I’m holding in a scream that no one hears,

Heavy with echoes from my younger years,

A childhood stolen, not misplaced,
I hung my head, took up no space.


Hands that should have held with care,

Taught me to vanish, not to dare.
As a mother, I had a purpose too,
But it’s to help them not need you.
What once defined me fades to grey.

My purpose shifts, then slips away.

At work, I shaped a thriving team,
Built up others self-esteem.

But now they soar, and I recede,

A rootless tree, without a need.

The pride is real, the pain is too,

Who am I, if not what I do?

The friends who once might understand,

Now drift like waves away from sand.
‘Come celebrate another year?’
There’s no response,
Like I’m not here.

I’m hoping somewhere in this ache,

A kinder self might start to wake.

Not mother, worker, friend, wife, child,

But something deeper, fierce and wild.

A soul not shaped by others' view,

But rising, honest, raw and true.

I walk through Hell in borrowed skin,

Each step a scream I keep within,

The past a shadow sharp and wide,

A ghost that never steps aside.

I claw for peace in books and breath,

But healing’s not the same as death,

To **** the pain is not the cure,

When wounds, though closed, still feel unsure.


They say ‘accept’, as if it’s small,

Like getting back up when you fall,

But trauma’s more like breathing air,

It happens, and it’s always there.

It haunts my dreams, over again,
A raging fire in silent shame,

It whispers when the room is still,
‘You’re here, but not - you never will.’


I tried to suppress, outrun the truth,
Rebuild a life worth living too,

But memory has teeth and claws,

It drags you back, highlights the flaws.

To ‘radically accept’ the fire,

Not to forgive, not to admire,

But to say: yes, this was done,

And not deny what I’ve become.


Yet every time I plant a stake,

The ground beneath me starts to quake.

I get up again and try stand tall,

My past still waits to watch me fall.


The path from Hell is not escape,

It’s standing still and facing shape.

It’s feeling grief without defence,

It’s mourning what did not make sense.

Acceptance isn’t love or peace,

It’s choosing presence piece by piece.

It’s letting sorrow have its day,

And living in spite, anyway.


So when the past claws at my door,

I need to breathe, feel to the core.

It’s not to fight, and not flee,

It’s just part of what makes me, me

At what stage does a poem become a short story? How many words can I squander or squash to fit a category?  
I think I know how to tell the difference between prose and doggerel but the rhythms change as pictures in my mind morph into another kind and thumb their nose at boundaries and realign themselves to squeeze just one more nuance in the dream - a poet's heavenly hell.

The trouble with poetry is the temptation to capture everything, every little scene, crashing through emotions to pursue the fleeting dream of telling the story before the memory of it disappears in the next cresting wave of words. It takes so much concentration to harness galloping imagination and keep to the point  - keep to the  rhyme when a longer more beautiful set of words just can't do the time.

Type, read, delete. Retype, reread, think, delete. Retype, replace a word, delete.   A new random phrase threatens to erase the former picture and create another as memories jostle for space under cover of making it rhyme better.

theres hoedown going on in the hills tonight
beneath the stars above the moon so bright
folks they gather round to dance the away
till the early morning light at the break of day

linking arm in arm and  turn around
clapping and a slapping to the hillbilly sound
do a hoedown throwdown a little clogging to
dance all night long till the early morning dew

dancing to the fiddles   banjo and guitars  
dancing altogther underneath the stars
little bit of moonshine put dancing in your feet
dance the whole night through to the hillbilly beat beat

the guttural sound of grief cleared its throat
all forgotten will be recovered
in sentiment
sentient emotion
evocative cries
the river dies at the ocean and reincarnates
so it is with words and poetry
a recycling to circle back
a replenishing to continue filling
prose be the restitution of cosmic karma
dust reclaiming its birthright

                               everything
                                                                                everything
            everything

I've heard verses set against verses
for the sake of thrones
dust says
                 verses are the natural material of power
decanted led
                         purified gold
a heavy mineral
the foundation of understanding

art cut its ear
and the heart still bled
red   -   blue   -   violet
a primary mixing you can feel
without senses
     listen with bone and marrow
     see what shakes the sinew
     taste the transience of life       in living color
      orange and yellow and green
     smell the salt, it lives in you
     evaporates through goosebumps to be felt by others

you can write yourself to nirvana
if you go through the stages
  if you shed enough stanzas
   if you surrender       and accept

What’s the worst that could be?
We could get naked together
And I have a stinky *****
You could make me laugh so hard that I
Actually ***
I could be in your presence
And **** silently
And it smells like the stinkiest cheese
And there’s no other person who it could possibly be
Because there is just you and me
We could shower together
And you jump out quickly
Because you have to ***
And I say, “sir, this situation calls for you to *** on me,”
And you say, “you’re gross, I disagree”
We could go to the beach
And you wear a thong bikini brief
I could find out the hard way you kick in your sleep
There’s lots of worsts that could be
I guess we’ll never see