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Hot on the tail of that wily, elusive beast
named ‘inspiration’, I travelled north.

North, where colours mute
and transformative shadow
bends in darklight,
revealing the world as it really is,
as it once was.

Hundreds of years pass,
rolling back time, boiling clouds
rushing over peaks in reverse,
a tiny tornado ***** in on itself,
and hundreds become thousands.

Rain blackens the babies of volcanoes,
engorges forces with greater purpose
and cleanses every shred of vision
from my grasping, desperate mind.

Thousands become millions
And I am stripped of incentive to try.
There is no ruination, here.
No furious nor frantic need
to imagine past lives
in this manicured, managed place.

High-vis’d toilers scuttle on mountainsides
carefully placing and re-placing rocks,
funnelling feet and discovery
on a prescribed and sensible path.

Only the rain
wreathing a secretive misted ribbon,
creeping in glacial cut-throughs,
is possessed of fanciful virtue.

Nothing shatters but the slate
and the landscape does not turn inward
to eat itself
in gnawing, atavistic need.

It says more about me,
than it does of the Lake District
that I would wrench out and offer
my super-heated heart
to see the mountains fall.
I know the Lake District attracts millions of visitors every year who gasp of how beautiful it is, but beauty is subjective, after all, and I simply found it too clean and almost Disney-fied in its smug majesty.

I need desolation, an unsettling sense of melancholia, and to see the broken bones of a place, jutting sadly through the earth, before I proclaim it 'beautiful'.
Francie Lynch May 2014
Does she know the silver chain wrapping
Around her ankle is terminal and deep
As a trans-Atlantic cable connecting the island
And here.

That a single full-breasted pull
On a summer cigarette was
Life altering.
Her body was beach-burned, her hands
Sifted grains of sand
Funnelling beneath her thread-bare towel.

Our silver natal thread contracted
As the blue smoke rose,
Magnifying the August moon.
Three hundred moons have dimmed.

We walked in step from the Village
Through the park with the slack chain
Dragging, scraping on cement.
I have often polished that chain,
Used muriatic acid to untarnish.

We didn't know our brains would
Become onions behind our eyes;
We didn't know towels would become
Patchworks stitched over bones.
I didn't know a chain of being could snap.
In Irish mythology, two people are born with an invisible (obviously) silver chain tied round their ankles. As time elapses, links disappear until the two are brought together. Clang.
thehighermind Sep 2017
We came
We saw
We conquer
I left
They stayed
I suffered

Cleaning the inside,
Funnelling it outside
Nobody cared
Except those that stayed

Never bite the hand
That served you food

And now I'm grateful
For those that smiled
And gracefully told me
To stand up
James Preston May 2018
Matter disintegrates,
flying objects dissolve back into insect forms,
to try and fathom the ill will of wandering parasitical urchins,
bar brawlers,
an incomprehensible mould has latched on to the beards of the Sedentary,
Lieutenant horoscope and his band of merry men
have fourteen times predicted the tumultuous reckoning,
where the lizards roll back into the cracks and breed with the *** butts.

dancing to a birdsong the most irritating,
chirp and roll and sit under the black azure,
swimming into the cataracting waterfalls of black sludge
accompanied by the ale bellies of ancient degenerates,
and linger in the neon lit sarcophagus dreaming of finer things,
with optimistic party poppers at the ready.


I spoke to high priest of white linen table etiquette,
he offered me a drink of the green elixir,
the taste of rancid sherry,
and I spoke to god almighty,
he had a few problems,
‘Penny for your thoughts?’ he said to me, the transcendent agony aunt,
so I gave him my spare change on the matter,
but now I’am lost in the ominous eternal skies,
like a haggard bird who is unable to land,
debasing all the relics,
I flit through the dark clouds and nearly perish in the ice rains,
I have caught a chill,
but, nevertheless, I float on, consuming the velvet sunsets and chirping my songs over insignificant mole hills,
All the time battling what the hermit astrology told me was a zinc deficiency,
One day I hope to bathe in the tranquil silk waters,
with a cup of tea and a biscuit,
find salvation and give inconsistent childhood memories a cuddle,
but now is not the time for folly dreams,
I must continue into the delirious horizon,
and listen to the sounds of hidden amorphous beasts writhing in agony,
because I fear I have picked up the cosmic bar tab,
and played gin rummy with all of heavens problem children,
the splinters of the sour harvest caught between my teeth,
lost in the gloomy overhang of the sleepless willow,
trying to glue the atoms back together with my prit-stick.


In the cool, pearly nights, I dream of lands without contours or maps,
and I can make out, in the grumbling silhouette, what was once someone’s memory,
the flies are circling the diseased dog along the sun scorched path,
the stitches of his wounds tighten in the heat creating sores,
A white hot, stiff, agony,
the trees are out of breath,
the expanse of the moment, like an endless ocean evaporating, is too much to bear,
I melt into the cracks,
and the mountains and planets drip with me,
matter disintegrates as we surrender to the ferocious will of the ineffable gloop,
but then a painful shriek rings across the sky,
the sound of metallic pink,
A byzantine woman sits below a fruit tree complaining of belly gripe,
I find myself inexorably drawn over,
moving fluidly through epochs, across galaxies, funnelling myself through volcanic fissures,
permeating day dreams and two way mirrors,
riding in the bellies of celestial giants and on the backs of mythical locusts,
creating my own rivers and waving goodbye to the misanthropic tribesman,
When I find her - there is nowt but silence,
her presence reminiscent of a glass lake with blink-less eyes,
I delicately pluck an apple from the tree, the most exquisitely green one, and hand it to her,
‘Cheers mush’ she says, in an earthquake monotone,
and with a wry smile and a nod I head off on my way.
Ryan O'Leary Feb 2019
Light has not yet arrived,
comes same time as the
crows, while waiting, I'm
listening to the tidal winds
funnelling forlornly down
our redundant chimney.

Blocked gutters dropping
water making messages in
Morse on the letter box.

The window pane has a
missive in Braille from
spits of rain which have
yet to pair up before their
descending demise.

Three orange halogen street
lights form a perfect Isosceles
triangle, beacons beckoning,
miniature lighthouses, landing
pad locaters, for the sun

                \\|| / /

— The End —