The sun was always brighter,
The sky, an endless tapestry,
The world’s hidden beauties,
Amplified in her dreams.

The crunch of fall under her feet,
As she jumped into a pile of leaves.
In a moment, the world was covered in snow, and she,
Smiled blissfully.
Springtime flowers bloomed,
The world covered in hues,
She saw good ol’ Mother Goose,
From the nursery rhymes she recalled when she was two.
She felt free,
In her dreams.

Adventure called from all around,
Knight’s boots clanking on the ground,
An ever-changing battleground,
Filled with overwhelming sounds.
Sometimes, the duels were in space,
Others, it was just a simple race.
Occasionally, she’d lose just for fun.
What does it hurt to mix it up?
After all, she was the god of her own world,
In her dreams.

The worlds she created,
Almost seemed real.
But dreams, consistently,
Have the same fictitious security,
That can distinguish whether it's fake.
She remembered when she was younger,
And she longed for endless dreams.
She wanted them to cross over,
An ambitious endeavor,
Now she longed to see the real sun.

In her dreams,
She’d wake up.
No more sleeping blissfully,
She needed to see the world again.
Look her mom in the eye,
And apologize for the accident.
If she were still alive,
She’d pray she hadn’t perished yet.

Her mother dreamed,
That her daughter awoke.
So, she drove to the hospital,
And watched as her heart broke.
She remained,
Comatose,
Her brain unstable,
And her heart rate growing low.
All because of teenage love,
Kissing blissfully and driving drunk,
Leading, inevitably to pain and suffering,
To all parties.
The man she was with,
Was already dead,
She’d be lucky,
If she lived.
She feared,
About all she’d miss.

How she found herself longing for the mundane,
If it meant she would receive one more day.
She’d never touch a bottle again,
And she’d leave her toxic friends.
How she wanted to brush her teeth,
The simple notion inviting reprieve.
Her mother’s pancakes were divine,
She wanted to devour them one last time.
She couldn’t believe she’d been so foolish,
To throw it all away.
She’d make sure to be more careful,
Till her final days.

Life seemed to be a blissful reality,
One that she’d trade anything to see,
All of its intricacies,
She wished she could take back everything,
In her dreams.

{ FREEDOM  “We may want to linger, to stay, to arrest the flow and talk about it, photograph it, lyricize it. Yet this beauty is mercurial and we must let it go, for it is already slipping away to be replaced by the new.” -Stuart Sovatsky }


YELLOW FIELD OF WHEAT


Angel of Death skims blacker than tar
a skeletal knock overturning bowl of oats
smelling of frankincense and ashes
to carry you to a yellow field of wheat
where you will dance radiant waltzes
haloed free

your laughter pranced across blue walls with
Michael Jackson, Spider-Man and cheeky elves
relishing Kentucky Fried Chicken as you
played scrabble with forlorn neighbour
your bony body birthing revolutions of
roulette with green life and grey death

how you endured those precision needles
wanting to instead drum tapered fingers on
waiting desk overflowing with car sketches
your thirteen year old bald head smiling
veins on an enchanting spring moon as our
hidden tears crystallised hospital sheets

we tried to keep up with you scoffing
encyclopaedias, Dickens and muffins alike
cancer like a chess game mastered chemo
doctors and nurses becoming kings or pawns
time in the now or endless pathos stalking
Laurel and Hardy keeping our hearts unlocked

on Merlin’s star-patterned couch you will
jokingly converse with Pele and his team
soccer ball silent under quiescent table
my ink cannot pen sad lines as I feel your
lips still ******* for warm dripping milk
your freedom moonwalks on a yellow field of wheat


©GhairoDanielsPoetry2012

my mother in law
lies on a gurney in a corridor
waiting for a bed
a limbo
between treatment and death
either way
the corridor clears
for the next contestant

My mind dances and swirls the jive and the jitterbug skirting around a myriad of colourful thoughts and shapes and places that may or may not exist.
It lurches as if somewhere my rebel self has pulled the emergency break and comes to a screeching halt leaving me vacant and vague beyond the reach of this world.

My mind has within it realms filled with volcanoes, raging waters and cliff edges lined with gorse bushes and burns me, scalds me, swallows me up periodically or else some dark shadow of who I am pushes me over the edge and I fall into a kind of abyss.

My mind is alive and buzzing and builds ladders from words once spoken by kind mouths. My mind can call my name and ****** me back to life and whisper hope into my heart as it builds a ladder from nothingness and leads me from death.

My mind is beyond comprehension and yet simultaneously can be almost transparent and articulates itself to me with passion and such clarity.

My mind is more magical than Houdini, darker than living inside a top hat, more robust than the largest of diamonds, weaker than egg shell, contains more colours than a rainbow, its intricate, it has the ability to distort like fun house mirrors, it devours knowledge like chocolate cake, it can be sloth-like or ant-like in its focus and diligence in extremes, it’s Narnia and Wonderland and fallen fairy tales blended, poisoned and polished.

As a baby, my mind – sponge, soaked everything up and yet refused to be wrung out.
As a five-year-old my mind put Picasso and Carroll and Barrie to shame and built up worlds in which I could live, created threads and wove them into reality and forced prisms into my eyes so when the sun shone I saw everything in magnificent vibrant glorious spectrums of colour.

As a ten-year-old my mind built a court house - old style - judge, jury and executioner. It planted olive groves and slipped olive branches out through my mouth - they tasted like Brussel-sprouts - they made me gag but had to be endured as I passed them and myself between those around me, grasping my ideals that the world could be changed, hanging on for grim death.

As a teenager my mind opened wide, it came to life like a popup book, scenes remembered unfolding as if a gust of wind blew ferociously through it and yet my mind also closed the book, closed itself, locked the doors, bolted the windows and drew black velvet curtains until there was nothing but numb blankness. It made me grow wings, colourful and exotic and taught me to fly and I did fly higher and higher until the air grow too thin and my wings would wilt, feathers shedding as I would plummet, colours fading to greys and blacks and I would be scorched by red hot lava, fight for my life in violent seas and be thrown into the gorse bushes staring over the cliff edge into the abyss. Sometimes my mind pushed me over the edge, other times I balanced like a circus freak and other times I dared myself to fall and did. And then my mind would haunt me, punish me, berate me before gentle breathing into me - bringing me back to life.

And now, at twenty-five I find myself not wanting to run from my mind, not wanting to close it down or sedate it with medication. Instead, I watch it fascinated, horrified, feeling somewhat the ****** with the same morbid urges that makes one slow down and look at a car crash by the road. I am exhausted by it. I am frightened by it. I am intrigued by it. For the first time in my life I am letting my mind play out despite not knowing steps to that waltz I am trying to dance.

You need to let go, they said. Letting go will set you free;
you need to forgive.
I have forgiven: it just wont let go of me.

Precisely what makes you think I'm worth this anyway?
this time? these resources? this care?

Do you not smell the putrid rot, see the maggots of my madness?
The glass is half empty of milk -
curdling and spoiling on the mantle.
I have scrubbed well over a decade: it wont wash away.

Each night is a relentless gruelling warped dance of the damaged,
the steps are foreign and ****** the ever encroaching darkness,
I am not mine-

What can I bring you to impart clarity?
I have laid myself bare under both kind and cruel eyes;
let you um and hmmm at my broken heart, my tainted body -
and take a microscrope to the intricate spoils of my mind.
I have endured the indignity of supervised showers,
the callousness of those who have known nothing but love
submitted to regimes of drugs lined up like soldiers on the front line
and down one by one they went

And now beyond broken, I crumble to dust lost in the wreckage of myself
This tsunami of darkness mounts an assault so violent -
its merciless, it violates, I am imprisoned: silent scream.
The growing insanity reclaims me for its own: it gives me over to him.

Instinctively I recoil, squirm, curl up tight - futile foolishness.
It isn’t supposed to really be real. But perhaps I really do belong there.
I let her go. I am ready to let me go
Drained and pained, exhausted and alone.
How my mind betrays me; how my body fails me;
I berate myself for not being better, stronger, more acceptable.
I am a slave to the black dog.
He bites and ravages - savage being
feeding off the fear and hurt of the girl who was impossible to love.

The painful depths are beyond the grasp of language now
and every nerve is burning;
invisible fingers tighten around my throat and I choke on silence.
Hope’s whispers are lost in the roaring barrage of abuse.
I fear I am irretrievable; the ferocious love loaned out
never was returned leaving chunks gouged out of my heart.
I have fought for my life and drenched myself in knowledge.
But the war is savage and my ammo spent.

What is this demented tumultuous madness?
It burns, scorches, consumes with forced acid kisses.
I retreat into myself but find myself locked in a cage -
one to which I no longer have the key.
I fear I will never have my death of this, of him -
I’ve had my fill of being ill - of being owned by a man who came to ****.

I am dressed in a gown
A blue paper gown
With the ribbons tied at the front

A crepe paper gown
Open at the front
The kind you scrunch and fist into gift bags
Crepe paper, but thicker, like asking the deli man for a bigger slice

But the white deli paper is folded over my lap
A big paper towel, a napkin

I fell like silence breaking,
a scream that never made it out,
the wind folding around me
like arms that never did.

Now, I wake in a room
stitched with wires and cold light,
where the air tastes of bleach
and every surface hums with life
that isn’t mine.

The machine speak in beeps
soft, exact, unfeeling.
Beep.
I’m still here.
Beep.
I failed.
Beep.
I failed.

They say the sound is good.
They say the beeping means I’m stable.
But it only reminds me
that death didn’t want me.
That earth opened its arms
and still let me go.

The noise wraps around my head
like a shroud of neon thread.
It winds through the hollow
in my chest,
settling where the fall had emptied me.

I hate its voice,
its small, insistent hope.
It has no right to be so calm
when everything inside me
is still falling.

I close my eyes,
but there’s no peace.
Just the beep,
beep,
beep,
dragging me back
from the edge I chose.

And I want to ask the silence
why it let me go.
Why it handed me back
to this world of white and wires,
to these strangers with clipped voices
and pity in their eyes.

But silence won’t speak here.
Only the machines do.

Beep.
I’m still alive.
Beep.
I’m still alive.
Beep.
God, why?