Helen

Helen Feb 2012

i’ve come home to see
you’ve left me the key
you brought it to me
because i’d called you crying

i look up to see
above the new key
that picture of me
and now my throat is drying

i guess now it’s you who’s crying

Helen Feb 2012

Moon

there is a moon
sweet and silver
a smile on its side
i’m sure it can see me
even so high in the sky
it is watching me

and my family
and our pain
and our helplessness
and it’s still

smiling
i think I will climb
the pensile stars
to rest on the moon
it is surely so soft

and so quiet
and so warm
and so far away

from everything
cuddled in its soft silver
i’ll watch a big blue marble
with tiny little people

and tiny little lives
and tiny little problems

how odd
the problems seemed so big
from down there

and they aren’t really

this must be
why the moon smiles

Helen Feb 2012

Shirk

O to escape the throes of reality!

O to shatter the shackles of ambition!

O to wriggle free from the white-knuckled grasp of foresight!

My soul would leap wildly from the ledge,

to dive – twisted, gyrating, and splayed – into formless existence!

Time would dissolve!

Distinction melt!

And my being would float forever amid the dust

and the ages and the reflected sunlight!

Helen Feb 2012

Snow

When it first falls from clouded skies, snow is beautiful and soft. It hushes the world, and those who watch its progress are content to smile and reminisce. As it accumulates, it covers everything with its purity and its pearl white so that even that which was ugly now sparkles with the magic of a fairytale. Its is the most breathtaking of natural beauty, and none can help but be intoxicated by its presence. All that it falls on is seduced into forgetting the inherent transience of its nature - this is why the sun always shocks when it breaks through the clouds. When crisp and solid beauty melts until it is formless, and then until ugliness begins to peek through it again, and finally until it is reduced to mud and slush that dirties the shoes of busy people and makes them angry. So they curse its ugly remains and wish it would leave entirely. Always their wishes are realized, and the mud and slush dry up and disappear until all that is left of the beauty of the snow is its memory and an empty bitterness and the small hope that perhaps another storm might come. So humanity sits in this way and prays that the clouds would come back, or, more desperately, that they had never left at all.

Helen Feb 2012

Toll

a rain drop

drips

from a Bell

with every gong

Time is measured

drip by drop

I shake the bell.

so drops Spatter

and gongs reverberate

Helen Feb 2012

Demon

I do not write to enlighten others or to broadcast my own perspectives. I write neither to remember nor to be remembered. Writing is not my ambition; it is not my escape; it is not my hobby. It is my addiction. I write to stave the shakes and pains that plague me when I do not. Writing indulges the demon fighting inside me, that creature clawing eternally at the bars of my soul. Though I try obediently to contain its groanings, to sit quietly in the verbal single dimension of society, the need cannot be ignored indefinitely. Eventually I must concede, must let it claw and tear gluttonously until what was once blank sheet now bleeds my deepest and most lucid revelations. I know that when this purging is over I will be left hollow, pensive and raw, but once I have begun I can only continue viciously, can only drink the carnage that I pen and savor it on my tongue, gurgling and laughing. Each work I create strengthens the obsession and claims another share of my existence, so that I live shadow-like between writings, playing a half-hearted charade. Like every addict, I secretly pine for the day when the game will reach its peak – when finally my demon will emerge triumphantly, sword in hand, and leave my dry and useless body lying in a gummy puddle of deep red inspiration.

— The End —