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Jul 2020 · 61
In passing
Edward Dominic Jul 2020
Days of a selected length squash against one another
Piling up high 'til the calendar confuses before it organises

First weeks, then months
Stretching ambitions into unusual shapes
Lingering decisions losing their weight
Making way for a wave of minor tasks to take the reins
With scratched-off to-do lists

Bobbing along the surface
Hardly leaving ripples in passing
Doing little more than watching the reflections go by and wondering what might make them

We won't have moments like this again

Not for a while, at least
A peaceful reflection
May 2020 · 68
An abundance of time
Edward Dominic May 2020
There's too much time to know how to waste it
Its traces found above and around
Spreading like mist in the most insignificant spaces
Filling lines in faces

Please let me be tired
Allow me the reason to be weary
Give me a taste of stress so I might sleep more easily

Thank you for this self portrait I've had the pleasure of painting
I'm still boxing with shadows, I hope it might change me
Mar 2020 · 82
Reflecting
Edward Dominic Mar 2020
I haven't tried to slow down for a while
Or given time to thinking or feeling
I don't know where the space lies in my body
The way in which it flows inside me
How it mixes with my thoughts
Or billows with the air
Coming out and coming in

I will look there
At my most recent portrait
Held against every version of myself I have seen watching or staring back
To see how the lines have swelled or bent over time
And see whether I know myself still
Mar 2020 · 108
Try to be kind
Edward Dominic Mar 2020
There is always a choice.
A binary voice,
Coding all that you say in one of two ways.

You may hide this or cover
Take the signs and smother
But
Every decision is either yourself or other.

Where on the scale do you lie?
When the time is high, the sharp tongues will fail and quick wits subside.
Your pride will show itself frail and hide

So,
Take your time.
Step back, rewind, and mind the thoughts that anger helps to distort.
In short, try to be kind.
Mar 2020 · 91
Breathe
Edward Dominic Mar 2020
Peace comes with a breath,
A slow exhale at rest.
Thoughts may distress
With fears they want to confess
But peace always comes with a breath
Short
Feb 2020 · 71
City
Edward Dominic Feb 2020
Sit down
With your four wall surround
Pour a glass of wine
Cut your sightlines
And breathe
Tension leaves

In this city that fosters neither kindness nor pity
Bunker down and take solace in its anonymity

Time will reflect all that you went through
These lifetimes linger longer than they were meant to
Jan 2020 · 66
Unfocused
Edward Dominic Jan 2020
Unfocused

I believe in you
But not what you do
Let's slow down before you try something new

Just a little work,
Just a little concentration,
Then you can clamber over the foot-hills of imagination

And yes, write your notes
Put them out to float
Watch them drift and shift
Until you can fit your fingers in that rift
And pick them apart
Like you didn't expect them to sound so harsh

But still, you're writing your reflection,
In some semblance of introspection.
Half hopeful, half ashamed,
Your potential remains framed
Against always-the-same problems, renamed.

Now, come, stare at your success.
Hunt its blemishes locked in the recesses of your mind
And find you've run out of time at second best.

So, rewind and repeat to your own excess:
I'm fine.
This pattern is mine.
Edward Dominic Dec 2019
The Promise.

The hours pass us by like seconds,
Sifting through our fingertips like grains of sand.
Stretched out over the sullen blades,
Beneath a blazing silver moon.

A gnarled old willow stretches out,
Ready to ******.
But the cold of the night will never reach you,
Wrapped inside a blanket of words and promises.

Ghosts of the weeks past fade amongst the stars,
Burning bright on their final eve,
But a haunting thought teases our mind
From over turmoiled seas foreign soils beckon.

Across the poppy fields the duty-call summons,
The unforgiving imperative rings true
And tears me from your clutches,
****** into the war of a loveless country.

The months crawl on, blurred with loneliness,
I see you waiting at the station for my return,
Instead a grey envelope replaces me,
Abandoning you, alone in the crowd.

And now, shivering on those sullen blades,
You lie there, waiting to join me,
As from afar I watch over you,
Above the waning crescent moon.
A dip into the past with a poem I wrote, aged 15.

Yes it is a war poem. No I had never, and still have never, been to war.
Nov 2019 · 112
Between Apathy and Anxiety
Edward Dominic Nov 2019
It’s hard to find the words to fit the days
When the dominant feeling you embrace is apathy
Poems do not flow out of grey areas
Despite the vast wedges of time sandwiched in between the good and the sad

It's a middle class working life’s unseen style of ennui
Suffering in no kind of silence but the unarticulated tedium that forms from routine

And even so, even in the same act of writing that seeks to gain understanding, it mis-sells itself.
Glamourising or problematising these white lies
Churning them into tides of the fine and the good and the comfortable

How horrible it is to yearn for more struggle
How privileged
How touristic

And still, I want to find a valley
A distance upwards to strain my neck and beg for
Leaving nothing but an aching beat strumming across my body, overwhelming my senses
An indescribable primal urge that reduces me to a single thought with only one adequate course of action that I could bear to live with

That would be... nice
Would be.

As ever, everything is possible
So nothing gets done
Moving into big city life
Mar 2019 · 630
Reflections on fast love
Edward Dominic Mar 2019
Are we perfect because there's no forever,
We can't learn to hate ourselves together.
Inside and outside show the same,
Love lust, quick release, just a game.
There is nothing there that we could cover,
No feelings that we smothered.
If it's not love then it can't hurt,
Climbing into bed without a word.

Slowing down would mean boredom,
So we're left with no time to find the problem.
The role of both a lover and friend,
A candle wick rope lit at either end.
Now, alone with time to dwell,
The idea doesn't sit quite so well.
A memory can't help the mending.
Short and sweet always has an ending.

Are you just my fixation?
A figment of some sweet imagination?
If I picked your life apart
To see what I could have known from the start,
Would I find myself happy
In the face of a reality?
Or sad? As, broken at the seams,
I see the remnants of my tentative dream.
Mar 2019 · 221
Frozen
Edward Dominic Mar 2019
I hold my phone.
So when i look from her eyes my gaze has a purpose,
To a frozen hue, that does not create beauty but only captures it,
That with a push of a button decides a moment more significant.

With one tap I may be part of an instant where I was never present,
Be felt on a continent I have never seen,
Consider a face I could never imagine.
And yet the blue in her eyes still scares me.
Mar 2019 · 176
I want to be
Edward Dominic Mar 2019
I want to be a word
A word that brings a smile to your lips every time it touches the tip of your tongue
That you write, scribble out and rewrite just for the sake of reading it again
That you don’t want to spoil by saying too often because it feels special

I want to be a thought
A thought that drops itself back into your mind every time you push it out
That roots itself deep and lets other thoughts branch out from it, each sweeter than the last
That you don’t mind distracting you because what better is there to think of

I want to be an ache
The pain you feel in a corner of your heart
That burns and breaks
That stops common sense from soothing your unsettled mind
Until you see me
And the pain sweetens and starts to make sense

Because that’s what you are to me
A simple poem
Mar 2019 · 217
Silence speaks
Edward Dominic Mar 2019
Why are you singing?
Do you not like me?
I thought you lived alone just to be with me.

What are those words?
They aren’t your own.
Your lips turn down when you speak
It hurts me to hear.

I’m feeling lonely.
We haven’t spent that much time together recently.
I’m not angry
I’m always here
And you fit so perfectly in my fingers
Bracketed inside those walls.

Let me help you think
You should listen to your thoughts
Can you really hear yourself with all that din?

Everyone has ideas
But you can’t beat your own

So come back
And bounce them around.
Let them echo inside your head
Clattering.
Growing.
Breaking down and reforming.
What you’ve seen can always change.
Two perspectives are never the same

Don’t be scared.
It’s only you.
What is there to be afraid of?

So turn off the light.
Crawl into bed.
And think yourself to sleep.

Don’t worry.
I’ll always be next to you.
Silence speaks to a man living alone.
Mar 2019 · 197
Why should you be sad?
Edward Dominic Mar 2019
Why should you be sad,
And embrace the blue madness?
Feeling helpless
Over and under the surface.
Squashing signs of shelter
As sadness swallows you inside her.

It’s a rut.
A dip in the path
Felt only in the aftermath of your happiness glut.
Looking back up to your previous peaks
The joy you seek now leaves you weak,
Bleak in its absence.

But how would you know
Without having seen them first from below
Those feelings that you miss
Your supposed, self-imposed idea of bliss
This is just what sadness is.
A reflection.
Time for introspection.
A translation code to unpick life’s most complicated crossroads.
A happy poem about sadness

— The End —