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SN Jul 2016
A casket
A journey, long road, comes to  an end
Life, perhaps mispent
But fate might always be smiling
Just beyond that coming bend

Broken bone
Calls to home but home is not wanted
Not mine to go, not mine, I grow
My own
From gardens of wilting blooms
Another season will see it soon

In comes the monsoon
Dripping life, drumming against the boards
Of a balcony where strumming I hum my lonesome song
Lamenting the ending of something gone wrong
Though this river's journey to the edge of the world
Has only just begun

Temporary regrets and missings
Of memories that crawl underneath your skin
With a flourish this night turns over its leaves
To reveal another day
You breathe out the ragged dusk
Shakes, bristles, shedding the husk
Avail the morning air
Lest the mourning of a midnight's dream
Breeds despair
SN May 2016
Slow mind on a speeding train
Tracks across, dragging tired
Eyes beam, lighting up the night

Away from that house
So filled with memories
Some of which you'd like to leave
While others sting their bittersweet
Of some of them you still dream

A summer haze, a billowing cloud
A firelit kiss and the sounds of the night
With sleep in the corner opening its eyes

Then from the dream
Haunting the seconds you're awake
Your fever broke, your hands did hold
I didn't mind your passing
I do mind the cold
SN Jul 2018
Now you're alone
Sometimes I wonder
What holds up your bones
When I see you
Slumped in your being
Tied to a seat
Tide to the sea

I see you drowning
Want to hold out my hand
Cast out a lifeline
Save you from it

But the sharks got to you
Long before I did
Took the fight out of you
Tore it apart with all your limbs

Now your body lies broken
And you've made it your throne
Accepting the scars where
Wild thorns have grown

Waiting for cancers
A tumor to grow
A vein to burst open
For that sweet numbing glow
Did you realize what you paid with
That your body was the toll
When you drowned all your sorrows
While we were there in your home
We were there all along

Now you're here all alone
And you fill up your lungs
Body creaks and groans
Living life on a loan
Five times did your heart die
All wrapped into one
Still remember that night
Never saw you like that
So mortal under fluorescent light

I took a picture
That you may never forget
Naive in my thinking
I know somewhere there's regret
But you keep taking that killing path
Keeping company with bottles
Burning cigarettes
Lonely ghosts all around you
They follow you into your bed
Keep you from sleeping
My tears for the fears kept in your head

You're mine until my bones hurt
Though I've pushed you away
It's your blood running through me
Being your son means feeling pain
So many things happened to us
Best intentions were never enough
When you slipped you took us with you
Showed us places we never asked to see
Showed us your faces
Distorted
The beasts within that still hunt for me in dreams

I don't know where to put you
With this love I can't let go
I cannot hate you
Even when you break me
When at nights I stay up alone
With all that goes through me
Your hands they are stones
They hammer straight through me

You're old now
But I'm no longer young
Watching you ghosting out
A picture painted
But the portrait's wrong
It's just shells now
The spirit's gone
It's your hell now
And I am still your son
SN Sep 2018
Sometimes the wind sighs
And I remember
Through a haze far away
Rising like a swelling tide
That rolls in and out over my insides

You chase butterflies bare handed
Always coming up empty
Until the storm comes
Your dilated pupils the sea's breath held still
Shimmering anticipation in the eye of the storm

The wind sweeps withering words
Seething at the edges
Flaring up in wild expectation
Like dark and nervous whispering
Black fanged, angry and terrified

Lashing out as gales
Tormenting the waters
Tearing and screeching
Screaming until it dies away
Leaving behind a small voice in tatters
Broken on the rocks of a wilder sea
Where calm is just an enemy in a different shade of blue
SN Aug 2018
If words were a painting
I’d paint me a scene
A long solitary road
Surrounded by green

I’d make every stroke a melody
That you’d hear in the leaves
Of a whisper that the wind blows
In the deep sea of trees

Every now and then
A traveler
Would come along with the breeze

Becoming part
Of a harmony
Before drifting back in
To the stream

As if it were a dream
SN May 2016
You wish for the sea
The quiet ocean
The liquid dreams

To go one last time
A last train home
Home in the unknown

To wade out among the waves
To sink back and let them carry you
The last of you
Like a blip at the horizon
Before fading from view
You let the water take you
Swallow you as you swallow the salt
Pouring in it purges your lungs
You've breathed like this before
And now you will do it again
The first breath that gave you life
Will be the one to take you back in again

No more they will call your name
Little boy has gone away
Little boy got lost again
Little boy grew older
Little world found a little colder
It dimmed the flame
Now a diminished spark
Submerged you embrace the eternal dark

Mother I am sorry but I need to go home
Where the thoughts of me won't follow
Where the voices never speak
Where the night forever sleeps
You gave the gift of life to me
And I am sorry for taking it back

This life is not for me, does not belong to me
I'll let its weight carry me, to bury me
Bury me at sea
SN Aug 2018
Lost on white streets
Hanging in between buildings and the eerie
Afternoon air that holds a promise of the gathering dark

The young eyes darting over the place
A growing mind that goes bump in the night
On unsteady legs watching meaning colour beside the lines

Then a flash of lightning sets off a schism
A slash, division down to the deep middle
Pilot light blinking as it drifts of into neural space

Left to grow stunted in isolation
Animal protocol takes over
Unusual growth detected, quarantine affected parts

Discontinuing memory lines 0 to 13
Incoming sensory override
Reboot soul system

Initiating memory dump
Re-awakening neural connections
Re-routing discontinued channels

Connecting...

Connecting...

Systems online
Current memory line: 29
Review memory dump?

Y/N

/
SN Jun 2016
Wake up
A sky
All is black today
Complement to my shade of grey

All is late
Can't stay
Finding no peace, no quiet
Though each night I can't be blamed
For a lack of trying

Time and people
I'm finding friends in neither
They are the cardboard and I am cut out
My dials crooked point towards the wrong sides

I made it
Somehow
But with a bitter aftertaste
Disconnected I lead myself or am led astray by fate

Fate meaningless, just a name for cause and consequence
My cause, my consequence
Sequence from screaming birth in pairs

Can't escape
Bound I am
Someone else's life at stake
SN Mar 2016
I left behind
Love, a breath, a light, a breeze
A shallow, a drop, a sun and my mind

At this hour finally come the words
Too late now but for what it’s worth I write them down
Better outside than inside where I have kept them
Or more that they stayed, shy before the daylight
Reluctant to be written into reality

Familiar fire burning in my heart tonight
Not at ease, fighting frights
Whoever wins decides how I sleep tonight
And if I will see it turn 03.45
Beating rapid rabbit heart

It runs out from between my ribs
Out into the night, under moonlight
Pale as the skin that glistens underneath
Shaded streaks of willow leaves
Groaning branches in still air

The night I own, it owns
Skin, muscle, blood and bone
And everything I burn as I call the fire home
SN May 2016
It flutters, wings, a beat and a hush before a slow meandering breeze, chaos theories, how you and me and everyone we know, converging with our little lives, a little lost, a little slow, we curve and carve little histories as we embark, out in the night, into the dark, our passing lives like little sparks.

We connect, break and fall apart, rearrange, stay the same or never lift off from our starts, we carry suitcases, we carry hearts, we carry memories with misery or merrily, branching out like canopies, we sway in the breeze, we lose our leaves, we dry and wither, we fall to earth to dust to soil, and we all give back no matter how we end, what we expel always comes back in again.

A tick of a clock against the stillness of a rock, sands of time, or ball and twine, unravel tapestries of fluidity, amorphous and amorous, from chance to serendipity and the distance between a day in the sun and a sleeping eternity.

Life takes all chances and spreads them apart, sprawling out in similarities, diverging, converging, emergence between shifting walls of time running forward or backward, inward and outward, spread out like little pockets in a universe of motion, of movement and how that echoes in time, how a moment is never truly lost but stored both in the recesses of a mind and as something that was, that is and that will be, all at once and over again.

It becomes quiet when you see the little heralds of the things that will be, everything becomes much bigger than it initially seemed, like a complicated machine or a symphony composed of symmetry and  asymmetry and I am just a small part in it all, so frail, so small, a human singularity, singular I fall, the construct of reality deconstructing my reality.
Excerpt from a stream of consciousness writing.
SN Apr 2016
When the darkness calls
Go back to cryptic
Messages in spilled ink and brittle crumbling words
That appear before eyes, fleeting, unstable and careening right off the pages
Just like the minds we own while we try to disown them
As we distance ourselves from ourselves and the love of others
Our hearts stalling, we stop in our tracks as life keeps moving
It passes by, leaving trails like shadows creeping up from behind
A gift unkind, toothless grinning fate on a mirthless night
SN Sep 2016
Never meant to be more than a dayflower
Alight in the brightness of a single day
Sway once, twice, then close these petals
Bow out and fade away
SN Oct 2016
The candle's gone out
Emptiness, hello's
Quiet time, a bow
Off to lead me into the night

Dreamless
To venture into the shrouding dark
Where with eyes closed a body wakes
Soundless and shivering
To deep dark alleys

The walls of which
Rustle quietly like leaves

And lightless stars litter the sky
Pale specks against the darkness
Mirrors to the depths of time

Running ever forward in all directions
Desolation as it spreads
Until everything becomes
Detached
Elm
SN Oct 2016
Elm
Where beneath I sleep
Taller in dreams
With autumn leaves, colours to bleed
Glory because it fades away

Slowly seeping under skin
Rooted where this tale begins
I can begin to read it
Under your burning coloured eaves

Far away echoes the beating heart
To sound out longing, like a sigh
Escaping from your solemn boughs
Unhurried, unworried your goodbyes

To be as you are
Silent, quiet, calm, serene
Rooted to soil
Growing evergeen
SN Sep 2016
A fly tickles my ribcage
Out in the half rain
I postpone the cigarette
Remember to eat

A stormfront of thoughts hovering near
Precarious and portending events
I sweep up in denial until the mirror breaks

I take better care not to fall back again
I take better care of myself now than I did then
But still it comes around as if reminding me
And my normalness is at stake

Even though I probably never was
I'd like to think I am
Just as normal as you all

I'm waiting here semi-passively
My chains of fear still binding me
Stuck between choosing the future that I want
and the things I'll have to face to make it so

All the while wondering where I did go
SN Oct 2016
Waiting
Waiting for that breeze
Lift it up, this melody I keep hearing between my ears
A sound so lonely that it haunts me slowly
When the moon hangs lowly and the night calls on me
And I pull the tears back into my eyes
While this song, this haunting song let's out its cries
Is this what it is like when childhood dies
Wave after wave of an ocean filled with regret
A youth you lose as its memories retract
And you become disowned from the things you thought were your own
But one by one they leave, become hesitant to show their clarity
Until at last fiction mingles with reality
And you can't make the distinction anymore
Between what is yours and what is put there by your forgetful insanity
SN Mar 2017
I am tired of being human
This body is tired of my occupation
Fortunately
It will be only for today
Tomorrow
I will be something else
Somewhere else
SN Jul 2018
I whisper in the darkness
Shy my words are finding flight
I heed the void
Let it draw me in
I need the night

Searching, groping
Without a light
The floor is cold
The walls are ice
I’ve slipped before I had a chance to rise

I’m looking hard
But try as I might
It’s hard to find something
To **** the fire that resides inside

So close my eyes
And slip inside
Take out your knives
Carve from my hide
Circles drawing from the tide

Of time as shorelines
Waves and grains, an interplay
Of moonlight and star skies
And the pitch black darkness
From a complete absence of life

Across the ocean
A destination silhouettes the end of sight
I’ve known it all my life
It’s been following me all this time

One day I will cross these waters
Leave my boat along it’s coast
Walk barefoot across the beach
And under white light give up this ghost
SN Sep 2020
Who am I?
A godless child
Torn from history
No culture, anonymous identity
A single tether
Long, unbroken line
There's nothing current, to which I subscribe
There's only her, of primordial mind

If I am lost
Everything is frenetic energy
Eyes covered with blinds
I shadowstep, from one blindspot to the next

But when I am found
Gently do I drift on leaves of grass
Over the hills until the sand tells me of the shore
Where into the ocean I go once more
And there, where light is found in the darkest depths
Does the shadow drop and I hear the beating of a heart

One
One
One

Every beat is one
Where I am tiny two
Lungs swell, breathing in
I drown in everything that's you

I am godless

For I love the Other
SN Apr 2016
Going
From June to June
Losing
Peace of mind
Altered hearing
Body no longer remaining
Still

Losing love, lives, other than mine
Taken
I see from behind a screen
Bitter overlay on reality
Everything gets taken
Circumstance on a side far from mine

Going
From June to June
Small road ahead
Traffic coming in
Remembering and forgetting
Remember to forget

Her death and his one coming
Their lives out of touch with yours
The noises and the rushing and the pains
From elbow to leg to toes
From mind to eye to skin and bones
No longer your own

All the imagined deaths
The cancers, bloodclots
Or the hand of your own
Chapters you try to close
Swell like tumors hijacking the dream
Your paradise was a nightmare
Reality not real

Sweep in like the tide from the sea
Erase the imprints you left
Retrace your footsteps
She calls, I listen
She calls
'Come back to me'
I listen
SN Jul 2016
History
Delicate, desolate history
Full of you and me’s
I’ve grown attached to these heartbeats
Time resounds, do you hear it
It’s for you and me
SN Feb 2017
The dark still there
Plastic cup cover runs it course out into the day
Before tumbling onto its sides

Wheels rumble onto the road
Cars ahead of the still slumbering workforce
Defeated, no one notices the cup's cover
Nor wonders what it is doing there on the road
Passed by like so many things on a Tuesday morning

But I saw its little cartwheeled dance
Its fleeting greeting of midnight's newborn day
I saw the stillness of the wind that ever so slightly moved it
A bus stop souvenir instilled on my frames

Before everything comes alive
I watch the still-life plays that come out from the night
The cartwheeling covers
The sleeping trees
The strangers in the early hours
Waiting to catch their bus into the day
SN Sep 2016
Reactionary passages that unfold like stampeding horses coursing like wildfire through the valleys of your veins.

Feigning indifference it takes up momentum. A galloping flurry of thundering hooves hurdling towards you at breakneck speeds.

At first you run. You run for your life. From your life. Scared of the monstrous fate that you've created. All the hate, all the pain, the forgotten sorrow.

Pushed away for so long it took the shape of animal storms to come and disturb your life of false denials.

Now here you are. Lost in a canyon of your own making. With nowhere to go. Running for your soul, running for all you've ever had.

But they are life and it always catches up. And they will break you with their iron feet.

So you stop and turn around. Face the collision head on. It is horrible and terrible what's coming at you with the force of a thousand horses.

You feel it all as it rushes over you. Every smile denied, every memory repressed, every touch forgotten.  Everything until the last broken, splintered bone.

Until nothing is left. A still and eerie, oppressive silence settles in. But you feel nothing of that. For the first time your upturned eyes are seeing blue skied and clear.
SN Jul 2018
I went to the river
Sank myself in
Struggling there upstream
Is where I saw you swim

On the same journey
Different within
Arms against the current
Is this a fight we could win

Blue hypothermia
Brown swaying reeds
Fighting in this wilderness
The rocks that scrape our knees

Coming over now
But the water remains wild
Reaching out with nothing to hold
Drowning words I can’t make out

And on the shore I see
In shapes and silhouettes
Monolithic still and old
The ghosts that remain your family

I cannot breathe
When it comes in cold
Pouring ice down in my throat
And it is only then I know

That I won’t see you grow old
I’ll have to let you go
And your eyes they tell me so
Your eyes tell me:

Let go
SN Aug 2017
This skin is on too tight
And these bones they feel too much
Life seems to spin
Violently, out of control and out of my hands
Leaving them grasping at air
Not knowing what to hold on to and what to let go

Emotions flare that I reject
Too painful to understand, undesired and unwished for
Yet they remain and I remain
Though I can't accept
And I'm looking for a way out
Trapped in a maze leading only to closed doors

Growing older didn't take it away
There's no rest
Only when I sleep does the noise fade away
But my waking life is plagued
By screaming voices attached to demons
Running circles around my head

They talk of opposites while laying out wires for me to trip over
Whisper words that drive me right out of myself
Causing rifts no bridge seems able to span
And with each passing of unnumbered time
The chasms they create grow wider

Skin a little thinner
Bones a little more hollow
I am waiting for a break I know will never come
I fear they are winning
Playing the long game stacking odds against me

I fear them mostly because they come from me
They are me even if I don't want them to be
And half the time I don't understand them
And they feel very much like separate entities
A multitude of persons
All in conflict
Living inside of me

The one who was there from the beginning
I don't see him all that much anymore
Crowded over by the others
Living in their shadows while I am losing my own
SN Apr 2016
I've forgotten
What it means

You across the void
Slumbering beneath
Your eternal ocean
I hear your siren song

Set sails and follow sunsets
Over the vast liquid expanse
Rocks jut out and become my anchor
Driftwood and I drift away

I pass islands but they're not mine
They're yours, fortresses of solitude
Each one a dot, a speck, atolls in infinity
Your loneliness spread and fragmented

Incarnations of your personality
One by one fading from view
Fading into obscurity
A mirage to the eye as if thats all you ever were

What's yours or mine is gone
We own the same mind yet live alone
Our hearts turned to the storm
Finding peace with our hells as it crashes into our bones

We drift apart alone
And I've forgotten what that means
SN Sep 2016
I keep going back to 1989
Date of birth and all that was, sort of, fine
Summer breezes causing melancholia

Older, going back before magnolias
Enticing, encouraging, all for the bees to be
Before everything got stuck on a maybe

But maybe...

Maybe when I bloom, if I bloom
With pale flowers to match a midnight moon
A chain reaction could come my way

And will I see my night turn into a day
Where these words have gone with the fading black
Maybe when they have gone

I will come back
SN Jul 2016
I recognized those hands
Thin and bony
Slender
Harsh and tender
Around mine

Travels, a train
Dusk, dawn
In and out and away we went

We were something fierce
Something young, wild and restless
Breathing in
The air was all you
Fleeting

I remember the fire
The storms inside
Those churning, revolving wild waves
Dazzling displays of falling from great heights

I remember those hands
Wrapped in mine
I remember how we clawed to be near
Tearing away all the spaces between us
Until what was left was only
Wholly you and me
SN Dec 2020
A drop,
warmth that's fleeting
Then,
the open road

Looming rocks,
they hide the trolls
Fairies guard forbidden roads

Trees are sparse
in this evergreen
Water roaring as it plummets
valley's glisten in a distant dream

Our feet here
never touched the ground
Open
did we float

A spirited dream
of dispirited souls
Asleep as they glide
Colliding into shades of night

How bitter then
our mornings
Through cold misshapen
bent and spent

Needles in a lovers den
Feeding evils thinking they were eagle's wings
SN Sep 2016
I´m with no one
Empty out my pockets
Out comes rolling nothing

But everyone is where it´s at
Everywhere where I am not
So I pack my bag and leave

Everything that´s been nothing
I´ll leave all of that behind
A future full of somethings,

Someones and everythings
Memories for me to dream of
Filling my pockets with the stuff of life
SN Sep 2016
I saw a mountain today
But it wasn't real
And I found myself picturing
What it would feel like
If I ever saw them
Forgetting that there are mountains
That I have seen

But some were small
Stuck on an island in the Mediterranean sea
Others taller, overgrown by trees
Meandering a war torn landscape
Like irregular forested pyramids
In between which poverty, anonymity and frailness
Are woven in with the fabric of lost days

Azure dreams of getting away
And viridian primitive, haunting aftershocks
Of history lived by the thousands
Expelled in an endless summer breeze
But more like daze, rippling slowly outwards
All part of an endless wave
Rolling on and on folding us, our histories
Inside its arm

Once I saw mountains
Little stacked triangles of geologic history
Twice I saw mountains
Wishing these were the places that I would always see
Thrice I saw mountains
Now a mountain
Is what I'll be
SN Jul 2018
Through blinds
In this world
I watch from sidelines
So many voices raised
Heat seeking missiles
Just waiting to hit any mark
Anything that sticks out
Anything that gives off heat
And as the world burns hotter
I find myself colder
Trying to be indifferent
Feeling hands and tongue tied
I won't add fuel to the fire
I'm letting myself burn out

But inside
I'm silently crying
For all the hurt that comes around
Feeling out of this world
With each passing day
I've tried the blinds
Shutting peripheries
But I can't ignore what I see in front of me
So much hate and lacking empathy
And for the life of me
I don't know why
It has me wondering
If I'm alive just to see how love dies

I loved the world
For all her shades
Be they wonderful or horrible
I loved humanity
Flawed and flaundering
With the potential for the truly beautiful
I loved each element
Every nuance
Every single detail telling me the world is infinitely colourful
But now lines are drawn
Colours muted mutating slowly into
False sensations of black and white

I'm bowing out
This can't be right
I must be sleeping
Feeling, seeing something awful
So I won't open these wandering eyes
I'll keep them tightly locked inside
Not stare awake into this night
I'll pass the time in my own mind
And let this nightmare pass me by
Come sunrise I'll be in bed
Please don't wake me
Let me rest
Drifting into better dreams
Away from this broken world's unrest
SN Aug 2018
Live with the shadows
I'm on that corner
Or high behind the window
Of an anonymous tall building
I'm the passerby in the meadow
One you watch disinterested from afar
I live in a shadow
Though sunlight may reach me
Where I am darkness is never far

Sleeping like dogs
On friendly terms with my nightmares
I'm learning to love all who reside in my head
Good at sleeping away the days
I've slept so long I've forgotten how to wake
Four little pills and I'm away
Some would say this is hell
But it's all I've ever known

I'm in tranquil dreams now
No background noise
Calm and peaceful
Like a mote of dust
In sunlight suspended
Before I disappear
Sea
SN Jan 2017
Sea
I wonder if you know
You are sitting on a dream

Carried away
An ocean
Words as thoughts in an endless stream

Whisked away under the spell of darkness
Where twilight is slowly broken
By the shimmering lights of the quiet stars above

A sea of stark diamonds
Waves beneath which you keep
Silently your prayers
Quietly your sleep

You don't know why you are here
Or how you've come to be
Under the light of our ancestors
You've forgotten how to see
SN Aug 2018
Unknown
There's still no answer
No sense of continuity
Just streaming defeat and acceptance
Where the void yells and I scream back
To find I've been having arguments with emptiness

So back to front projected on a silver screen
With my eyes behind blinded by the light
That whites out what I'm supposed to see
The room is white with shadows grey
As I compress out of any dimensionality

Neither sticks nor bones
Skin like leaves strewn by the wind
I own no body but a mind unknown
There's noise and static
And the fear I feel is my own

Everything attracting to a singular point
Stretching out into a vortex that tunnels
Calling out my name so it can carry my feet
I'm afraid of the coming singularity
Knowing the floor will be cold

So I'll breathe out your name
And say a prayer even if I don't believe
Through cold I'll walk
To let the fraying arms gather me
And tether me to the rest of oblivion
Where forsaken lay
The faded parts of a body that I used to know
SN Dec 2016
Today I drank from rose coloured petals
My soul parched from these dry winds
That scatter flocks of birds in my head

The restlessness of crows
Wings that scatter stillness
Constant comforting sounds of leaves

I leave
From the top of my head
Water swells

And from the well I take flight
Breaking through the shimmering screen
I wrap the cloak of night around me

And kiss the veil that holds my fickle dreams
SN Sep 2016
The song comes on
And everytime I find myself in that room again
There's no weight to it, no discernible heaviness
Just the initial waves washing over me
A lingering missing, not tied to a place or name
Just faceless emotion, older than I am
Sharing itself among every individual
Inside each in a different incarnation
Mine is a deep pit filled with superfluous everythings
Where life scatters in fragments
Dispersing into the sky
To come down as rain and snow
I pluck its crystals from the air
Pocket them as I move along
Life is a rhythm, they are its song
SN Oct 2016
Open your eyes
Here in the arctic white
Witness a disappearing act

The blinding snow
Bleaches sight
Light for months on end

Then darkness
Hanging low under the sun
A blanket of sleep

Wake up to the company of stars
Fall asleep as you travel
Deep sea dreaming of horizons afar

And deeper still
Where halls hum
Your feet they land on marble floors

This feigning cold more real
More piercing than anything
Sinking softly through your heels

Winter stretching out its long arms
Cradling the sky in hazy icicles
I let its cold touch seep into my bones

And from my breath
The vapour of a clouded whisper
Stills in the frost
SN Jul 2016
There's blots and stains and bulbs tonight
Caught in a throat that can't swallow it
Turn away and find old friends
Friends you left behind
Now they burn away these nights with you
Forget for an evening what you can't avoid during the day

You look to find, distract your mind
Ready to dive down into
A maelstrom to help build a new you
Fight exhaustion, fear is physical
Drift on whisps of smoke
Don't give up, you give up the hope
To cope you fold your wings again
Of paper mache, they can burn again

The letters swarm like birds of prey
It burns inside but comes out
As cold, stiff, dead lumps of ice
In the morning it died
Come noon it comes again, alive
Stuck inside
SN Aug 2016
I move, swiftly, out of pace
The room shifting
I am forgetting all about this place
Before I leave
Making sure
I will never come back to go through that door

Stomach knots when I clasp the handle
Rotate a 90 degrees
My feet heavy, my heart thumping, I freeze
Memories wafting through the opened crack
Curling around my face like an unwanted and unpleasant breeze
I freeze

Orison, a swarm succumbing to a feverish itch
Scratched it to catch it going nowhere above my head
Here in this white and grey pastel hallway
History’s hand comes down heavy handed
Clamps itself around my throat
It won’t let go until I let go
And I can’t let go of these maddening picture shows

Black around my cavernous eyes
Peer inside, glacial stalactites and dust mites
The heart commanding what my hand ghostwrites
As murmurs and noise and lights
Omnipresent or unclear, at least I know
It’s everywhere and it isn’t  mine
The hand that writes
Speaks my mind
The tongue it keeps does not play kind

The heart thuds and thumps once more
Loudly bringing it to the fore
All the faces that I’ve seen before
All their menacing smiling eyes

Turn around
Lock the door
Walk away

This house, this history and all its mysteries
They’re not yours anymore
SN Jul 2016
Come on
This willow, this hull, this breach, these roots are mine
Sunken ships, barreling, down we go in time
Burrow deep, fallow, fine
Let the reeds, the weeds, swallow us and taste the brine
Bubbles and puddles we muddle and huddle

Past the reactions of chemicals
Silver pedestals and blooming petals of metal and bone
Of sinking and sinking and sinking like a stone
Come home, alone


Close eyes
Breathe, lungs, they swell before the collapse
Punctures and stabs, scratching the scabs
Crash, break
And turn, turn to run, the road ahead
The wars you thought you won
You run
Haunted
As the mad dogs of the past
Come catching up
Nothing ever lasts
SN Aug 2018
They say Sleep's the cousin of Death
I wonder who his parents are
Is Coma his little sister?
Who's grandpa?
And what is a nap?
SN Sep 2016
Winter is stirring beneath my skin
Clutches my bones, tells me I'm cold
Head sinking down, down it goes below
Growing up, growing old
I iron out my creases but I can't stop the fold

And each year I get better at it
This thing called living, carrying my own skin
But each year still feels like drifting
The clock strikes and I am somewhere
All things new, all things, they just go

Holding life by the frays, unraveled threads
Weave and follow
I follow
And find
Other knots to untie

And somewhere, someone says hello
Greetings, passings, goodbyes and we go
Dreaming of infinite versions, you again
Unshaped entity that flickers like a flame in the darkness
Lighting my way, on and off and on and on
As one we grow
SN Feb 2017
Falling down
Grains of sand drip from my eyes
Skies dark and grey
Beyond the window
The unveiling of time

Remnants of trees
Withered from green
Ashen leaves
Fading beneath the eaves

A touch of frost
Slow snow casting cold
Caught in blankets
Turning to vapour
In quiet dawning
Morning light

An everyday newness
Small and fleeting
Disperses silently

The sky turns over
And when the world awakes
The eyes go to sleep
SN Aug 2018
What haunts the day goes back to slumber
As sleeping ghosts rise up to greet the night
Where the light of the sun illuminates
They draw from air, spheres of darkness
Pulsing with an indifferent hunger
Without mercy, without anger
To wake something you hid from the light
Coaxing it out with their timeless patience
Like snake charmers of a personal night
Entranced, bewitched, under a spell

What comes out between your ribs
Curled up tight, a little ball containing hell
Unfurling slowly, open mouth and out come the fangs
Dripping poison, dripping blood
You have to hold it in your hands
Stillborn and shaking
Still torn from waking
Half alive is never living

You feel as helpless as what's in your arms
Wondering why it had to be like this
And why they come at night
To make you bear what is unbearable
Strip you bare from what you think you are
Until naked skin is rend from bone
Revealing parts that turned to stone
It makes you feel at your most alone
When what you're holding in your weaker arms
Is what used to be your home

I've pleaded often
On knees begging until screaming I felt my throat turn sore
Until it dawned on me what I was holding
What they were showing
It was me that held the key
And it is me that has to open the door
To find that long lost loss of mine, make amends and say goodbye
Perhaps finding a way home once more
SN Mar 2016
I do not function well within the confines of society
Life frequently comes to a standstill
Where in a short period
I cut loose
Cut away everything
Because the emotions that I bleed
When I release myself from all these binds
They purge, cathartic, hurt
The act of violently giving up
Knowing you're kicking in your own doors
Destroying your own windows
Shooting your own two feet so you no longer stand
And on your knees among the pieces
Is where you come apart
With nothing left to live for
Only unsaid words bleeding from the heart

So you write them out
You write out all that swirls around inside your plagued mind
And the broken pieces that cut like glass
Carve inside their meanings
Hollowed out inside your hollow bones
So that the wind might pick you up
And you may be set adrift
Becoming that haunting voice carried on a breeze
Murmurs of a past life trying to be forgotten
And as you meander along
All the landscapes where you never belonged
You thin out bit by bit with each moment gone
The weight falling out until what remains
Is but the skeleton of a whisper
That to those with ears to hear
Becomes the shadow of unrest

They'll find themselves clutching those they love
As inside enters a mouth of fear
Where they feel the desert of the loneliness
Breathing its years of solitude down their neck
Voices of a quiet death
With a foreign memory reminding
Darkness always falls
And inside they wait
Until one day they too
Will hear its haunting call
And they will let go of love
They will let go of it all
To join the chorus of a quiet breeze
That travels around the world
Whispering the words
That their hearts will bleed
SN Mar 2017
Where are you in the creation of your own puzzle
How many pieces have you found
And do you like the picture that is appearing
Or are you constantly rearranging
Thinking it could never fit like this

I've been at it for a while
Picking up pieces while losing others
And I don't think the holes that appear
Could ever be filled

So what meaning do I subscribe to that
How do I add it all up to see the sum of my parts
How do I make sense of a story
When the only things constant
Are change
And that from start to finish
The name it carries is one I call my own

A life made up of memories
Collections of recollections
Inhaled and expelled like breaths
Passing to the ticking of clocks
Through tunneled passages of time

Sometimes I wonder
If they become ingrained as lines
Forming adornments on the halls of history
Curving and bending
And if someone walks along them
Recounting the tale of a universe
My story a story among billions of others
Just a chapter in the grand book of life

What would it be like
To read it all in one go
To see it all unfold
Neatly in order, row by row
And have the meaning laid out for you
What then would you know
SN Oct 2017
Late shift of a later day
Emotional balance like a mirror broken
Coping mechanisms, a million to none
All strewn out in arbitrary direction

I think I did it all wrong
Took a wrong turn somewhere
Ending up at a crossroads
Where all signs say: to Hell

And so I went there
Feeling not so free after all
Doubt cast as my shadow
Faithfully trailing me along the way

On the road meeting with strangers
Whose faces are coated in bitterness
Smiling sad, broken smiles
With sad, broken eyes

Trailing their ghosts and skeletons behind them
A procession of lost souls
Pulling shadows from their lives

We're all of us going in circles
The past clinging to us like a child
Fearful of being left behind



I dream of being and forgetting
Leaving only blankness in my wake
SN Aug 2016
Sometimes I think
Or feel
That this life is exactly like a dream
Like that dream that upon waking
Has you feeling mystified
With a dull aching inside
Still and small but vaster than the sum of all your parts
Left behind it closes when your eyes open
To be forgotten
When the new day's water comes rushing in

As if within your life
Is an endless spiral of other lives
Hidden so that you might feel
The culmination of their being
Leading up to you
Threading in the wakes of their rippling waves

Vanishing days
When you go down to leave your own
Ripples in the lake
SN Jan 2018
Broken goes
I tip and toe the undertow
Scratched dirt beneath scratched heels
Trailing paper and what I’d feel
If only I had something around my brain
To make me feel whole again

But nothing lasts longer than a cigarette
A can of beer, it’s all wasted breath
Expel the moment
What comes back
Atonement

For sins you think you might remember
But just a kid, a kink, when you were younger
Made your knees buckle, and you went under
Afraid to let go, afraid to surrender

Is it my fault
What has happened here
Time went out and I grew cold
Feeling older than the sum of my years

And it feels as if it’s all stitched together
Moments that collect themselves
In a tin bucket cheaply rendered

And it all feels wrong
Like violins in a marching band
No one knowing what they’re marching for
And everyone’s just waiting for it to end
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