you, my love, are the light of my life, and you - are ruining my writing. lately, when i sit down and try to write, all i can seem to come up with are grossly overused analogies and tired metaphors that have been recycled a thousand different times. all that flows from the end of my pen are flowers and stars and the creases that form in your forehead when you smile and how much i'd like to lose myself in the galaxies of your irises - and it's disgusting. this twilight-esque prose, this juvenile symbolism and puppy-love poetry that pours from me - is not me. i'm no Poe, no Plath, no Kerouac, but i like to think that i'm okay. however, recently the caliber of my writing has been reduced to nothing more than rainy-day romance and child's play. and god, everything rhymes. i feel like i'm sixteen again in the best way. it's because you've stayed, that you are changing everything i thought i knew about love. i catch myself absentmindedly drifting to visions of a shoebox apartment in a city somewhere and furniture shopping and even the B word (babies). that's so unlike me, that is so - amazing because nobody has ever been so serious about me and i think that maybe, baby,  someday i'd like to be 80 with you - oh god. you - you are too many poems that all sound the same, but each time i read through them i somehow manage to find something i haven't read before. you are open doors and patient arms with a voice like a lullaby that resonates in the darkest corners of my mind. you are saving grace without condition and a love so deep i could go for a swim in it - and maybe that's why i'm drowning, because all i ever really learned how to do is doggy-paddle. but you are so patient. anyone else would have quit on me by now. the idea of forever has always terrified me, but the promises you make sound so real that i'm beginning to think maybe they are. baby, you, are eyes like soil and words made of rain drops, and every day we grow a little more. i adore you. i am so sorry that my meager words can't do you justice. my ineptitude is criminal, but i'm trying. and i think that i would rather be vomiting these clichés than return to the world of gray i lived in before i met you. i love you. i love you. i love you to the moon and back and every planet in between. you are the sweet to my tea and the leaves to my tree. and every song i've yet to hear but somehow i manage to follow along with. i wanna scream it from the top of a mountain or the middle of a grocery store, about this love that leaves me with butterflies in my belly and fireworks in my heart. baby, i've never been so happy to embrace mediocrity. my prose may be suffering, but my heart is soaring. writer's block has never been more welcome than when it bears your name. so wipe your feet at the door, take off your coat, and please, make yourself at home.

- m.f.

The ice drew lace on the window panes
We couldn’t see out for a week,
The air had frozen and blocked the drains
And my tears were ice on my cheek.
‘Come back to bed and forget her now
She’s been gone since the crescent Moon,
Her passing has freed you from your vow
Yet your grief’s pervading the room.’

‘I need to know what was in her mind
On the day that she passed away,
She left no message of any kind
Why she swallowed the draught that day.
But you were there when she combed her hair,
You were there for the last words said,
She must have told of her deep despair
Or she wouldn’t have ended dead.’

‘You knew my sister had many moods,
You knew, before you were wed,
She’d lie, consulting the ancient runes
While hiding deep in her bed.
Her superstitions were known, it seems
Her hold on the world was loose,
She drifted half in and out of dreams
But death was what she would choose.’

I shook my head and I walked away,
And ploughed through the drifted snow,
Crunched a trail through the empty streets
To the cemetery gates at Stowe,
The clouds were grey in the sky above
And the snow built up in the trees,
While headstones peered from their icy tombs
Like sinners, down on their knees.

I scraped the ice from the headstone face
That said ‘Elizabeth Jane,’
‘An Angel fallen to earth,’ it said
‘While her heart was wracked with pain.’
A shadow fell on the marble face
As I turned, but no-one was there,
Then words appeared like an act of grace,
‘My sister killed me - Beware!’

The horror showed on my face, I rose
To follow the tracks I’d made,
But somebody else had left their prints
Leading away from the grave,
The tracks were made at a frantic pace
And they forged on way ahead,
Leading me through the cemetery gates
But Elizabeth Jane was dead!

A storm blew up on the way back home
And had turned the house to ice,
I forced my way up the frozen stairs
To confront Margot Desize.
But she lay frozen with eyes a-stare
And a glance said she was dead,
The horror fixed in her final glare
As a shadow stood by the bed!

David Lewis Paget

There’s always been something controlling me,
I knew, but I knew not what,
Something diverting and foiling me
Since the days that I lay in my cot,
I thought it was simply a parent thing
As they whispered their rules in my ear,
The things that were right and the things that were wrong
And the things I would most have to fear.

They sent me to school and the teachers, too,
Must have read from the very same book,
They always laid blame and they said it the same
And the cane lent a sting to their hook.
‘You’re coming to learn, not to think for yourself,
You’ll repeat everything that I say,
And maybe just some of these rules will stick
If you dwell on the rules every day!’

Then once in the world my employers unfurled
All the rules and the regs I would keep,
I didn’t last long, I’d seen them before
And told them they put me to sleep.
The government fined and unlicensed me
From a book that they said was the law,
The magistrates sat on a heap of these books
As I shrugged and I said, ‘What for?’

I sat in the jail for contempt of court,
Spent plenty of time in my cell,
The world was consumed with a million rules
Designed to consign you to hell.
I watched all the lawyers and prisoners, cops
As they danced to the rules of the cot,
And sensed they were puppets, and most of them fools
Who would baulk at the words, ‘I will not!’

They’d hate to be questioned, they thought they were right,
If you disagreed you were canned,
They’d lock you away for a hospital stay
There was no going back, it was planned.
You had to be made to agree with their way
So they clamped electrodes on your head,
Then slide up the volts, and it wasn’t their fault
If it happened you ended up dead.

They called it Electro-therapy
And said it was doing you good,
But the thoughts in my brain they were never the same
When I came out from under that hood,
I saw the strings jerking from shoulders and heads
In a vision you couldn’t conceive,
And there were the hands that were pulling their strings
When I called out, ‘I don’t believe!’

‘I’ve never believed and I’ll never believe,’
I called, and they all moved away,
A thunderous cracking of mortar and ceiling,
It all fell apart on that day.
The strings fell away from my shoulders and hands
And I knew I was finally free,
And then I called up to the Puppet Master,
‘You won’t be controlling me!’

People were falling all over the place
As he dropped all the strings from his hands,
The bearded Master could see the disaster,
‘You’ve ruined my world and my plans!’
He paused for a moment and then he was gone
Leaving people to blink in the light,
The rules were the rules of the Puppet Master
Now we can decide what is right!

David Lewis Paget

I wake and prowl the house at night
And wander through the gloom,
The only light that streams are beams
Of silver from the Moon,
While every room is silent
And the passageways are dark,
There’s just one sound, the beating of
My misbegotten heart.

But no-one else is stirring
And the atmosphere is thick,
With dreams and ancient memories
From some old sailing ship,
They rise up from the midden of
A thousand journeys sailed,
That came to grief on some dread reef
As each one said, ‘You failed!’

And long-lost faces turn away
Before they’ll meet my stare,
I try to capture them again
And say, ‘I know you’re there!’
They shake their heads in silence and
Then drift into the night,
‘I know that I was wrong,’ I call,
They whisper back: ‘You’re right!’

So on then through the early hours
My vigil seeks the past,
Re-visiting each love I lost
As if it were the last,
And tears stream like some sad dream
Repeating: ‘Well, you know
Just why I turned away from you,
I really had to go.’

The years have mounted up, and now
Lie on me like a tomb,
Reflected in the silence of
This darkened, empty room,
And just as dawn is breaking I
Cry out, ‘I cared, you know!’
My voice, it echoes in the gloom,
‘Why do you hate me so?’

David Lewis Paget

My thoughts, my words,
I purge them out on paper
But the echo I hear,
Most clearly in my ear,
Is the conversation
Infinite feelings
Through infinite cigarettes
Life done
By twenty-seven
I’ll take that bet
The echo of epiphanies,
Ends where it starts
A run-on sentence
Beginning with f*ck
“Your name here”
In wonderland
Sounds less melancholy
Than “your name here”
Anywhere else
I’m in an **** of the mind
I’m burning up
The fury with the might
I’m trumping death with life

Behold the tyrant that we've come to uphold!

He's holly and jolly but his intention is a fold!

An act you see? Like the holiday scene!

Giving gifts, sharing feelings all on the drop of a ring?

That's the way you might tell me. Tradition's the thing!

...No just misguided and mislead, you're a sheep in a sling

Forgive me for caring just a little too much when my brothers around me have brains leaking mush

It's the buy-in's I tell you they've rotten your brain

Like the sweet allure of candy causing cavity pain

It creeps up in bulk bins then swarms you in herds

Over-bearing advertisements have become the word

But this is wrong! Don't you see?

All this holiday greed!

"I want this, I need that, does that suit come in black?"

I'm sick of it all and I don't give a ****!

I don't want any presents off that red fat man's sleigh!

I'm going to tear down my tree and set it up when I say

Not on some specific, planned out, or traditional day

I'll set it up a week from now or on a Tuesday in May

That's the sort of holiday I think I can brave

No unwanted gifts and forced smiles denied

Cause' the music is chill and the feeling sublime

They would leave with full bellies and a carry home plate

That is... if we did holidays all run my way