I am madness,
and sunshine while it rains
but I am no rainbow
there's no light at the end of this tunnel
only darkness
lit by florescent counterfeits.
I am a wind storm
messy, never dangerous
but always unpredictable.
I have spent my days
worried with things I cannot control
and I so badly want
something I can hold close to.
But I am solid as a rock
and when I approach you
it will cause some damage.
I have known for a long time
that loving me is hard
because I've tried
and even I get tired.
I am clay,
easily molded
but when left dry and untouched
I turn to stone.
It may take some time,
but even a diamond
needs pressure
to be beautiful.

Can you count the number of drops
that you see
falling down from the sky to the ground
hundred feet down?
That's too much?

Can you count the number of drops
that you see
caressing the window
right now?
That's too much?

Stretch your palm out
of the window
And catch as many pearls as you can
And tell me now

Can you count the number of drops
that are falling off
your hand
That's too much?

Can you count the number of drops
that your hand
can pour down on mine
That's too much?

That's love!

A love where you’re

Ignored,

Unseen,

Forgotten,

Competing,

Overlooked,

H­oping,

Wishing,

Praying,

Is nothing.

The worst kind of love is where

You’re waiting…

For that one message

For all these not to happen

All over again.

1) For every great skyscraper, there are petty fingers that built them.
I wonder if we were made the same way.
They were strong enough to raise a hammer, but not enough to raise a family.
I wonder if we were made the same way.
She is cold, and he is drinking, and this is our backbone.
She is alone and he is driving home too fast because sometimes you don't have to be in the wrong place to be looking for the wrong thing.
She is afraid and he is warm, this is the beginning spark of a forrest fire filled with broken glass shattering in broken homes with broken people inside on a broken piece of land in a city that has too much rain for someone to build an emergency room in. Everyone with a burden holds their confessions in their left palm and their beggings in their right and no one ends up having enough arms to hold each other.
2) One day the whole world will be in your hands too, and you'll see that sometimes darkness can blind you worse than the red glare the sun paints your vision when you stare at it with your eyes closed.
You will be brave, you will stand up straight, you will stop being royal when people stop painting Jesus with a purple robe.
Even the concrete asks the sun to make it a garden so try cracking your knuckles a little louder and maybe you will wake up as a mountain.
3) Autumn. When you wrote secrets on notebook paper and taped them underneath benches in the city park, you gave too many pieces of yourself to things that weren't made for holding that much weight.
But you said it kept you honest and there were never any reasons for me to ask you to stop giving away the parts of you I wanted to myself. It kept me humble.
4) I am alone
5) You are October in a green dress with a black mask around your eyes and you have stolen the breathe of that day. And I hope when you are 80 years old you feel a breeze sliding on the back of your neck reminding yourself of all the times it should have snapped in half during the moments of what should have been your hanging, how it takes you back to living life like you're always in the desert and stealing innocent people's money and smoking cigarettes beside rattlesnakes.
I hope you find a beach in the Caribbean that asks to be died on, I hope you learn to forgive people harder than you can cry on their shoulder. I hope you watch a sunrise that you spend the rest of your life thinking about. I feel like for that to happen you need your feet in the ocean or underneath a rocking chair, but I would settle for your bedroom.
6) But with you it was never settling.

It looked all right through the windows of
Our cosy sitting room,
The day was light and the sun was bright
But the house was like a tomb,
The other rooms were as cold as hell
With their stalactites of ice,
That dripped from the bedroom ceiling down
To meet the stalagmites.

I’d settled Eve on the couch and spread
A blanket round her arms,
I didn’t think I should tell her, just
In case she became alarmed,
She’d spent a week in the sitting room
For she wasn’t feeling well,
How do you say, ‘We’ve fallen into
The Seventh Circle of Hell!’

They taught us the laws of physics were
Impossible to change,
Gravity, mass, and basic math
Had a certain, definite range,
But men of science had interfered
With the particle known as ‘God’,
They’d built the Hadron Collider and
The results, they said, were odd.

I could have told them how odd they were
When I went outside to see,
My car was covered in mushrooms
And a train sat up in the tree.
A whale was floating beneath the Moon
And a porpoise lay in the park,
The light was bright in the sitting room
But outside, it was dark.

Nothing remained the way it was
For all the colours had changed,
The lawn, the colour of strawberry jam
And the sky was rearranged,
The stars were falling like sequins in
A cluster of drops like rain,
And ice was forming up on the eaves
That tasted like champagne.

I went inside and I slammed the door,
I turned on the News at 6,
They said there’d been an apology
But it wouldn’t be hard to fix,
They’d run the Collider backwards to
The way that they’d done before,
And hopefully, the ‘particle God’
Would be as he’d been once more.

I sat with Eve as the sun went down
And I tried to keep her still,
Away from the hallway mirror so
She wouldn’t scream or squeal,
The lines were deepening on her face
As our lease on life had lapsed,
I hoped she wouldn’t go out today
With the world outside, collapsed.

The sun rose up in the morning as
It had for a million years,
And everything was familiar,
They’d run the thing in reverse.
The News went back to the good old things
We were used to, from before,
Stabbings, murders, infanticide
And that good old standby, war!

David Lewis Paget