Shall we step outside for a swim
in this ocean of artificial light?
Aren’t the lamppost legions lining the streets
the bioluminescence of the night?
Shall we take a stroll through the gardens,
through the forest of wire and twisted metal,
and admire how the cool autumn winds
waltz with these polythene petals?

The old and the new are already married,
Tied to the mast of time’s great voyager.
And beneath their most brilliant disguise
Lies the truest and most perfect reflection.
What does it matter in the sagas and songs
If now there’s a tower where once a tree stood?
A tree is nothing but a pillar of bark
Their lofty branches, girders of wood.
The grey and the green, the towers and trees,
Former is shunned, yet the latter is lost.
Hemlock and arsenic both send you down
And of granite and concrete, are either so soft?


Time marches on and leaves no-one behind.
It’s the ceaseless march of all of mankind.
If the end seems impending, and the path draped in black
To the darkness you go, there is no turning back.
This pilgrimage is a bitter prescription
And our sour rejection is sorely reflected
that legacies past are lauded and loved
While modernity’s beauty lies cold and neglected.
On the railway tracks we are hurtling down
Laid each day by the hands of history
We cannot turn back or regret our mistakes
Or the careless advances we were perceived to make.
While we grasp at the memories, and skeletal remains,
With our rueful yearning that's becoming so desperate
The fact remains, ‘till the end of our days
There's no better, or worse, there is only different.
There is no behind, there is only beyond.
The passing of past lays the road for the new.

Someone is drowning in a sea of faces.
He never saw me but I sure saw him.
And he was cast away to far off places,
But where to bound, he'd never say.
I see him draw a shallow breath,
decending into the glassy oceans in his eyes.
With all the pressure he is barely breathing.
He seems as though he is barely alive.
Where have you been to get here today?
What have you done to become how you are?
What have you seen to make it seem this way?
You aren't here to catch the train at 8:15.
I wanted to ask but I did and said nothing.
And I became just another observer.
And when the questions were finally answered,
Before we could act, it was already over.
The train came at 8:15.
I never even knew his name.
I should have asked him how he'd been.
I never asked. We never do.

In the drawer beside my bed
there lies a graveyard
where scribbles cut to ribbons
rot in literary purgatory.

Discontinued timelines
suspended in the could-have-been,
you know, that awkward space between the realms of possibilities?
Civilisations falling into disrepair,
starved of vision,
endless streams of thought tricking into discontinuation.

It's all in the drawer beside my bed,
beside my head,
that knitted them together
and in the same breath, tore them apart.