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Twenty years apart (dedicated to J.B.)

Here I am running again,

crushing the morning with a bleep 

on your dark wooden flooring where you fell asleep

My thoughts are sliding down the everyday hill

To catch a train wrapped up in the Monday morning still

 

Your words are melting all that frozen fear

While warm notes of ‘that was so real’ are resting on my ear

I’d like to let your whisper sit there for a little longer 

Until I feel a little bit older, or perhaps 

a little bit stronger.

 

We arrived here twenty years apart but I’ve been fast at catching up my part 

 

Am I just spinning in mid-air dragged by the earth around the sun

Are you forever flowing with the sun, drifting away on that river of dun?

 

Sometimes I dream I could’ve saved you

It must be that old thing of mine

that saving someone would make all of this fine 

And oh, I wish that someone was you 

 

You always turn your head and smile 

My hand is reaching out, my breath is sinking in

The water is cold, and your wait is now on hold

 

I guess it’s you that saved me after all. 

The failure's hiss

Perhaps

there in the corner

Your eyelids closed on our future love’s mourner

 

Alone on that platform, 

You walked with the rain into a mundane art form

 

Hands trembling, lips forgotten within that  unfinished kiss

I can already hear the failure’s hiss

 

My fingers are tap dancing on your hip

Sit down and take another sip

I’d like to hear you sing again

I’d like to be your friend. I do not want to be your friend

 

The void of you is all that I know how to listen to

I’m looking at those blank notes that wrap me up in a sighing silence 

It’s like I hardly know how to write down my own name in defiance

Your eyes. My words.

I scrubbed their meaning off, I let myself begin again

Fears are rushing underwater away from my clumsy pen

Drifting along with that look on your face

looking at my face.

I freeze. 

 

I’d like to be your friend. I do not want to be your friend. 

I might just sit there quietly 

And let myself be. 

Black words

Black words dissolved in cups of tea

Just when the milk escapes its agony,

Your lips are folding under a taste of cold

Emotions bite the innocence of the bold

 

And I keep running round and round

Chasing the ribbon of a cloud.

Black words. They turn into black dots,

I wish they were some beauty spots.

 

Black words. They curl around your skin

I pick them up and let them in.

And then my mind just dives away

Trying to drown their bittersweet melody away.

 

I run for days and then I stop

There’s so much black that I forgot,

I left three words outside the game

White love is waiting in the hall of fame.

Pinhole life

I watch myself inverted in your words

The light is chasing me through my pinhole life,

Tomorrow sank in today’s afternoon

Wish I could hang onto your love to tell the time.

 

The long exposure of my crippled thoughts burnt all the words onto my lips

There is no lens to share the drawings of emotions

Look there. There, I abandoned it next to my bag of rotting dreams.

“Now” is just “Me” distorted,

A black and white echo of colours bruising the veins of a quietly tormented mind.

 

Don’t look for me.

I found a shelter on a paper boat,

I’m sailing through the silent void of fear that shouts at me from every page,

I am a scribbler tangled in my clumsiness,

Would words fill in that sea of an unknown me?

 

My life keeps dancing with that stream of light

But I’m afraid to search for its reflection

As all I see is one odd self-portrait

Of all those other haunting selves...except MYSELF.

Those twenty-three seconds

Behind the tale of whispered dreams

Where colours clash and breathe together,

I used to bounce on clouds of edgy fears,

Then melt my words in those twenty-three seconds.

                                         

And I’ve been somehow chasing all those dreams

You say you never have,

Trying to meet your halfway smile

And kiss your thoughts good night.

 

Today I’m counting twenty-three

Having your arms floating around me

And you are drawing sounds of gold

Putting away my nights of cold.

 

Your smile keeps searching for the corners of my lips

While watching my ballet in barefoot dreams

But that’s a world you’ll never know,

It’s just as loose as an illusion’s bow.

 

‘Good morning’ I will hear you say again

When twenty-three is history

And a thousand worlds just fade away

The way that they did yesterday.

 

And when you ask me: ‘a cup of tea?’

I feel the dizziness around me.

The dream was soft and high in speed

And we were travelling along,

 

But now I look at you and smile

As everything that I recall

Is hidden under twenty-three.

The man on the wire

A thought

A stitch

Increase

          Decrease.

 

I hear her breathing in the lightness of the unknown pattern

which hovers above her amber dream

like fog in the valley of Saturn.

The mind is playing with a rigid crochet hook,

pulling loops of emotions through other loops of hollow faith.

 

I hear him.

The man is here.  He’s waiting on the wire,

waiting for her to take the first step through anything but fire.

Her thoughts are getting tangled in the songs of yesterdays

with hues of blues and greens diffused in long forgotten maydays.

Through closed eyelids touched by the blue flow of his glance

She feels the vivid colour travelling its way from head to toe

Leaving behind the strange sound of

‘Don’t let me go’.

Now standing straight before his stare at the other end of the wire

She suddenly remembers that silent film scene

they both used to admire.

The strap of the ballet shoe freezes her right foot in dégagé

For what is worth to take the leap and dance..?
 

Waiting.

A thought

A stitch

Increase

         Decrease. 

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