Blue veins that pace from on high
Or saunter, streaming in a drowsy
Way, day napping light into ocean
Sleep, carousing with slides of time
And dearest travelers to keep—
Where do you come from?
What is your source, a holy well
Or mountain tarn, the fallen cloud,
The rising waters that bursting sun
So ordains, what the wistful, traveling
Birds are want to herald by all thy names
As they speak from above on spry wings?
In my final day shall I know such peace
That your drifting lay delivers?  Or shall
The moon unface me as I dive into
Lost cloaks of the eternal oceans?
River, my final driver, take me on
Those pathways to the seas,
With open eyes welcoming
Under the lacing lakes,
Of greatest garment,
The bedding nights
Of gentle stars.

When love was young and bore an immigrant
Soul, how fresh and adventurous the years
And brinkmanship, my rite, was took for grant,
Aye, in my flotsam and jetsam, I spent no tears
Which by and by a greedy sea of beginnings
Has left no bounty, but cargo delivered or turned
To wood adrift, which built but useless things,
Children love tossing in fires bonny burned.
Here I lie, on the waters edge, searching—
For something to contain my emptiness,
My wanderlust, but like shy waves lurching,
I wrestle now, toward land, not loneliness.
Though I spent my life as a flag unfurled,
A disembodied soul is without this world.

I am science, I am fiction,
Victorian youth, ***** addiction,
I am addicted, no rest for the wicked,
I am not what these glorious stories depicted,
I prayed for my mother, I asked for a saviour,
But scarlet’s a varlet and I couldn’t save her,
Faith laughed at my pleading but science was pliable,
Boundaries were broken, I made fact unreliable,
Doctor! Doctor! Blood’s beginning to boil,
As you work by the light of the Tesla coil,
You’re polite, once contrite, not particularly odd,
Now you’re trapped in your lab and you’re playing at God,
You were robbed of a woman, held hands with her breath,
Your disillusion excluded you, so you made life out of death,
And the blood and the ****** and the bruises on throats,
And the ghost of a sibling that grasps at my coat,
And I strived for ‘it’s alive’ but that’s a misquote,
It was never alive, that was not what I wrote!
It was pale and abhorrent, thread unraveled it’s head,
It’s lips moved but I knew it was made from parts of the dead,
Graves invaded, made empty, just so it could rise,
My shovels were broken, decriminalised,
My secrets unspoken were hard to ignore,
And it was only myself, since there was no Igor,
And my brother was gone, my father, my wife,
So if you seek to threaten me, be it with life,
Nothing left, I fear no death, in fact I seek it with vigour,
But I am no mad scientist B-List horror movie figure,
I am bigger, I am bloodless, I am the lightening’s whine,
I am all that befalls the name of Frankenstein,
I’m disturbed, I’m depraved, afflicted with my plan,
But above all I am only a conflicted young man,
And I cannot compete with tainted world’s so dark and neat,
So call me Victor as I retreat,
I am the monster I must complete.

I whisper poison to myself in ways only poets can,
wondering why you never asked me for the antidote.
Sat in the middle of my warzone, decomposing symphonies
formed in your ears when my poetry held you tighter than I could.
It is better to recognise your blood stains for what they are.
I blame myself. I blame myself. I blame myself.

I blame myself, when you still arrive unannounced at my door
with ****** knees and elbows. Shirt sleeves and split jeans.
Again, I have another hole to make whole again.
To stitch up your stars into rearranged constellations
that match the traced freckles on your back,
that do not form to spell my name,
that aren't metaphors; but the truth.

Dean Eastmond.