Days of a selected length squash against one another
Piling up high 'til the calendar confuses before it organises
First weeks, then months
Stretching ambitions into unusual shapes
Lingering decisions losing their weight
Making way for a wave of minor tasks to take the reins
With scratched-off to-do lists
Bobbing along the surface
Hardly leaving ripples in passing
Doing little more than watching the reflections go by and wondering what might make them
We won't have moments like this again
Not for a while, at least
Jul 13, 2020
Jul 13, 2020 at 5:50 PM UTC
There's too much time to know how to waste it
Its traces found above and around
Spreading like mist in the most insignificant spaces
Filling lines in faces
Please let me be tired
Allow me the reason to be weary
Give me a taste of stress so I might sleep more easily
Thank you for this self portrait I've had the pleasure of painting
I'm still boxing with shadows, I hope it might change me
May 16, 2020
May 16, 2020 at 5:18 PM UTC
I haven't tried to slow down for a while
Or given time to thinking or feeling
I don't know where the space lies in my body
The way in which it flows inside me
How it mixes with my thoughts
Or billows with the air
Coming out and coming in
I will look there
At my most recent portrait
Held against every version of myself I have seen watching or staring back
To see how the lines have swelled or bent over time
And see whether I know myself still
Mar 23, 2020
Mar 23, 2020 at 10:44 AM UTC
There is always a choice.
A binary voice,
Coding all that you say in one of two ways.
You may hide this or cover
Take the signs and smother
But
Every decision is either yourself or other.
Where on the scale do you lie?
When the time is high, the sharp tongues will fail and quick wits subside.
Your pride will show itself frail and hide
So,
Take your time.
Step back, rewind, and mind the thoughts that anger helps to distort.
In short, try to be kind.
Mar 23, 2020
Mar 23, 2020 at 9:15 AM UTC
Peace comes with a breath,
A slow exhale at rest.
Thoughts may distress
With fears they want to confess
But peace always comes with a breath
Mar 19, 2020
Mar 19, 2020 at 3:32 PM UTC
Sit down
With your four wall surround
Pour a glass of wine
Cut your sightlines
And breathe
Tension leaves
In this city that fosters neither kindness nor pity
Bunker down and take solace in its anonymity
Time will reflect all that you went through
These lifetimes linger longer than they were meant to
Feb 23, 2020
Feb 23, 2020 at 8:15 AM UTC
Unfocused
I believe in you
But not what you do
Let's slow down before you try something new
Just a little work,
Just a little concentration,
Then you can clamber over the foot-hills of imagination
And yes, write your notes
Put them out to float
Watch them drift and shift
Until you can fit your fingers in that rift
And pick them apart
Like you didn't expect them to sound so harsh
But still, you're writing your reflection,
In some semblance of introspection.
Half hopeful, half ashamed,
Your potential remains framed
Against always-the-same problems, renamed.
Now, come, stare at your success.
Hunt its blemishes locked in the recesses of your mind
And find you've run out of time at second best.
So, rewind and repeat to your own excess:
I'm fine.
This pattern is mine.
Jan 20, 2020
Jan 20, 2020 at 4:36 PM UTC
The Promise.
The hours pass us by like seconds,
Sifting through our fingertips like grains of sand.
Stretched out over the sullen blades,
Beneath a blazing silver moon.
A gnarled old willow stretches out,
Ready to ******
But the cold of the night will never reach you,
Wrapped inside a blanket of words and promises.
Ghosts of the weeks past fade amongst the stars,
Burning bright on their final eve,
But a haunting thought teases our mind
From over turmoiled seas foreign soils beckon.
Across the poppy fields the duty-call summons,
The unforgiving imperative rings true
And tears me from your clutches,
****** into the war of a loveless country.
The months crawl on, blurred with loneliness,
I see you waiting at the station for my return,
Instead a grey envelope replaces me,
Abandoning you, alone in the crowd.
And now, shivering on those sullen blades,
You lie there, waiting to join me,
As from afar I watch over you,
Above the waning crescent moon.
Dec 16, 2019
Dec 16, 2019 at 7:13 PM UTC
It’s hard to find the words to fit the days
When the dominant feeling you embrace is apathy
Poems do not flow out of grey areas
Despite the vast wedges of time sandwiched in between the good and the sad
It's a middle class working life’s unseen style of ennui
Suffering in no kind of silence but the unarticulated tedium that forms from routine
And even so, even in the same act of writing that seeks to gain understanding, it mis-sells itself.
Glamourising or problematising these white lies
Churning them into tides of the fine and the good and the comfortable
How horrible it is to yearn for more struggle
How privileged
How touristic
And still, I want to find a valley
A distance upwards to strain my neck and beg for
Leaving nothing but an aching beat strumming across my body, overwhelming my senses
An indescribable primal urge that reduces me to a single thought with only one adequate course of action that I could bear to live with
That would be... nice
Would be.
As ever, everything is possible
So nothing gets done
Nov 27, 2019
Nov 27, 2019 at 12:56 PM UTC
Are we perfect because there's no forever,
We can't learn to hate ourselves together.
Inside and outside show the same,
Love lust, quick release, just a game.
There is nothing there that we could cover,
No feelings that we smothered.
If it's not love then it can't hurt,
Climbing into bed without a word.
Slowing down would mean boredom,
So we're left with no time to find the problem.
The role of both a lover and friend,
A candle wick rope lit at either end.
Now, alone with time to dwell,
The idea doesn't sit quite so well.
A memory can't help the mending.
Short and sweet always has an ending.
Are you just my fixation?
A figment of some sweet imagination?
If I picked your life apart
To see what I could have known from the start,
Would I find myself happy
In the face of a reality?
Or sad? As, broken at the seams,
I see the remnants of my tentative dream.
Mar 6, 2019
Mar 6, 2019 at 5:58 AM UTC