When you change the colour of the view,
The world takes on a different hue.
Writing's both a window and a mirror,
You can see life and yourself clearer.
This stained glass window labelled a poem,
Different phrases, different colours, different gems.
The scales of glass in an iron frame,
My words must fit the form.
Each word a different shard on the palette,
A poetic mosaic, not quite transparent.

A translucent lens.

I will you see creation through it
Extenuating before you in a piquant pigment.
In a tint I can show you joy,
In a separate, pane. Tainted.
Yellow, blue, red and green,
And a thousand nuances yet unseen.
You can't read all of it, nor look through every colour,
But perhaps the icon on the window can be discerned
When they tessellate together, the person I am trying to show, the bigger picture, the grand design.

Weeping tears I haven't earned,
Saying prayers I don't deserve,
Breathing music I must preserve
On pages of poems I haven't burned.

Sleeping away these transient treasures,
This well of ink which is my heart.
Using the dregs of my soul to start
Composing symphonies to passing pleasures.

Every uttered thought is a secret shared,
Emotion sustains each syllable said,
Shared on paper so they can be read,
These words in which my soul is bared.

Live through the poetry and the prose,
Don't look back onto the sorrow,
Endure, survive, outlast tomorrow.
Curb this music before it flows

Over the line and out of control.
Once you read, it's yours to own;
You're in charge of what you're shown.
The poet himself cannot read them all.

These songs will blackmail me, in time.
Something tender to remember the pain,
I can't regret what I forget remains;
Where do dreamers go to die?

How is it
That every perfect word has already been spoken,
Have all dropped off another person's tongue?
I feel I cannot pen originality, but chosen
Poetic words and poetic lyrics from poetic songs.
If a fledgling writer dips his quill in another's inkwell,
It's stealing and lack of imagination.
But in other's rhymes, lifting becomes an art
That leads to success, a homage rebranding genius.

You can’t bury stars underground,
Or preserve this sight in sound;
Of Dawn blushing our quilted sky,
Lacing it with divine alchemy.

Eos blushes as she caresses
Earth with the hem of her dresses.
We trace the tangible crease of sunrise,
As the night peels away before our eyes.

She fashions a shroud of technicolour,
As the night dies a beautiful crescendo death.
And we lay mourning the night, another,
Waking up from stargazing on the heath.

We could have watched in awe for hours,
Counting the stars; Heaven’s and ours,
There was enough wonder in our eyes,
Enough fuel to write an ocean of lines.

God’s fingerprints for us all to see,
As he rolls up again his tapestry:
He repaints his canvas from black to blue,
The balm of light once more renewed.

We watched what can’t ever be said,
Only immortalised in my head
Like a stained glass window to the soul,
Heaven’s curtain descends before us all.

I’m trying to say how I cannot write
The size and breadth and depth that night;
My wonder suffocates my ink,
These words are not the words I think.

Decanting light into the darkness,
The birdsong chorus provides the anthem
To herald in our breathless thoughts:
What is man that you are mindful of him,
Mankind that you care for them?

I only told you I loved you in my poetry,
But never in person.
I never loved you out loud,
Only ever in my song.

I didn't show you what I'd written,
I loved you in what my poems say.
It's too late now for you to read them;
Now this verse too shall see decay.

The ghost of you in what I write,
A beauty of words that comes from you.
I feel a sting in what I sing,
I write to a person I'll never read to.

My words never reached you,
And perhaps they never will,
But my poetry is my heartbeat
Which beats forever still.