The floorboards have done their crying.
All the sticky flap-jack has been spent.
The sweetness, and energy of youth has run out
in the biscuit-tin we call our lives.

The times before this will always be missed.
But now is a time to freshen your face
with a cool, calm cloth.
Wipe off, those, your last of tears, and restock.

Now stand, the size of a cut on the tip of your finger,
in that vast empty tin.
Gaze up at the stars, and admire them
as they reflect around your box's silvery sides.

Or, at the witching hour, hear the flicker of a cigarette
burn in the silence of a leafy drive.
Keep that sound and let it echo, only for you,
in that spacious box.

And the next day, having worked hard,
You will look upon the world with another sense of beauty
- not just seeing the trees and fields in the afternoon sun.
That afternoon, your cup of coffee will taste the same as that very first time.
Its smell fused into your lungs, luring you to try.

Put that in your box too, and close the lid. Tight.

Sting you through the chest. Jar running thoughts.
Reach in like lightning, plunging a green hand
Into your heart, and squeezing tight -
Life-stopping, heart-wrenching,
Bulging between finger - a nightmare,
Stifling panic in a back room - in a black room.
Your mouth trapped behind an irrevocable, greasy paw.
Suffocating.

The paw grows nails, the nails gleam, lipstick red.
she moves across the room, you feel her presence. . .
She leaves, the darkness deepens.

Pulses race through tubes,
Out into the world in multi-colors.
Her green grip tightens around your soul -
Fireworks gouge your eyes from inside.
Ready to burst, helpless, breathless.

Familiar hands clutch a glowing breast.
You fall back to earth
back to where you were.
It all happens so fast.
In a flash, like lightning.

Light fades. The sunset;
From electric purple, to a thin fleeting slash
Of amber just above the tree line.
I hold my cigarette up to the horizon –
No difference

An umbrella-tree shields me from the drizzle.
I try to distinguish the rain on leaves
From the rustling branches of gushing trees.
I peer out from under leafy-dreadlocks,
Across an abandoned meadow; it is calm,
But the sound of water tapping foliage is restless –
Its sound calling back to the storms of life.

It was merely a pause.

I am dying
From within. I don’t wish to,
But I think of this skin
That holds me

Back and I feel ill. I stare,
Glazed over, at all the happiness I have tried to
Capture in moments of grace,
And self contentment.

But this does not do me justice.
This hand does not do me justice.
It all falls short of feeling.

Now I write blankly, efficiently, capturing
What I feel because it is easy.

Do I long for you, or do I wish happiness
Would knock me dead?
Knock me down,
The earth upon my head.

I wait, I long, silently.
Suffering all, wishing nothing.
Nothing will come of nothing.
Or shall I become a sod
So as not to feel and rot,
But just rot, unaware.

I am dying, like a flower,
Whose time is limited.
But unlike a flower,
I see what’s coming.
Unlike the single, once crisp tulip
That hangs aside from the others still-fresh,
Falling from the boring vase
I see my fall
And contemplate it often.
And read poetry which seems both
To help and to hinder.
Like you, an enigma.

The feeling seeps through my nib
Through my heart, through my ribs
Gushing out onto a page, limited,
Tired but taking shape.

Hope leaves me, to be implanted
In a line
A seed,
Sewn. Waiting, longing, wishing quietly
To grow.

But not knowing that its time is limited.