a solider and a sailor
sing a lonesome song just for your entertainment
but in it you are betrayed by visions of heaven
shine with the late night ribald drinkers
after all after a few bottles even mortality seems lively
disjointedly you pick your way
through all these salvation's
never quite believing that you could exceed
your worth and standing
after all you can buy a new life for dirt cheap
long as your willing to give up your lifestyle
long as your willing to be disarmed
of all those quick witted answers you think fit so well
and give up all her peek-a-boo paradise's
the solider and sailor buy a round
and toasting the queen they bury the hatchet
no expectations can lead you on to the
brink of such strange bedfellows but you'll try
you can only hope not to be a victim of such defeatism
when all the ribald drinkers have left the saloon
walking in the thin light of dawn
you will remember all these beautiful things
and dream better dreams
build better sunrises from the gloom of days ending

red fragments of plastic litter the
sandy soil at my feet
i gather them with one at a time
while my soul searches for a song to impart
my pen grows strange in my hand
its words have a feel to them
foreign deranged

the phrases float disjointedly
they refuse to knit into a poem
while my mind is troubled by a scattering
of autumn winds
the red fragments arranged randomly
on the small backyard table
sunshine illuminates each with precise clarity
the fragments are my poem
and i shuffle the pieces back and forth
trying with a maddened mind
to knit them into a beautiful bird
but they only keep forming the ugly face distorted
they keep moving of their own accord
to form a jagged edge
i breath and **** at my coffee mug

the red fragments thorny in my head
they have sand clinging to them
and bits of the brackish water that
the nights rain had left for me
these words are incomplete visions
mere phrases like incongruous men walking
random paths in a field
when two meet they shout their ideas
at eachother and part company full of
suspicious glares
a draft of this randomly worded madness
flows from my unwilling pen
the red fragmentation
of the incomplete poem

.
The goods trains roll on by,
passing my window at night
and I wonder, wonder,
where are you going to?
May I come?
May I lay back slowly
and let you take me somewhere?
Anywhere.
Anywhere but now.
For here I lay
counting the rhythmic pulses
of iron wheels on iron rails.
As goods trains roll on by.

I need to feel in my bones
these rhythmic pulses
like temperate rain on tin roofs
soothing the beat of a heart.
I want to go and to expand,
to flow through the world
at an even metronomic pace,
to find a place of balance.

And my inner eye like a clipper
sails into the void of dreams,
yet, somehow, more real to me
as I watch myself explore.
Teasing out the dark corners,
bringing light to their inherent terrors
and exposing myself to fears.
But who's fears?

Individual pieces or the whole puzzle?
Pieces missing, the puzzle incomplete.
Its hidden away in my mind
disjointedly interlocking around holes.

I wrote about my sanctuary.
A special garden in a special forest,
providing me with safety
for when the holes become to large.
To this retreat I speed
when the sensory input overloads,
blows a fuse or severs a link
to the circuit of attachment
and fractures the edges of the puzzle,
scattering the composite pieces.
The further dislocation of logic
as I sit in my sanctuary and weep.

And through tears I can see
light flooding in to me,
the blush of morning sky
as goods trains roll on by.


© Pagan Paul (30/01/20)