came and went.
matteus was never here.
matteus is gone for good,
and with him my senses.

Beauty
Love
Joy
Kindness
Light.
Light was all I was capable of seeing
Never did I shield my eyes from the sun
No.
I surrounded myself with the very essence of light
The glow radiated off of me in such a way that blinded anyone near
Briefly allowing them an escape from the darkness I was unaware of.

Years passed and my lamp still shone brightly
Unafflicted nor affected by the darkness of this world
Until it was.
My eyes were opened
No longer was I squinting at the world through the blinding sun
No.
They were opened
For once I noticed a difference in how society treated my people,
My family
The light flickered
I noticed the prominence of hate and separation
I noticed the way they looked at us and saw how they expected less from me
The flicker ceased
The lights went out
I was surrounded by darkness
The blinds had been lifted from my eyes only to reveal a starless night
For a while, the glow that once encompassed my being was no more
Replaced by a murky mask and a broken spirit
For a while, I couldn't find the light
I was trapped in a closeted pit of sorrow.
It wasn't until much later that I discovered the true identity of this lost light source,
It was my innocence

My innocence had been lost
Snatched up by the hands of discrimination
Stolen by the forces of premeditative thoughts and colonial idealism
I didn’t want it to be, but it was
Gone.
It’s location unknown to all
I had to say goodbye to my sun
I had to mature and grow and learn about the faults of this world
I needed to develop a deeper understanding of the darkness
All the while escaping from its ungiving grasp

Perhaps I could illuminate this gloomy obscurity
Find another light source that could renew my once ever-present glow.
No longer will I be forced to squint through life
Staring into the blinding light of the sun
Nor would I be completely incapable of seeing the luminosity of this world.
No.
It was a tinted light
One that understood the pain of this world while also witnessing its beauty

My sun had been swallowed
But a newly discovered star had been born.