He called it ‘fire water,’
He’s smart like that
My dad,

He made me afraid,
When I was small,
Of something I’d never had.

It was grown up stuff,
Not for me,
I was just a kid,

But I got curious,
About grown up stuff,
I bet you can guess what I did.

I drank that fire water,
& it burned
Just like he said.

I drank it,
That fire water
& it went straight to my head.

But it didn’t make me a grown up,
Not really,
I’m still just a kid

But it gave me a taste for poison,
Burning stuff in which I hid,
That’s what it did.

English Cowboy


I see a Cowboy walking down the street…
He looks like he’s a stranger here, from a place I have never been.
He tips his hat at the ladies and they are all smiling back at him.
If I bought myself a cowboy hat, they still would never smile at me.
Because I’m an English man in England,
I cannot stand out from the crowd;
But the Cowboy walking down this London street,
He ain’t looking like no clown.


He owns his style and he walks so proud;
That is something I could never do.
In this place I am always lost, somehow.
Maybe if I went to his land, I could find myself in tune.


He’s heading for his hometown;
I’m walking out on mine.
I see him at the airport,
Waving all those smiling ladies goodbye.
When we land over in his land,
He just becomes the same as all the rest.
I walk into the nearest bar and order myself a drink…
Oh my God!  I love your accent!


I’m a stranger in a stranger town
And I feel as if I’m right at home.
I’m so glad I left those London streets;
Maybe I could have stayed, but sometimes you just have to go…


(C)2017 Aa Harvey. All Rights Reserved.

she was strong enough
to kick down walls
and watch it all crumble.

she was weak enough
and failed to crawl
out of the dust and rubble.

Sometimes you have no reason to stay,
and realize that's a perfect argument to go.
And that taking an entirely new way,
is the sore but single method to grow.

If you're washed-on abeyance's bight,
and you feel decision's heavy heft:
To choose the left where nothing's right,
or go to the right where nothing's left.

Remember it matters not where you proceed,
or which mountain you want to ascend.
It does not matter whether you succeed,
it is the journey that matters in the end.

LS:   This place is desolate
Where darkness ***** at your pupils
And infuses your lungs with a cocktail
Of cold and despair
Amongst the mistletoe and bells ringing
You hear a quiet echo of
Isolation that has no shape
Unexplained, ever mysterious
Fearesome lack of a vital link
To hold your feet down on the plane
Familiar to countless faceless strangers
And familiar faces alike
Where willingly you could join
In a silly dance around the circle
Outlined many spiraling ages ago
And feel at ease and ONE

And to the sound of choral
I could fly up with crows
And see it all from
Unattainable
High
Up there in the milky clouds
But
Nature is so uniformally ordered and
Strange as it is no law contains
This spirit so eager to escape

WW: I hear the darkening silence echo
And drone in the northwood stillness.
The forest treetops lurching south
Into the memory of sunlight
Crowns bending unbroken,
Grasping unspoken,
To behold the waning daylight

While the spell of darkness cast deprives,
It opens up the craving soul

This is the naked truth,
This is the light
Oozing from graying monotone
Spilling from cracks between the pause,
Betwixt the shapeless lines of poetry’s refrain …

For life is not a work of art,
The colour a fleeting moment cannot last
And the paradise of going somewhere else
Still so far away

wildish

All endeavors in life
need a start in Peace..
Peace is our experience
without the
thoughts and perceptions
which seem convincingly to
declare an independent world..
Another name is Silence
which all may experience
any time and any place..
That is the start..
Now appear words
of sameness and difference
which appear to break
the Peace and Silence..
Words bring longing
for that place before
wounding words unfold..
(The cosmic joke:
the place we were is
the place we are..?)
We await the arrival
of life's many teachers:
scripture and nature
neighbors and friends
an evening concert
a startling dream..
Teachers carry words
words as thorns
to remove the thorns
which hide the place
we long to return..
And finally: all thorns
burn in the glow
of returning Peace...

When I was nine
My mother asked, “What do you want to do when you’re older”
And I told her
Honestly
With my nine-year-old smile
As wide as an ocean
My nine-year-old heart
As deep as infinity
I told her, “mama, I wanna touch the stars, I wanna find pirate treasure, I wanna climb mountains and live in the treetops”
My mother,
She looked at my nine-year-old smile
She held my nine-year-old heart in her hands
and she whispered,
“Baby, how are you gonna do all that?”
I didn’t have an answer
You see,
At age nine,
I didn’t think about practicality
Or actuality
Or logicality
Or any big word with an -ality stuck to it
At age nine I had aspirations that I rode like angel wings
Dreams that would carry me to the stars I longed to hold
I was nine years old with a mind full of colors
And a mouth made to love
My heartbeat was the drum I marched to
The melody to my song
I told my mother once again “mama I wanna touch the stars”
Flashforward
I am a freshman in high school now
I stand before you,
Age 15
A year and a half away from driving
3 years from applying
4 years from finding what I’m gonna do with my life
Since then
My nine-year-old smile has dwindled
My nine-year-old heart has shriveled
These dreamers shoulders have hunched
Under the weight of textbooks and GPA's
The fingers that spewed color like a 64 pack of Crayola crayons
Aimlessly type out the final paragraph of an essay
The cavern in my chest, that was filled with infinite possibilities and wonders and questions that I longed to answer
Now sits
Empty
Instead of looking for mountains to climb
My aged nine-year-old mind
Searches for the college that will accept me
Not even the real me
Not the seeker of possibility
Not the tree climber
Not the wannabe fingerprint artist
They will take prim and proper not-nine-year-old me
the one who tells her mom she’s gonna major in finance but she hates math
The one who’ll have a steady 9-5 that’ll numb her skull and make her contemplate if death can come from boredom
A coffee tainted room of pencil skirts and high heels
Instead of her favorite blue jeans and Chuck Taylors
A nice job that’ll pay well but only for the price of her nine-year-old originality
But she only tells her mom that because it sounds like a real job
A not nine-year-old treehouse living
Cave exploring fantasy
I mean, I have to move on from that dream.
It's time to be practical
Actual
Logical
Now instead of making up new words
I learn definitions of the ones that already exist
Instead of painting with my own colors
I use the ones handed to me
Because its practical
Actual
Logical
Its how it should be.
I am no longer nine years old
Far from it at that
And yet,
I still long to touch the stars,
just a little less
I still want to search for treasure
But just as an afterthought
My eyes are still glowing with wonder
Just a little bit duller
Nine-year-old me isn’t dead
She just
grew up