From somewhere way beyond midnight
a breeze sifts gentle but true
through an open window.
A candle blows a fatal last kiss
before plunging the room into darkness.
The breeze, lively now and Jack Frost cold,
hugs him like a spoilt child.
It kisses him from numb lips to frozen toes
and skips a tormenting dance along his spine.
His heart – an igloo, a derelict furnace –
beats no more than four in four.
Death march. Dirge.

Once strong now weak.
Muscles decayed, now hangs sinewy flesh,
Red-sore, purple veined.
Hairless and airless.
In the darkness, pain has an image.
You didn’t get the chance to kiss her goodbye.
You could only watch from the window
As she dissolved in the light,
Like an aspirin into water she went.
Matter into purity, dissolving and concentrated.
Both matter and purity.

In the distance the sound of a crying baby dies
And gone is the occasional bark of a worried dog.
The wind picks up again – audible - and blows
Fragmented memories through the open window.
Do you swear you can smell her perfume on the breeze?
Of course. She is the breeze now.
She is all and all is she.
Have I gone? Is this what it is like to be gone?
How painlessly boring is death,
with nothing to do but wait to be born again?
Born again into space
Or dissolve and become like she
A fragmented memory

Copyright Marc Hawkins 2008

Today I contemplated suicide.
Today I succumbed to the shadows
And pondered the unthinkable.
My muse of late takes the form of death,
Assuring me that my next
Will be my final breath.

To the uninitiated this may seem
An easy route out,
But my convictions far outweigh
Their self assuming doubt.

(The bugs crawl
across my shoulders
scaling my neck
navigating my ear
entering my head)

Today, I begged for there to be a God
And for that God to be fair in judgment
And for that God to look down and
Witness me…motionless…startled…
Disoriented…solitary…
…scared;
To take pity on my micro-concerns,
Maggot-like in my manifestation;
And to arc down a single clap of thunder
Which pierces the water
And drags me asunder,
To depths way down
Past my own experience,
Down past the devil
And his pitiful allegiance,
Lower than the time
When he invited me in
Only for him to realize
He’d never met real sin.
There is comfort to be found
In self loathing.

(The bugs crawl
across my shoulders
scaling my neck
navigating my ear
entering my head)

Copyright Marc Hawkins 2015

Colonial history will still dictate how the men around here
Practice love through hate
For aesthetic purposes; an ethnic marker,
Gender controlled by husband...son...father
Against my will.

I can let nature take its course, the uneasiness in how I pass
Bears nothing to your immoral force with which you open me up.
Your gateway to a selfish pleasure,
And I once believed that being loved
Was close to being treasured.
I am as trapped as a bird in a cage,
Modified and made ugly by your commission.
Disfigured by tradition and religion and holy wars,
And chained by the fear  that renders me yours
Against my will.

My sisterhood grows from northeast Africa
To the sub-Sahara.
Young and joyless and bound by doctrines.
No pursuit of happiness. No pleasure to come
No great expectations. Nothing foretold
Nothing that has been or gone.
Objects more of control than desire;
My eyes that once shone with innocent love
Now burn with hate fuelled fire…and all because...
You denied me a fall from grace, you denied me self discovery,
No different to putting scars on my face
Or is that too much a public recovery?
You denied me womanhood, you denied me choice.
I censor my thoughts and silence my voice
And I think of our mothers and their mothers
And of the honour and pride they felt
When this exact same fate to them was dealt.
And why did they not feel humiliated? Abused?
Mutilated? Used?
Maybe when we live in a world without light
We relinquish our strengths and fall prey to our plights.
Enlightenment and knowledge, I was lead to believe,
Are the roads to freedom.
Our mothers learned nothing other than to serve and to please,
And here am I, enlightened but sedated,
Imprisoned, captive, segregated.
Dysmorphic now, a victim still,
And all of this against my will.

Copyright Marc Hawkins 2013

The cave, a discovered diary.
Rock walls, pages of history.
Etchings and markings
A social commentary,
Buried for an eternity.

Lost in a melee
Of storms and hurricanes
And earthquakes shaking.
Depictions of life,
Of civilization in the making.
Messages chiseled
With muscle and blood,
Signs of existence
Where communities once stood
And thrived on the need
Of food through labours,
The skies, the trees
Their pagan saviours.
Dark rains that poured
Before the construction of Zion,
The shifting of contours,
The shaping of horizons.

Art: the first form
Of true communication.
The observing of omens
Through pictorial narration.
Lessons unlearned,
Warnings unheeded
From a time when the promise
Of future was seeded.
Histories left to benefit man
Before possession was borne
And conflict began.

A legacy left, designed by tribes
From an ancient time
For narrators and scribes.
Their duty to record
An ever-changing world
Through parchment and pigment
And the spoken word,
For future species
Of woman and man
To strategise survival,
To project and to plan.
Knowledge more likely
To be buried, interred,
Then discovered too late
For lessons to be learned

Copyright Marc Hawkins 2017

Take a branch,
Snap it and hear it crack.
Take a lie,
Roll it over a hard stone and,
In the sun, let it crisp,
Then crumble it
Into a cold stream of reassurance...
Let it drift.

Cut the wire
Sever the thing that tethers

Take all the truths
That you know to be true
Place them in a box.
Replace each ending
With the ending that follows.
Re-evaluate, redesign
Recreate, realign.

Take all the things that you loved
To be the things that you now hate

Take pleasure when you can,
Take despair as it comes.
Take a miniscule moment in time and
Expand it until the weight becomes unbearable,
Then drop it from the cliff top.
Watch it crash towards the ocean,
Watch your dreams fly north
And become lost in the mist.

Take the things you once loathed
To be the things you now hold dear

Don’t let it wear you out
(It’s nothing personal).
Take it sitting down,
Roll with the punches,
Absorb the force.
Pull away from cold surfaces.
Run your own race in your own time,
Failure seldom comes enforced

Take the pendant
Gently pull at the chord

Simply turn out the light.
Be aware of your breathing -
A two minute meditation
Of ins and outs.
Down into foam and memories.
Down into dead cold then
Into searing heat...
Into blue, then green, then black.
Into familiar confusions
And self doubts.

Take a short cut
Dare to get lost

One foot, then the other,
Then the first then the second.
Arms outstretched -
Radar fingers.
Avoid cold surfaces and blazing furnaces...
Places sure to become places
Where my impression lingers.

Copyright Marc Hawkins 2016

The thought of what is left behind
Thwarts my plans
And provides a light so dim,
But a light nonetheless
That flickers along an eerie path
In a darkening tunnel;
Faking a route to salvation.
Teasing me with muffled laughter
And joy and things of the past:
Homely things, like comfort,
Peace, love, care.
The chance to love and care in return.
The chance to lift the muzzle from joy
And laughter,
To let it roar, to let it spin and swirl
In pleasurable mayhem,
In improvised rhythm.

But in the background
The voice calls this a lie.
My mind held in clenched fists,
Hands that are no longer mine
Shaking the images to nothing
Without me moving an inch.
Lying still in the fetal position -
The most versatile of all.
Depictions of birth, light and life
And of darkness, dread and death.
The shadows gain territory
Engulfing me and swallowing me whole
Until I no longer exist.
I am recognized only by
The residue of myself
Yet still a stranger who descends
Unannounced, uninvited
To re-establish my atrocious plans
And numb the thought
Of what is left behind.

Copyright Marc Hawkins 2016

Everything that follows
Is determined by the past,
Futures un-commissioned
Not designed yet cast,
A distance diminished
That once was vast,
Aspirations unfinished
From the first to the last.

Lovers in the midst
A new kind of sense,
Never faked or hidden
Within secret pretence,
Ne’er refused or forbidden
Or there to condense,
Rigid as oak
With  power immense.

A love then discovered
With truth, given free,
Unabashed and unhidden
For who cares to see,
Horizons and futures
Imagined and believed,
Zirconia stones given
In the search for eternity.

A time of wondrous spirit,
A time of young innocence
When flowers then growing
Combined indiscernible scents.
Torn from root by rough hewn hands
As drama’s conflict appeared in essence.
And there, in the dim light of the dance hall,
Her scent leaves a vague, unattainable presence.

Time passes
And takes it’s course,
Unknowingly directed
From unforgotten source
From where lives intertwined,
Then untangled and forked,
The bright sun giving way
As a bitter rain poured

A mile extends into miles
And the years roll blindly on
Offering maps of nostalgia
Of an era now gone,
But one that remains,
By will or by none,
Within the structures we made
To hang our souls upon.

Copyright Marc Hawkins 2017