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Nov 2014 · 1.8k
Mark my Words
Oli Mortham Nov 2014
More haunting
Than the marks
Left on a tortured body
Are the marks
A tortured body
Leaves itself
Nov 2014 · 816
The Fourth Wheel
Oli Mortham Nov 2014
You penned an unsealed note to yourself,
Its Writer, Verse and Address were as one -
A Wholly Poetic Trilogy.
You were brave:
Left your paper-lips wide open and
Let the letters leak;
Watched them run
Into the grooves of the creased spine
On the back of the pushed envelope you posted -
Wounded origami angel wings
Sprouting from the shoulders of your scripted self.
You feel you were delivered to your pretty little house face-down,
Desperate to fly but tied by glue to some side-table surface,
An ornamental cardboard carrier-cherub,
Smiling in the furnace,
But unable to breathe...
I read through the words you tattooed on to your feathers
Again and again,
From their bold beginnings
To their ruffled dead-ends...
...ends which say:
..."Stuck"...
Behind a parchment-brick wall...
That's why I've picked up my pen -
Cracked it open,
Moulded its cascading ink into a ladder,
So we can climb over
And look at what's on the other side
Of that stoney-faced page -
See, its edges came unstuck:
While you nested, and rested your eyes
Your vertebral quill was effortlessly flapping,
Whipping up a written wind with ease,
Like second nature,
A cathartic breeze
Mutating the rock you carved on
Back into a leaf once more,
And turning it over...
Letting it hover and settle anew.
Now it's a hive of technicolour graffiti,
Not a dead-end
But boundlessly alive -
It shines and thrives
With designs
Voluntarily plucked
From the lucky minds you've touched.
They bustle decoratively across its columns,
And among them is this reply:
You are now, always have been,
And always will be:
Not just the Writer, the Verse, and the Address...
...But all the happiness you inspire in others too...
Because of who you are in writing,
Because of who you are in life,
Because of you.
See, that Wholly Poetic Trilogy,
It needs its Fourth Wheel to become Holy,
To roll and rumble towards
And crash through
The gates of that pretty little cage.
So, mould your beautiful ink into a key -
It plays a minimalist melody,
A ringing note of ignition.
Push it,
Turn it...
And let's drive.
My girlfriend wrote a poem last night. It was wonderful, raw, evocative and inspirational. I promised I'd write her a reply in poem form. This is my attempt.
Oct 2014 · 1.9k
Luminous
Oli Mortham Oct 2014
The sky is ripe with stinking wet scorch marks,
And bleeds in petrified phosphorescent snapshots,
Trapped by droplets that
Pour from scratched gorges,
Clawed into the ether by electricity's unkempt fingernails:
An unholy flow, funneled to quench
A celestial ****** of tap-dancing crows;
Their flickering ***** miming pastiche skeleton shapes,
Beckoning black hole embers
Through trap-doors to some ghastly Cathedral of Mirrors:
A padlocked whinstone veil of white lightning,
Encasing maze reflected upon monolithic maze -
Paths billowing torrents of burning shadow -
Thrusting day, night and apocalypse between
Those rusting bars of strobe.
There's an electrical storm outside my house.
Sep 2014 · 1.0k
The Tenderfoot Tryst
Oli Mortham Sep 2014
Terry the Troubadour,
Tip-toeing tenderly towards terrible tension,
Touches Theresa the Trobairitz's threateningly terrific thighs:
Their two timid tongues -
Those terse types that tend to tie -
Twist together traumatically,
The tricky tips tamely threading through
To tickle their tiny tangential teeth:
"Tap. Tap."
Twice...
"Tap. Tap. Tap."
Three times...
The tender-tongued timpani teases them,
Taunting their tenderfooted tryst,
Timed tantalisingly to teenage tunes too terrible to tango to.
I wanted to have some fun with alliteration. I enjoy how certain consonant repetition can have a tongue-twisting effect and make something difficult to read, so thought I'd utilise that to convey the awkwardness of a first kiss.
Sep 2014 · 1.1k
Truly
Oli Mortham Sep 2014
How can I search for Truth in a world that's built on lies?
A lid resting heavily over a once glistening eye:
Shielding, masking, concealing
What last droplets of wonderment are trickling and asking to pierce the concrete ceiling...
...Instead I cynically note its off and aging colour...
"Yellow: Choice Number 4!"
Relays my proud voice, with a more
Assertive tone; I, the host...
Discussing aesthetics to collectively pathetically awe-struck guests, over specially served toast...
"Yes, I'm an impulse shopper, so it seems"...
...(Well, according to the ******...something article I read in my monthly subscribed to magazine)...
Happily consumed by consumerism...
But still unable to consummate
Anything really, Truly sacred...
...Unless I'm exactly half naked...
(That includes wearing Calvin Klein SoCKs)
And crucially still sporting my brand-named top,
Designed for tight fit to cull any ounce of shoddiness,
Whilst giving the impression of an existing healthy body, no less,
And then, due to superficial attraction,
An end will occur, hopefully, of distraction,
From the absence of my once healthy mind...
...but that never happens...
So then, how can I search for Truth when the bricks of my own guise
Only resonate deceit, sealed to create a facade of falseness?
Sure, I can articulate,
Wielding words like swords,
Pure, planned alliteration...
Baffling the bemused by barraging both beautiful and brutally belligerent brilliance...
But...
Showmanship is the tool of the restlessly minded,
Those who search the hardest for the key to authenticity but yet cannot find it,
And then paint their walls with vibrancy set out
By observing the mass hysteria of the layman,
Because nobody wants, Truly, to be classed as grey...
Do they?
Or it may
Be that that is exactly what we're all tactfully missing:
The fact that appearance, in some sense,
Is reliant on one sense,
And thus, in defiance of what we're meant
To wholeheartedly believe,
It is, in its very nature, subjective.
We were not designed
With a panel of judges judgmentally judging what pair of shoes should be selected,
Our mind's
Blueprint was principally a highly charged and thirstily receptive
Open book, with no printed prose,
No preordained guide to "Truth",
Merely a transient vessel:
A glowing red beacon of vulnerability in glorious, continuous distress,
Uncompromisingly afraid of its own ignorance, which, through an act of defense,
Strives to follow other's paths,
In arbitrary hopefulness that someone knows the meaning of it,
The answer to it,
The code that locks it,
The spark that drives it,
So in our fearful and ever conscious lives it,
Makes us want to hide behind this
Fantasy of an apex being,
Where our car seats vibrate and our carpet is soothing,
So that we seem to have a clue of what we're doing,
And instead of resting our ego-bulging heads and choosing to accept,
That we're just not quite, you know, as adept
As we might have thought, we choose to reject and neglect
Our opportunities
In communicative
And interactive discoveries of the beauty
That goes beyond and lies behind that neatly fashioned fringe,
Within.
Love is humble as we are stupid:
We'll see that one wise man has cottoned on, and knows
That even though
He hates that smell that his wife
Adores, he incessantly sprays it lovingly from a canister for the rest of his life.
But he'll never say a word,
Because, from what he's heard,
Truth no longer exists:
In fact, as soon as the larynx allowed the habit of opinions to persist,
It became a frozen entity,
A vague depiction of pure, untampered quality...
A poem I wrote 7 years ago on the back of an envelope in terrible handwriting when I was struggling to sleep.
Sep 2014 · 1.6k
The Anhedonic Animation
Oli Mortham Sep 2014
We're all boxed into this room of tricks -
Held up and down by cyber bricks -
Where the walls are decorated with moving posters:
Each of them more animated than
you and me...
Sep 2014 · 1.1k
In the Hiddenness - part 1
Oli Mortham Sep 2014
For the first time,
Stricken by thirst
…And blind…
A young girl emerged from a dark captivity
And stumbled headlong into the jaws of a rich and rapturous city
CONSUMED by light.
A light as opulent as the gold which it acted to illuminate:
A policy of the “Great” warden, Ciro...
Whose callous mandate stated that no trees should be allowed to grow
Within the walls of the region.
With all the forests torn, it freed him
To covet his plundered wealth without stealth's covering eyelid,
So that every jewel and sculpted idol
Glittered with the unrelenting reflected fire of the Sun,
Like ornamental flames bedizening some roofless civic solarium.
Blades of heat rumbled in the sand,
And invaded the young girl's consciousness with suffocating hands...
...And, as she slowly ebbed into a syncope,
A faded groan edged in single beats about her:
It was the laboured breath
Of a lonely spinster,
Aged, yet walking wearily
Towards the waterside
To drink, and rinse her clothes -
Her only cooling comforts
In these days which closed
Her journey between life and death.
…A moment passed in a silent rest,
Until…
Familiar darkness wound around the young girl's waking eyes,
But what she felt was different:
In brief abatement, the heat lay held aside,
And, in its place, an umbra coolly shrouded her predicament.
Its caster, standing arms akimbo, was a curious young boy,
And to him no greater joy came than from the task of answers sought;
‘Always asking,’ once taught his father
‘Is both the fuel and mastery of thought.’
So, with this in mind, he asked her:
‘Why are you lying furled and frightened across the ground?’
On hearing this sound,
She lightly unclasped
The fabric of her uncertain whisper:
‘I’m afraid I may have lost my way…’
And, through the blackness of her personal void, it fell…
To twist,
And whirl,
And fade…
‘Well…look around.’
The boy insisted,
Catching that ambivalent cascade in motion;
The opposing palm of his reply
Held outstretched and shimmering against the shadow-flow.
  He calmly posed the notion
That, so her way could again be found,
She should picture a searching arm
Linking the wayward loop of her location
To those famous, sparkling landmarks
That mapped each inch inside those gates
With which that desert metropolis was bound.
The girl reached out, with spoken fingers…
The worded tips cracked and broken by doubt…
And twelve years of dreaded bleakness
Spent chained down under the clenched fists
Which were bolted on
To stand gravely upon
The wrists of her lingering incarcerators:
‘Thank you,
For being kind…
And for the guide with which you try to help me…
But…I fear…I cannot use it…
For…in truth…
I cannot see.’
Part 1 of 3
Aug 2014 · 1.3k
Horror Story
Oli Mortham Aug 2014
Walked down to the river at midnight -
Used to be terrified sneaking through that
Lampless village in the dark,
Could hear villains from a horror story calling,
Over the precipice of each passing garden wall.

But now I'm impervious,
Desensitised by hourly hauntings,
Which whisper that my adult brain itself
Is the spectre and the jangly skeleton,
That once lurked round those corners
And chilled my childish bones.

— The End —