He woke, as before, a boy.
She told him he would be a man,
As his father was out cutting turf,
And his mother told him the story,
He had heard before by the fire.
No pages to this book, not a leaf.

When he was younger, this boy
Had once cut, alone, the turf.
But upon placing it in the fire,
He decided instead to burn the mother of the leaf,
And that he did not want to be a man.
He couldn’t tell himself her story.

He saw his mother, an aspen leaf
Trembling by the fire,
As what was deemed a man
Turned her blackened eyes into a story.
He had always resembled a boy
Even to his own son, who pressed his tear-stained face into the turf.

His father tried to prove the boy a man
But found instead that he was hardly even boy.
So drink hid him from the story
While the not-boy cried by the fire
Knowing that he could not touch his fathers turf.
It was not like a man to shake as if a leaf.

The not-boy decided again not to be a man,
And lying in the earth found a fire
Inside that showed him a story
He had told himself as a boy
In which those who were only leaves
Could not have their own turf.

He was not the only boy
Who did not understand “man”
None did, and instead told a story
About how only the strongest leaf
Would cut the turf
And that only women would tend the fire.

Boys do not cut turf.
Leaves fall and we still tell stories
Of how fire somehow makes a man.

I hardly knew you
And yet sometimes the wind
Decides to hit me in some way
And I remember that you're gone.

Sometimes someone mentions your name
Or I see a flower
For you were like a blossom
And I feel like someone has placed me in a dream

It's easier to forget that you existed
It's easier. If you were alive but just not around
I would hardly bat an eyelid.

It's just that every time I go back to the last place I saw you
I remember that I held your hand.
Could I have done something?
Could I have eased your pain?

I would do anything.

Standing on the beach where you died,
I wondered where it was that you took your final breath
And if it was your own decision.

You are among the faeries now, in the hawthorn,
The primrose blooms brighter now that you are in her earth
The birds sing with you
And sometimes I can almost see you among the trees,
Laughing as the wren dances.

I don't know where people go when they die
But I hope you're somewhere in the forest.

I can't stop wondering.

Who found you lying there?
When did your children hear?
I cannot begin to think,
For if you were my mother I would have loved you
Loved you to the deepest part of my heart

I will never know, because I am
And always will be,
Just some girl you saw once in a while
Shared a song and a kind word with
Shared some of your beauty with
And who wishes she had never met you

Because she can't handle the pain of losing someone that she would have loved if she had known she would die.

Soft, loud, loud.


What am I?
Not music, just the lines on a page. Yet depicting the pitterpatter of moonlight, music, lines, dreaming, all the same.
Soft loud soft
Gently in little strokes a delicate face emerges
         Loud loud
The night sings through my hand, darkening until no line is left unshaded, no place left
              unworked.

Scribbling in little weaving scratchy black lines, neat but still
uncertain,
unsure of where the ink should turn to next, leaving
blotches of unsureity riddled awkwardly across my page,
my hand turns a phrase of no meaning, only to strike
it through with a line too curvy yet too straight to be
       intentional.
We are forced to write until shooting pains
crawl
up
our
hands and arms and we cry
out “no more, no more” and all of a sudden
they turn it to your life, they say
we are useless
without these marks
depicting memories
of frantic
late night
remembering.

Today I heard
The all too rare sound of silence
When I took my boots and woollen socks
And with them my feet and legs
And the rest,
From the noisy pebbles
Up to the sea-soft grass that lies
Between stone and rock, and beyond that,
A sea,
That lapped today no stronger
Than a lake in summer.

It is not quite yet the time for silence,
As winter is loud, at least
To my ears.

But today there were
Catkins, on the willow
Coltsfoot flowers, which I had not seen
Before, and
I saw a plant I think looks
As if it might be related to chamomile.

I wore my long skirt,
My sisters scarf
And a green hat
I felt as lovely as the trees today,
Well maybe not quite…
But I will say so because
All is silent, but love in this moment,
And if I am not to love myself I am not to love the earth on which I stand.
Am I not the tree?
Am I not the bird?
Am I not the hoverfly?
Am I not the insect that I almost ate,
Upon plucking a gorse flower
So enticingly filled with a scent of coconut and sweet warm sunlight

I looked into the flower and found another being…

Gorse flowers do not taste as they smell
However often you try, thinking that maybe, this once, they will liken primroses, and taste like….

Flowers.

Maybe I am more like the grass.

The girl awoke, as ever before
Younger than herself yet older,
As before, too young to know her own words
And too old to speak them freely.

Words, she said, were like sneezes,
Maybe not so frequent, but still,
For some erupting easily and eloquently
And for others, hanging painfully unheard
Building pressure yet never ceasing until forgotten.

She sat up, her tousled hair catching in the morning light.
No, she said, sneeze was not a clever metaphor
She tried again.

Words, she said, were like flowers,
Maybe not so dainty, but still,
Some big, catching the eye, the ones we plant in our gardens,
Others smaller, the wildflowers that often go unnoticed
Yet somehow carry more beauty than the others.

She pressed her sun-kissed feet to the floor.
No, she said, flowers could not be compared
To something as graceful as words.

She tried again, her tender lips unsure
Her blue eyes sparkling yet broken.
As she stumbled over thoughts,
The corners of her mouth curled subtly.
I wished I could kiss those lips.

Words that are not hers fall from my hands
And thoughts that are not hers spring to me,
More eloquently than my own thoughts.

When I am alone, and my chest hurts,
Oh it hurts, and my heart won’t stop.
My eyes often fill with tears and I cannot stop
Or feel what keeps me here,
It all goes, it all goes.

The words I say are hers began as words
That only sprang to mind from fiction
And yet everything comes back to her once more, again.

When I am alone, and my heart is not beating with my consent,
The face that fills the pain is hers alone.
I love him deeper yet I do not feel the pain from him
For when I feel an ache, an ache is all I feel
Therefore the things that hurt, hurt all the more.


She sat up, her tousled hair catching in the morning light.
She smiled with those perfect lips, yet those words were not hers.
I do not remember any words.

She pressed her sun-kissed feet to the floor.
Her blue eyes fixed on me, I think she does not love me,
Although her words say otherwise.

I would not wish for her to love me, for I love another more.

Words that are not hers fall from my hands
And thoughts that are not hers spring to me,
More eloquently than my own thoughts.
The words I say are hers began as words
That only sprang to mind from fiction
And yet everything comes back to her once more,
Again, again,
Again.

Spreading
       Cracking

Growing
                                Pulsing
Slowly, breathe
  Into me.
I am not the earth nor air you live on, but the pain you drink
                          
                 Sorry but I can’t help myself.

If I were one inside instead
I would take it all back
      Out
The raindrops tumble slowly,
   Dripping off your weathered skin,
Winter is coming,
I’ll never again
See the words you softly spin
Peaceful

I am not the earth you live on, but the tears that fall
                  
                                           Slowly


Upon your leaves.

Everything is watching
   Always
                         Always
I sometimes find at those times
When everything just falls into its place,
And the sky becomes one with the earth and it floods
Through the fragile small body that
      Holds me,
          Maybe.

And my feelings become one with the earth
As tears fall from my eyes down to the roots.
In those times I can’t breathe because
All that is holding me’s so huge,
       So beautiful and bright, So bright and huge
And whenever my hands find the earth
Among pavements I wrap my fingers
    Round soil and plants just to get a bit closer.

      In dark nights I wonder if all that ever mattered
Were the sky and the sea and the stones,  but turning my face to the breeze I know,
      That maybe they’re nothing at all.

And when I am falling to pieces I place my ears to the bark of the trees
         I tell myself that maybe I’m part of the spirit that’s

moving through them

Just turn around please, somebody tell me that all that I am is not lost

That the dust on the breeze and the sky on my fingers can do something more
Than us all
But maybe
      
         Maybe

If the broken down houses and deserted forests can play a melodic a chord among those once lost
The music of the never stolen flames can sing

          Sing, Sing!

And all at once it bursts
Oh, the colours of the dawn, the growing of the leaves.
In the brilliant circles lie the real truths

It cannot be described. No.
It is the earth.

      I am the earth

When the first human to discover excess
Patented the story of ownership
And filled their mouths with more food than they could eat
They ate a hole into the future of their kind

We dance the dance
Of a thousand beating, aching hands
Held and bound tight in hatred
Throbbing with a curse
To love or be lost
To hate or be hated
Each one longing for something that the other can give
But nobody speaking
And the earth became drowned in tears

I get very scared sometimes, so I wrote a list to give you about everything that scares me.
So that you might not do those things
But then I got scared again, and I didn't give it to you.
And your very existence scares me
And yet I love you
And I think you might be the best person I know
And I don't ever want to hurt you
And yet your pain is so overwhelming I often can't breathe and I'm trapped in this world both with you and without you and I can't love you because I'm too scared of myself and it hurts. It hurts.
I should give you that list
But your pain outlasts mine
And shouldn't I let myself sacrifice my fear for your happiness?