And I sat on the shore
Watching the families
The mothers greatness and deep love
Fathers fountains of knowledge and abundance of affection

And I wondered

What if I'd have been chosen
To be a mother
To care for a child
My child
A million times more than I'd ever cared for myself

What if the mountains had realised that I too was strong enough of heart
Brave enough of soul
Overflowing with courage of the ocean
Capable to create a bond
Never to be broken

What if I'd been gifted a child
A moment so precious, tender
Instead of the loss
Empty womb
Dark spaces
Always checking
what I may have forgotten
something missing
Never awoken

I've learnt to catch the water from my eyes
and replenish the sea
Strong tears are needed
For the heart to be free

Never knowing is destruction
Always wondering is pain
Emptiness is darkness
But I've learnt to smile
In these moments of rain

Re-ject-ion
I can’t even type it whole
I’ve never said it out loud
I’ve whispered it
Like some people whisper the
word ***
But I’ll never be bold enough
to just say it
It’s the most heart wrenching
word ever created
It consumes my every thought
Yet I refuse to acknowledge it
exists
I prefer the words desired, accepted, loved.

I do not want this word Re-ject-ion

Submissive

Peel me raw with your voice
Undress my mind with your wit
Scrape my bones with your laughter
******* blood, so I submit

Pluck out my heart with your soul
Rip through my spine with your mind
Extract my juice with your desperate eyes
Make me love you till my eyes go blind

Arachnophobia

I want to live in nature
I want to travel the world
I want to live in a forest and hold hands with Mother Earth

But I have arachnophobia

Addicted

If I’m not addicted to Facebook
I’m addicted to a poetry site

If I’m not addicted to alcohol
I’m addicted to any azipam

If I’m not addicted to tattoos
I’m addicted to ***

If I’m not addicted to the sky
I’m addicted to reading

If I’m not addicted to shopping
I’m addicted to tinder

If I’m not addicted to exercise
I’m addicted to food

If I’m not addicted to staying thin
I’m addicted to cutting my hair

If I’m not addicted to AC/DC
I’m addicted to Leonard Cohen

If I’m not addicted to writing
I’m addicted to procrastinating

If I’m not addicted to the beach
I’m addicted to my bed

If I’m not addicted to you
I’m addicted to someone else

If I’m not addicted to something
Then I’m not happy being un-addicted....

In the words of a song I love dearly...
addicted
“I’ve never met a ****** that I didn’t like”

Many of us are addicts.... it’s how we survive ❤️

Waitress (waiter)

You don’t need good grades to be a waitress
But you do need a heart of gold
Correct grammar is certainly not necessary
But you must love the young to the old

You’ll require a smile that’s genuine
Even if your heart is blue
And a passion to make the whole world feel special
with a soul that’s honest and true

They are days you won’t feel like smiling
and times you’ll just want to cry
But the people pleasing side of your nature
Leads to stories that you glorify

You’ll tell stories that make people happy
And stories that make children smile
You’ll tell so many jokes and so many tales
But their reaction makes your efforts worthwhile

Sometimes your days will be funny
And others days maybe quite rough
But knowing you made someone’s day special
outweighs the days that are tough

So next time your served by a waitress
And you think she didn’t listen in school
Remember she has skills that you would find hard
If you don’t see this then you’re clearly the fool!

My father
Sick of motor neurones
And holes in the aorta
Has made a decision
Full of heartache and pain
I support
I understand
But the darkness has returned

He has started the journey
The process has begun
I will be by his side
I will hold his hand
I will fight back my tears
My aching heart will stay hidden
But the darkness will come too

I must be brave
For him I must stay strong
He will be frightened
He won't know what will happen
After he has left his body
Does he still believe in God
I'm not sure
I should ask him
I wonder if darkness has got him too.

Reading Vonnegut

I'm reading Vonnegut
I'm tired
Had to look up three words
In three pages
The app wanted more money
To view the words
In a sentence
I don't have the money

So the sentances remain
Unknown  
I long to be more like Kurt
I dream intense
Repetitive dreams
My pen in my hand
Thoughts profound
I reside inside his followers
I want to go to a party

And quote meaningful texts
I want to join that society
'Catachresis'
Now there's a word for me
The writer inside me
Is trapped
Uncultured

Behind failed education
Inside a broken mind
Desperate to find those words
To explain my thoughts
Which are deep and saturated of
Feeling..... No one will hear me
My emotions frozen

Those three words
In three pages
Already evaporated
I have another four words now
Four more to research
Four more to skim my brain
To mock my intelligence
The app wants more money

I'm reading vonnegut
And I'm tired

Vast approaching, carnivorous clouds
set to surround her
Choking her with their black ****
pregnant with both child and fear
she is unable to protect what she holds deep within her
Evil screams at her every turn she is lost
and she has nowhere to run

His putrid stench has returned
It resides within him
Redolent of whiskey
Nicotine stained
And she wants to retch
He has invaded her
****** her sanity
He can barely walk
He is disgusting

She fights with reality, desperate to disappear
Meditates to another land
Where her body is vacant and alone

To be pregnant with evil
Is to be punished
She can not be loved

His veins reach out and engulf her with such venom
That her throat is choked with
his sticky sour blood

Dying is her only chance
But her life is cruel
She must endure his foul, stinking breath
His beatings
His abuse
Desperately hoping, praying
That someone would **** him...

I fight you in the morning
I fight you before I sleep
I fight you when I'm lonely
In pain or feeling weak

I fight hardest during the dark
It gets easier during the light
But the grey days are the tricky
ones
These days I strengthen the fight

I fight because I'm worn out
And it would be easier to leave
the daily pain and struggle
behind a long forgotten dream

I fight you for the people
That I would leave behind
But to fight you for myself alone
The reason I can't find

Even when the last star ceases to shine
And the moon is hidden in the dull of the night
I will still love you

Even when the moon demands the ocean waves cease to roll
And Neptune cries into the darkness
I will still love you

Even when Mother Earth sends her anger up to the surface
And all in her path burns to the ground
I will still love you

Because my love for you is beyond harm
It is stronger than the ocean, tougher than the moon, too clever for nature’s anger and
unlike this broken world, my love is eternal

Yes I'm a waitress-

Which doesn't mean I'm dumb
People skills are declining in need
But still you all come

I'm here 40 hours a week
Clean the restaurant before I start
Some days I feel ok
Most days I've a broken heart

Even though I'm cracked inside
And my fake smile wants to frown
I'll give a night you'll never forget
Face painted like a clown

You have no idea
in your one hour break
Or your 30th birthday
Which I will make great

That just last night
I received bad news
But I have to work still
I don't get to choose

I'm dying inside
but you'd never guess
Smiling my head off
Though my hearts in a mess

So next time you come
and I'm not the best you've had
Just remember I'm human
And I'm losing my dad

Discovering Dauphne

Reading Du Maurier as my mother once before me

I feel cheated that in my midlife
This now my first discovery
I weep at the complex beauty within the first page
I read and re-read and re-read and again
I want these letters that form these words to penetrate and reside within my soul

I feel saddened for my lack of knowledge
For my laziness and lack of wanting to escape through words in my previous years

I feel anger for the years of substance use to take me out of myself
Why has Daphne been kept hidden I ask?
She understands me!
If there is she, then more alike there must be.

I leave regret, usually, for those who don't understand it's teachings
With Du Maurier I experience a new and crippling regret
I feel betrayed by anyone who has lived within her words, her worlds and yet kept her hidden from my unquenchable thirst

At least time seems to be slowing down in my 'almost there' sobriety
More hours appear each day
to be filled between the sheets of each turning page.

Hello new world

Mocha skin man

Move over
come closer
my mocha skin man
Kiss my lips
Kiss them harder
My mocha skin man
Touch my face
Touch it sweeter
My mocha skin man
Stroke my thigh
Stroke it higher
My mocha skin man
Hold me close
Holder me dearer
My mocha skin man
Love me deeply
Love me stronger
My mocha skin man

I can’t wait any longer
My mocha skin man
But I will wait
forever
My mocha skin man

Take your needle, and paint my skin
Tattoo over, under and across my territory, so they won't see inside me
Pervade my body with rainbows of pain

With Striking colours, hide the black and grey mass of my being

Take my skin to another land
Where flowers bloom, fairytales live and rainbows glow
Where my heart is hidden

I hide myself well, my skin draped with powerful ink
It's how I protect
How I live behind
How I survive

Rainbows

I love rainbows
I love the fact that I’ve read how they are formed
Yet I select delete to forget it
To keep them magic
To keep the belief that they are caused by the sky’s happiness
To believe that the *** of gold
is a metaphor for love

I love rainbows
because it’s a faith that holds no judgment
A belief that requires no war
A vision that only gives warmth
and creates pleasure
A lightness in the sometimes days full of a dull dark grey

I love rainbows
because they are safe to love
And safety and love are what this world needs the most
If life was lived believing in the magic of rainbows
What a beautiful, colourful and wondrous world we’d be living in.

I love rainbows

Begin again

She held on too tightly, white knuckles shining through the blackest of nights, that returned with such venom, that she stung to her very core.

The shades came crashing down and the pull of the night dragged her curious mind back into her past. A past that was so familiar, it had become a second skin.
Stretching over her lightness, an eclipse, of which escape seemed too far out of reach.

Surrounded by her friends she was still alone. The wall she'd built,  towered above and was too high; There were days when it's bricks were cemented together with fear and jealousy. A black, sticky mass that no love could pass through.

She had to find her way back to the lightness. No longer could she endure. For she had felt the lightness that tugged at her soul and she dared to believe. Dared to hope

She fought until her knuckles and elbows bled with an angry, frustrated but knowing love.

She fought until just breathing and stillness were all she could summon from inside herself

And in this breathing and stillness she found her quiet mind. A mind so strong that it grasped her from dark to light in a single heart beat. Just as it had stolen the light away only hours before.

She would return to darkness time after time. She had accepted this.

But now she was loved, and she loved.
And this love would always pull her back....

I call upon the wind to steel you within its breeze
I call upon the angels to help you feel at ease

I call upon God to let you be released
I call upon your soul to let you rest in peace

I love you
I've never met you
But I love you

I've seen your face in beautiful strangers
I've kissed your lips in my dreams
I've touched your face deep
within my heart

I won't give up on you
Because I long to kiss you
I live for you
I'd die for you
You are my life's work

I won't give my heart
until I can give it to you
And if you don't come
My heart will stay hidden

I am yours

Don't take too long

Today she wrapped her arms around her fear, and she thanked it

Yesterday, as she lay in bed, and during a new meditation she'd found, she was reminded of her fear.
This fear, is of not being good enough for people to love.

She craves for love, like many of us do.
A lost but familiar drug.
It haunts her, yet she is unable to fully accept it when it appears.

To the outside, all looks great.
She has a new man, or a new friend.
And immediately, crashing waves of love, she hurls at these people.

She pushes them way up high, and fills them with pressure.
The pressure of healing her.
Of gathering up her pieces and gluing her together with their love.

There is a pattern. It's rooted as deep as the memories of an old spirited tree. A tree rooted over too many years. Struggling to stand with the knowledge embedded within itself.

Then once again, she meets someone. And she falls in love ❤️

Her ego dances with joy. Her heart somersaults in ecstasy.
Her fear is gone? Or so she feels. And all in her magic kingdom is beautiful again.
The grey walls of her life are a dazzling bright white. And she is free.
This person she then fills with her desperate love, her hopes and dreams, and her need to quieten the fear, until they can't breathe, bursting at their seams.

This 'filling up' of people, wears them down. The relationship rips at the edges. She senses this and her fear applies more pressure within this filling up.
The torn seams become gaping black holes.
And she has lost.

The pattern needs to be broken.
The fear wants her to hear it, to take notice. And so it sends her love after love followed by rejection after rejection.
Until she hears it banging on her soul.

So she is teaching herself to love this fear. To read it as an old book and to learn from its pages.
As each time her heart is broken, rejected. It is fear teaching her that she doesn't yet love herself fully.

The heartache is there to remind her that there is still much work to be done.
That there has to be this darkness, to let the light in.
That trying to hide from the pain, resenting it, or getting angry with it. Does not serve her.

She will have love; she will find her magic and she will let in the light.

Today she wrapped her arms around her fear, and she thanked it.

Love is the answer ❤

My broken heart that saved my life....

I've learnt to love my broken heart with every atom of my being.
It has become my best friend.
It has been with me since my childhood and become my only constant, my only go to, my only place tucked away for only me to feel.

It enabled my quiet side, my deep, unwavering pensive and wounded side.
A side, that without it, would never have lead me along my life path. Collecting tools along the way that now prove so valuable, that I know the best is still to come.

It broke me into a thousand pieces, sliced me up and left scars so deep that I had no choice but to embrace it, snuggle it up and with my soul for guidance, quieten a pain so powerful, that it had manifested in a long term physical disease. But this dis-ease, I have recently learnt to live with and slowly reduce, day by day.

A dis-ease that I feared would define me, wrap itself around me so tightly, that I would splutter and choke and surely die.

This disease has, unbeknown to me, regularly pushed me to my limits.
It has tested my strength and my power until I'm exhausted and heavy with darkness.
A disease that boasts anxiety, addiction, extreme constant pain and popping joints and limbs. Fatigue, dyslexia, dyspraxia, brain fog, and depression, plus an entire resume, full of equally delightful ailments.

But I am a fighter. I am strong. And I can beat it.

Me and my broken heart have teamed up once again.
But this time we are knowledgeable, we have gifts and we are brave beyond my wildest dreams.
We are compassionate, we are loving. We have matured. And we are on our way to helping heal the world. Starting from within.

I have a fire in my heart that will never permit me to give up. It is what keeps me from deep waters, deeper pockets and heavy stones.

There is a white light that fills every inch of my mind and body at any time I need it. I could drown happy in its warmth.
Each morning and evening I soak up this light, and I am still.

I am the luckiest person I know. Because I won’t let life beat me.

Love is the answer!

I’m malleable
A Chameleon in heart
You can undo me

Take out my bones and replace with lead

Strap me down on an iron bed

Wire me up
To the highest volt

Smell my flesh burn
I was born to revolt

I wish

I wished for you when I was 5
And you came to me
You were still alive

I wished for you when I was 7
I missed you deep
But you'd gone to heaven

I wished for you when i turned 18
I had lost control
Didn't know where I'd been

I wished for you when I turned 25
When I'd jumped to end things
But remained alive

I wished for you when I was 28
And I was in love
I thought it was fate

I wished for you when my heart fell out
Smashed on the floor
I couldn't search you out

I wished for you in my 30th year
So lost and alone
Feeling nothing but fear

I wished for you but I'd lost control
Too many drugs
My life a lost soul

I wish for you now but I know you won't come
My life is my fault
What is done is done

Kerosene and the Devil

I would drink up all the kerosene
Until my veins ran sick
and burn to ash from within my lungs
Of which your fire had lit

.....For one more hour with you

I would lacerate my mind
have the devil gobble it whole
Pointless having a mind
when I want to forget
the heart you stole

......After my last hour with you

Photo of Leonard

I stare and watch your face
as it contemplates
your smile
You are but a photograph
Yet my heart still feels you

After the lense had shut
and the negative lay still
unborn
I wonder if you were
there
how I see you
here
now

We dream dark,
we dream deep,
we dream awake
whilst you sleep.

Reality is our loneliness
Our fantasy is real,
We'll take whatever we can,
just as long as we don't feel.

We live off adrenaline,
we don't know how to not,
We'll do anything it takes,
to make the emptiness stop.

There are many of us living,
but you'll never know who,
We walk, talk and smile,
just like the rest of you.

But our hearts are on fire,
And we need to feel alive,
we're the Clyde to your Bonnie
or the Bonnie to your Clyde.

We only come out at night,
Just as the darkness falls,
there is no point in fighting,
When the darkness inside us calls.

We will jump when we have to,
The stars are ours to take,
We are the writers and the artists,
We hide before you wake.

You'll find us in the shadows,
Hidden behind our dreams,
Our minds dreaming of far-away lands,
Our hearts ripped at the seams.

We are misfits, we are outlaws,
the ones that you don't trust,
But if you're lucky to be one of us,
Our friendship is a must


We can not be tamed,
And we never fall in love,
Unless we find the one,
And only then
We never give up.

Thank you for breaking me

When I found all the pieces of myself

I rearranged them before putting them back together

And I became a new whole

My friend who broke my heart

I told you my darkest secret
Because I trusted you
Because I loved you
You were the only friend
Who got me
understood me

Yet you threw me away
Like so many before you
There is a reason that I'm a loner
And that reason is for fear
Fear of not being good enough
Normal enough
sane enough
For people to keep around them

I never felt this fear with you
With you I felt safe
I felt good enough
I felt calm around you
I made you my best friend
Maybe that is what frightened you
And made you run away

Saved by words

You'll find me reading ****** novels,
you see me read romance.
I might be reading Kermit the frog or best views in the south of France.

I'll read to forget, I'll read to sail away
To learn of heroes like Jonny Cash
and how life was in his day.

I'll read so that my mind expands and so my heart can grow
I'll read and I'll immerse myself, from head right down to toe.

I'll read to stop me drinking,
I'll read to stop my tears.
I'll read so much and for so long that I'll forget my fears.

Reading is what saved my life
and writing helps my soul
I'll never stop to read and write
It's all that keeps me whole.

She woke before the birds one morning, and she was as light as the sunbeams creeping over the horizon.
It had been a lifetime since her smile was wider than the ocean, since her heart felt free.
No longer caged in behind her walls. No longer contained, unable to reach out for freedom.

She had sat within the molten air.
She had reached out blindly, and stroked its black velvety walls. She had listened to the masked voices.
And she had separated herself.

She had cradled her sadness and pulled it close.
She had sheltered it from the claws that had threatened to ****** it away.
And she'd saved it so that she could learn to love it.

She chose a new way.
She had pulled at the light and had drawn it to her core.
She found her bravery from the kind, supportive hearts that surrounded her, each and every day.
Her constant: Her friends.
She cut out and stitched over the patches of guilt, jealousy, fear and uselessness.

She had awoken.
She was reborn.
No longer afraid.

She had chosen to sit in the darkness.
She had chosen to feel it.
To reach out and touch it, and to listen to it.
She had not sent it away; she had taught herself to separate from it.

Again the brilliant sunshine rose, which had blinded her only days before.
This time she didn't turn away. This time she allowed it to reside deep within her, as she held it close.

She now loved both the light and the dark.
And she had new knowledge.
For she realised, that one could not exist without the other.

Poem: Empty where you lay

Two decades and one year
Ruptured by my heart

I watch
immobilised
as my frontal lobe detaches and slips out under my door
Too afraid of my agony
Of my actions performed in the darkness
It abandons me
Protecting the parts left attached
of the constant-

-What would you look like now?
Sound like now?
Would you be happy?
Lonely?
At peace with yourself?

Would you possess the heart of a warrior?
Or a peace maker?
Soul of angel?
Or just the mind of a poet?
                     ...............................
I apprehend your second chance of this life
It cracks my spine and spits out splintered regrets
The perfect parents you'll be given
Survival of the fittest
I pull at my lips to form a smile
Because I love you-
Because I know this is a better path for you

I gouge out my eyes
And push them inside my heart

Every space you occupied
Each song you sang
Every performance
I am there in another land
I've memorised every word
Felt every beat

On the pitch at football
Playing with friends
Twisted limbs
Tears hidden beneath my feet
Your first love
First broken heart
I feel them all.....

I fabricate your sadness
As I scream into the cave of my mind
I wretch and choke out for Aphrodite

But she is elsewhere, having cocktails with her Goddess companion, Isis,
in celebration of their latest triumphs
For those hand picked to fulfill their hearts desires
Who live without empty echos
And chaotic minds
Those with a stillness, percolated deep
Carrying auras of golden warmth
Mistaken by the humming bird as nature's
Glowing nectar

I fear those women more than anything in this-
my life
I run
So my jealousy remains caged
                     ............................
I find my frontal lobe at the bottom of a bottle
Sedated in sediment
My local pub say they'd go under without my custom
A weird, turbulent, symbiotic relationship
Gnawing into my desperation

If I were a Disney character
the film by now
nearing it's final scenes
There would be some joyful moral to my sadness
I'd be rescued from myself and live
happily ever after
No voids
No aches
No emptiness

But my scenes are a deadly, grave reality
My cheeks soaked with a desperation
To know
To feel
To love
The fight was lost before gender picked you
Not a fingernail nor strand of hair
for me to swallow
Nothing of you resides within me
Just an unknown
Silent wailing

Self punishment mocks my fragile mind
As it wills me to imagine your scent
Eyes burnt shut
Your shadow runs past freely
Faint laughter falls and stings my lobes
It belongs to you
I know it is you

Knees cracked
Praying for a God, any God
Stitch the fragments of my brain
Begging Aphrodite or her peers for a second chance
Any mythology will do
Desperation knows no limits

BUT NOTHING......................................

Just painful silence of empty echos
My womb forever
................................Empty where you lay.

Poem- To the past & present

Hanging from the shame
Of my privileged supremisist height
Choking on the knowledge
That until now
I didn't fight

Eyes silenced hard
From systemic white view
All lives don't matter
Until your lives matter too

A product of white history
I wish I could reverse
Where all mankind are equal
For real not just in verse

Anger and great shame
come banging on my soul
Prejudiced leden centuries
and inhumane forms of control

I promise from today
Your fight becomes my fight too
I pray you'll accept from my heart
This apology to you..........

-  I am sorry
I am sorry on behalf of my ancestors and the part of history that affects you.
I am sorry for any part I may have played through being only Non-racist instead of Anti-racist.
I am sorry that I didn't educate myself earlier.
I am sorry that it has taken yet another death, for me to stand up and fight.
I have always shot down racism with my words, but I have failed to completely understand it.
For these and more that I still have to learn, I am sorry.

Twenty eight hours ago
I walked right into the sea
It was so cold
But I couldn’t feel it
I couldn’t feel anything

Up to my neck under water
A woman called me from the shore
She broke the spell
I turned around
I crawled back out

Cut my feet walking on the stones
I was fully clothed apart from my shoes
The sun was shining
It seemed like the perfect day to leave my life

But I didn’t
An angel was sent
And I turned around
I’d hit rock bottom
I needed to
I had to admit I needed help
I never ask for help
I just survive

I’m asking my doctor for help

Twenty eight hours ago
I almost died
Twenty eight hours later
I will do more than just survive