There was once a time when I was the king of the road, until you came that night and threw me off my throne.
Your fickle eyes stalked me like the pale moonlight that dark December night as I entered the room with a bag full of confidence.
But I spilled it all over you, the enchantress whose name remained anonymous.

With your witch’s wand-like finger you cast a spell on me and attacked my sub-consciousness,
My legs failed me and broke like that of a figurine soldier.
Falling to the ground, I choked as tried to spit a plea for help out.
You weren’t going to save me now.
Oh no, you’d rather me kneel and beg for mercy,
Pining silently as I watched you trample over me with your nine inch high heels.

I’d signed the deal with the devil’s daughter, and she was going to sacrifice my heart like the lamb to the slaughter.
I was put under your curse now, and there was no was out of it other than in the back of a hearse.

You were the first to push the king of his perch,
*And you were the last to have seen him at his worst.

Thinking back to the first fast days when our hearts burned with the indigestion from the chest to chin,
Butterflies flying high and wild in our stomachs at the touch of our skins.
We ran quickly into the lives of one another that May Day that first brought in our summer.
Under the sun that smoulders and scorched our shoulders, we walked into the flames that burned we were younger.

Twenty years down the line our hearts have grown colder.
A blockage has come between us, but we can’t move the boulder.
I’ve even tried to dig up our love’s old grave and shake the corpse back to life,
But try as I might it lies limp, it’s body as frail as its owner.

We’ve tried treading water in the cold blue seas.
Though our arms tired and we drifted to our knees.
The current dragging us down stream and beyond the river,
Nothing will reprise our best years gone by and the time that I have given her.

I still hunger for those days when we didn’t fight.
Those days that kept blazing on and on golden bright.
Those long summer days that never wanted to turned into night.
But maybe one day under the sun that'll smoulder and scorch our shoulders, we will once again walk into the flames that burned like they did when we were younger.

I read your words etched on ancient pages.
From a different time,
Drifting through the ages.
What intricate thoughts passed through your mind,
Tingled the nerves of your spine,
And escaped through the tips of your fingers.

Is it a mirror image of a generation lapsed or a talent that still lingers?
When I compare our thoughts
And write down mine.
Different as they are, the intention’s the same.
To channel your feelings that are lying inside.
And to spill them out line by line like the ink splotching over your pages.

I’ve got along way to go to match your talent.
It might take a while,
With our opposite styles.
But maybe I’ll have my words drift through to another time.
Read in the future.
Passing down our line.

Your words may not have inspired your next generation, but, please, do not worry for this one.
The sunlight of your dreams may still be realised through the eyes of your grandson.

When clouds are overhead
It doesn't bother me,
I lay my weary head
Right on my lover's knee,
With her fingers in my hair
To soothe away dull care.
I go walking in the sunlight of dreams
In the sunlight
Radiant sunlight
In the ultra-white
I'm alright
Sunlight of my dreams.

When lady luck won't smile
I send her on her way
The weather may be vile.
All the livelong day.
But if wintry winds do blow
And summer doesn't show
I go walking in the sunlight of my dreams
In the sunlight
Happy sunlight
In the living right
Watertight
Sunlight of my dreams.

Where skies are darkest blue
And trouble's far behind
Young love is ever true
And hearts are always kind.
Everyone has time to spend
And pleasures never end.
I go walking in the sunlight of my dreams
In the sunlight
Laughing sunlight
In the dynamite
Golden bright
*Sunlight of my dreams.

Diane,
I enter this mysterious town welcomed by the eyes of strange owls seeping through the trees like city lights.
The wooden town, primitive in its functions, is set to the backdrop of two twin peaks, bursting out from the earth.
The ground is uneven from the roots of the great trees it has given birth to.
Looming above like majestic pillars erecting the sky with their enormous height.

Yes, there is definitely a mystic hidden in the misty air that’s lingering low along the ground.
Covering up the what’s, they why’s and the how’s.
Of this young girl, who walked with fire,
And got burned, ***** and torn.
With her body in a bag, sealed and taped,
Sent down the stream, sailed the lake and drifted to shore.
There’s an answer here somewhere to this masquerade ******.
It’s hidden under layers of false pretences of which I am going to have to use my sixth sense to understand.

No, this case may be more dangerous than I come have dreamed possible.

Ps, I think I have the right to suspect that the owls are not what they seem.
Goodnight, Diane.

Her mirror must be broken.
Maybe she should take it back to where she bought it.
Because when she looks into it,
The reflection brought back to her is an image of imperfection.

This is the girl that hides online behind a keyboard confidence.
With images of what she wants to be locked in the bottomless pages of her Internet history.
It’s outside that she should really be.
Out where curls of hers that change colour according to the seasons should be hanged out for everyone to see.
She has no reason to want to disguise her hazel eyes from the real world.
And no reason not to open them up and realise how beautiful she really is to everyone else but herself.
How beautiful she is to me.

For I know if she was ever to be mine I’d have her smothered in a sea of blankets,
And it's waves of sheets would consume her with all the reasons why she's the opposite of what her broken mirror shows her.

I have no idea why I come to this bar every night.
But I just do.
I just leave it feeling jet blue with the weight of the wanders of the world crushing down on my shoulders.
And I leave with questions and grief for anyone I see there.

Of pity for the girl behind the counter who isn’t very pretty.
She’s washed up on the wrong side of the great Mississippi.
Now she’s working ****** shifts and pulling pints filled with misery for the bums of the city.

Of shame for the alcoholic with his alcohol frozen brain.
Standing by the bar eying up his drink before he chooses where to take his aim.
But it’s his own fault he got dragged into this whole addiction game.

Of humiliation for the boy in the couple corner alone with his head filled with that question he shouldn’t have asked her.
At least he now knows his place for it finally been confirmed.
And so it’s time for him to forget it by ******* up his bottle of Estonian liqueur.

Of frustration for the poor taxi driver who picks up drunks stumbling up to his car under the influence of the pale moonlight every single night.
I ask him if he’s been busy even though I know he has been asked this by everyone he has picked up tonight.
Despite this he answers me just to be polite.

Of eternal embarrassment for my own self when my face hits the pillow and I ask what I’m doing with life.
Why I’ve went to that hellish bar another evening to get drunk off my face and spend all my of savings and come home alone to go to bed and cry again.
Worst of all is I know tomorrow it will be a repeat, like the next day and all days after that.

I have no idea why I come to this bar every night. But I just do.

You’re aged thirty-two with your own bottomless bank account.
A pocket full of cash that’s digging a deep immeasurable pit into your pocket.
Spending ridiculous amounts on ridiculous things, no matter if it costs over a million.

You’re aged thirty-two with your own supercharged automobile.
Fresh new stainless steel alloys and rubber tires to burn at the turn of the diamond studded steering wheel.
Chasing the marks on the road as you drive off into your own endless oblivion.

You’re aged thirty-two with your own house in New York.
The doors of which let hundreds of guests pass through night after night into the never-ending carnivals rides of Coney Island.

But when they leave you standing alone on your peer, pensively pondering your past,
Reaching out for her green light across the misty filled lake.
Trying to work out how to bring her back, but only this time making it last.

She’s just across on the other side of the bay,
With no idea that the hole in her back is being burned by the fires of your eyes.
As you stand disguised staring into her yellow solar flare hair in the morning sunrise.

You’re aged thirty-two with an unfilled heart.
Longing for the girl that you should have never left in the start.
But she’s with someone new and she’s probably forgotten all about that year she spent with you.

You're just the distant memory reaching across the bay,
The one that the whisperers say was a lonely millionaire aged only thirty-two.

Some moments you’ll find can never be recreated a second time.
Such as when we first met; a moment I assumed I’d easily forget.
But it still lingers in my mind yet, even though nine months have passed down the line,
I still remember that night.

When I entered the room to opened armed embraces.
Where the bottles of beer clanked together as we matched up our names with our faces.
Our conversations hatched open common interests as we spoke of the things we liked best.
Spilling the alcohol scented thoughts off our tongues that run as wild as our mind traces.

Our futures memories of the coming months would become locked behind the
handles of our rooms,
Held imprisoned inside the walls of what became our nighttime tombs.
The voices of my old friends echo when they rebound of the walls filling their own voids in the now deserted halls.
That lie barren as they wait to be filled by the next year’s crew so that the endless circle of old and new resumes.

We’ve watched as our friendships have transcended onto another plateau.
Through break ups, fallouts, spilled wine, growth sprouts, chinstraps and dropouts.
But the end is here and it’s time to go home;
Time to close the curtains on that perfect view,
And open them up again to something new.

He’s had a long old day between eating his food and getting stroked where he lays,
But when he rises in the twilight there’s always one urge he can’t fight.
His ginger fur stiffens in formation from the cold sensations of the night.
He journeys to the driveway sniffing the ground where her paws once touched down, as he follows the remains of her scent that slowly decays deeper into the air everyday.

The security lights hits his eyes and shines in his fluffed face, clearing up his vision as he looks for the trail of her tail.
She’s not here anymore,
But still night after night he comes scratching at the door.
Every time thinking, ‘just once more.’

I hear where his purrs once sang in my back yard those two years;
They’re now being replaced by his pain as he whines.
He stays a while, but the winds of loss toss his long ginger mane around.
He hangs his head and walks off into the midnight rain.
Where his tears run down into the gutters and drains as he cries his feline tears over the lost little cat of mine when he realises she's not here anymore.

Home’s not what it used to be.
The grass isn’t as green as the other side.
The sky is grey like the middle land between where I am and where I don’t belong.
The tides are changing,
Guiding me to somewhere else and pushing me somewhere new, telling me to just drift along.

This place has become my safe house
Somewhere I’ll come for rest and recuperation.
And to get spoon-fed like I was one year old again,
The stop-point to get fuelled up, like a filling station.

While I was away I felt liberated in a land where I was nameless.
Coming back home I feel like the alien that’s landed here in no man's land,
Rather than the boy walked these streets shamelessly as a local hero.
Now I just need some way to disappear.

Time passes here dictated by the clouds of monotony.
I’ve watched those clouds all too often from this same perch and pondering if I would ever find the gear that’s lost here.
I think I have found it,
But I’m still looking for the accelerator.
At this point I’m closer than ever to putting my foot on it.

I’m at a moment in my life where things could take off this road to ‘now’.
Because that’s somewhere I’ve never thought of being.
I’ve failed in the past.
I’ve surrendered to the future.
But ‘now’ is the place to stay.
I just need to open those clouds and accept whatever weather it may bring.
And I’ll get there somehow, along this long road to ‘now’.

We’re gathered here today to put to rest the words I didn’t mean to say.
The thoughts I tried my best to suppress, but slipped out anyway.
Delivering meanings that I didn’t have planned,
And messages she just can’t understand.

My acid tongue throws out its poisonous whispers into her ear, containing words she was never meant to hear.
But she cancels them out with her alkaline replies that don’t align with mine.
She’s the one who starts this game every time.
Throwing in the truths that bring me shame,
But when I claw out her flaws from beneath the dirt out onto the surface,
They impregnate her hazel eyes with rain.
And I’m always the one to get the blame.

I check the weather where she is to know if she can see the dark clouds leaving,
Unveiling the blue skies that lie beneath.
Hoping that one day she will open her hazel eyes and realise we’ve been through wet and dry seasons that continue to replay like groundhog day.
But all we can do is keep believing that there is a reason why we can’t let the storms blow it all away,
Just because of the words I didn’t mean to say.

I’ve never understood the pull of the nightlife.
I was always content to hang in my cave and enjoy the homelife.
Every now and then I do wag my tail and purse the trail of the pack,
Always lingering right at the back of the queue.

I follow their scent when they descend into the night,
While they ascend the social status stairway.
From my perch at the bar I watch the social sheep dancing to the beat of popularity:
The girls show off their twirls and brunette curls,
Inviting you into the funhouse down under that never shuts for festivities.
The boys weigh up their options with the biceps on display and perfect quiffs held up by ten tins of hairspray.
Hunting through the flocks of feet trying to find themselves a piece of meat for an all night feast.

When he finally finds his muse he bites her lip and grabs her hair, pulling her in without a care about those who stop and stare.
They kiss for seconds and he whispers in here ear,
“I think we should get outta’ here.”
She giggles grabs his hand and leaves through the exit at the rear.
His friends give him a clap and cheer, whilst his jealous rivals sulk and sneer.

After a few too many drinks I leave through the front, holding my head low to avoid a fight.
Bearing the brunt of another unsuccessful night with no young light to take home and ignite.
I fall on my floor with a case of helicopter head as the room spins in circles and squares in front of my eyes.
My lasting thoughts are of the day ahead; hanging dry and feeling as if I’d rather die.

It's just another day in my nightlife.

You lay in your nest like the wingless bird.
Watching the seasons spiral by,
Held by the frozen crystals of the grey sky.
Your howls for sympathy have gone unheard like yesterday’s favourite curse word.
Content to sit in the sidelines as your fellow fowl just jet off by.

You watched them stiff necked as their flocks migrate,
Off to better shores with their suited soul-mates
Surely they’d think to take you too,
But all your attempts were too little and too late.
You failed to navigate the flight of your fate.

Your borrow that was once perched at the top of the tree,
Has now been overgrown by the leaves of history.
Leaving you to roost and think about what’s right.
But the big question is;
When the stakes are high and it’s do or die,
Will you fight or will you fly?

It’s just a thought, tied in a knot,
About the changing of the winds,
And what it brings.
The new season comes and goes,
And I enter it via planes and trains to the place I call home.

It’s just an idea, put there on a plate,
And fed to whoever would like to translate it.
When my wings float over the smoke of the sky,
I think and I think but I can find no reason why I always come back to the place I call home.

It’s just a theory seen through wide eyes but not seen clearly.
When the train runs like a die and my thoughts fly like wild fire.
I still can’t find what it is that pulls it off track,
And takes me back to the place I call home.

It’s just a guess, it’s nothing more.
It’s just a dot on the other side of the shore.
Waving me in and guiding me over.
I look round and it hits me that I’ve just drifted and flown where those new winds have blown.
All along I should’ve known they’d take me back to the place that I call home.

One picture, that’s all I have.
Barely enough to identify her from Eve.
But I know from what I have seen,
That she is all I need.
Drawn out anxiously awaited replies,
Endless time spent picking my words,
Avoiding any slip that will cause her to log out and leave.
Black text on a white screen shouldn't mean this much to me.
But I analyse and re-analyse her words etched into the pages of internet history religiously.
Every sentence read in ‘she loves me, she loves me not’.
I do this utterly uncertain as to who she is.
Her mystique has possessed me.
For all I know she’s sat next to me.
But I do know we’re one in the same;
Two twenty-first century keyboard lovers.

I thought I seen his face today,
But it was gone to some place between time and space.
Into the vast infinite skyline where the upper echelons wine and dine.

His soft brown hair flopped here and there,
As he used to declare his love for the fresh British air.
His black European eyes would stare into the clouds telling me that one day he’d take me there.

Whatever was hidden underneath the façade, it was hidden well.
Between the confines of his mind,
That must have been hell.
His own personal prison cell.

The words he spoke bounce off the walls as they echo through my haunted halls.
I think I see his shadow yet, when I wake in the night, cold with sweat.
But when I turn on the light there's no silhouette.
He’s gone.
He’s out of sight.

When I think of what I could have said and what I could have done.
I realise I could have never understood where it all begun.
But when I think of what I could have said and what I could have done.
I realise I could have saved someone’s son.

Sometimes I think I know
Why the other people go
To the place where all this pain will mend.

Where melancholy does not linger
No blood upon their finger
To the place with eternal time to spend.

In a far distant land
They'll lay upon the sand
Under rays that cannot burn them
Below waves that cannot submerge them
To the place of beginning and of end.

From the Giant's foot-prints of the Causeway,
And to the way old Donegal Bay,
His home of County Down,
Where all's sound as a pound,
We'll all celebrate the Irish way.

The mouth of the sandbanks,
Ireland’s Linenopolis,
Where King Billy rode the walls
Of the loyalist Sandy Row.
Samson and Goliath crane over the skyline
At the dock of the brave Titanic
That, like everything built by Belfast,
It was built to fall.

Good Friday had ended the Trouble,
so we thought,
But when they took down the flag
it was all forgot.
We have never had peace;
But we had found some pride.
After thirty years the fires had ceased,
We’d finally taken that stride.
Working towards putting this country right.

Peaceful protests, that’s what they said
The people’s spirits now filled with dread,
Fearing the riots that loom ahead.
Our gums bleed as we eat the fables we’ve been fed.
Unity is a lie; unity is dead.