And so continues our flight of fancy
Feigned romance elated dancing
Waltzing under rose-tinted spotlight
tock the clocks but time is not right
twist and swing like metronomes
beat slows down and even though
disaccord and inconvenience
plague this ghostly white dream sequence
concrete confines couldn’t stop me
for the beat and you still rock me
On the verge
verging on
urging on
sleep but
slurring thoughts, blurring dots
converging so deep in eyes,
thinking hovering why,
love lovering ties
parallel so as never to meet.
A
cheap way of sinning
Ego bubbling brimming
Spilling over and slopping
But too great for stopping,
For separate lies
Make for cruel compromise
And love never dies
When it’s played on repeat.
Long legs
Orange eyes
That singe the dusk
Like fireflies,
That drink the sky
And toast to mine,
Get drunk on words
In lieu of wine.
Black coffee
Brewed in threes and
Putney bridge is
Drowned in trees,
So lend me your
Candy-coated kiss,
Repartee, and
Weightlessness.
(Whilst Trivial questions
Poised on a cloud
Plummet to earth to be
Spoken aloud.)
If I were a book
Would you break my spine?
And if I were French
Would you feed me a line?
I can’t cure like nicotine,
Painting your heart black,
Nor am I poetry
Scrawled on the tarmac.
Nevertheless
I’d cocoon you in rhyme
If this metre and stanza
Could cancel out time.
I’d freeze the
In its current position;
To keep you I’d put on an
Antic disposition.
If dancing on a harpsichord
By the village green
Gives you as much of a
Kick as caffeine,
We could spend the day
Tripping the light fantastick,
Not caring if
Others see us as bombastic.
You’re a tall, tea-stained,
English rose,
Speaking in prose on your
Tippy toes,
Employing a diction that’s
Eloquent yet slurred,
Like dissonant chords mixed with
Biblical words.
Mumbling lover,
If I had my druthers,
We’d both end up in
Some city or other,
We’d roam every boulevard,
Smoking our cigarettes,
And you’d live forever in this
Rhyming couplet:
Like Mary, you are quite contrary;
Like breathing you are necessary.
Death is but to cease to be the same, the mechanical transformation from red to yellow to green, and back to red, the constant acceleration causing life to move forwards: eggs to hatch, flowers to bloom, cocoons to open, stars to explode. To one abode; here one road leads us all. Death is the birth of something which previously did not exist, and the disappearance of another thing whose time is up. Nothing is permanent.
Therefore with adulthood comes death; we are dragonflies undergoing metamorphosis from our nymph form, shedding our transient innocence in return for self-absorption, unrelenting and unfulfilled desire. What was once beautiful becomes tedious; what was novel becomes inadequate. Here is an example.
A three year old baby, in his naked naivety, is old enough to know between right and wrong, but young enough to take it into account. He has not yet experienced enough of the world’s contradictions to try to fight against them, and he has not the capacity to notice the world’s futility. So what is the consequence of his actions as he tumbles haphazardly in the waves of
Twenty years later, this baby’s innocence has washed out with the tide, his involuntary immersion into life’s excitements evaporated into clouds. In this present moment, the ocean holds no more pleasure for him than a cigarette, burning the air around him, filling his body with a warm, plastic replicate of the good old days. A la recherche du temps perdu, he desperately seeks a modern wave to sweep him off his feet, to propel him into unknown depths. Amid the techno beats and voices encircling his head, there is an omnipresent solitude. This unwelcome sentiment is countered only by prescribed remedies, a tidal pull in the form of a pill, injecting colour back into his black and white veins. His sense of self is consequently vaporised, dissolved like medication on the tongue. Girls, unaware of his dark and broken being, flash past his glassy eyes, fleetingly kissing his cheek. They are his forbidden monsters, conspiring against him, falling in briefly to take for granted his vulnerability, then rushing out just as suddenly, leaving him skeletally empty. His disposition suffers, his blue eyes no longer hold contact, his fingers tremble upon electronic keyboards in his lightless home. He is utterly alone, awaiting the apocalypse. Human existence is chaos, a raw and undivided mass, devoid of reason, definition, or pattern. A mind infected by treason, loud music, and hypochondria, he is weary of his shadowy loneliness, and longs for inspiration: spiritual, metaphysical, psychological, whatever.
His desire is finally realised somehow with an abrupt change in character, a sudden tangible confidence, a metamorphic phase of sorts. Silver wings burst out of his back like flowers, and hypotheses spill out of his eyes, philosophical concepts seeming to unlock universal secrets. His focus is no longer averted timidly to the floor; he stares vertically through contrails and stars, discovering scientific theories, overwhelmed by the ideas being concocted in sleep. His dreams contain fantastical pictures, cinematic scenes of nuclear destruction, cosmic fires, planetary order. At last he senses a pattern, a clearly structured design in the way of things. No longer afraid, he is entirely invincible, a God in his own right, one of the few who possesses the knowledge of antiquity, of ancestral shores. He is immersed in the undertow, rolling on the edge of the breaking wave, and laughing hysterically.
Recording his ideas on napkins, post-its, receipts, cigarette cartons, empty spaces of wall, transforming it into a story, creating plot, character, setting, outcome, he falls head over heels in love with it, with this idea. At the same time, he is wary, as he knows of the perils that would face him, should his story leak. The authorities would be curious, men with guns circling his palace would coax him outside through a megaphone, patronisingly talk him down, psychologically manipulate him as though he were a criminal. He would be crucified, they would drown him in their confusion, weigh him down with a thousand questions unanswered and unanswerable. A martyr, maybe, but he still has things to do, things to learn, things to write, before that end. He must save himself.
When it comes down to it, all we can do is save ourselves.
Living for days in secret, in a state of superlative fear, he hears only the metallic sound of helicopters ticking incessantly overhead like armed clocks, hovering as though suspended on string, waiting for it to snap. His phone rings but is disregarded—it could explode, break up into millions of jagged and radioactive pieces which would pierce through him, put holes in his palms. There is no trick they can pull on him, no ploy which he has not thought of beforehand. If they took away his life, at least his knowledge would be immortalised in text.
And there he remains for a lifetime, perched stoically in the shadows beneath his desk, pen in hand. His skin moulting, his black eyes bulging, his wings crumpling like paper. He is fallen from flight. The lights outside his window burn red, buzzing away at him tauntingly. The waves keep on coming on, deafeningly so, but he’s lost the ability to laugh.
You’re in books.
Your memory echoes between pages,
Your voice permeates cover to cover:
Pretentious mutterings scribbled in margins.
Your eyes are the rusted orange corners of folded over leaves.
Your hands are the letters,
Long and deliberate.
Your smell is ancient like the sweet decay of paper,
Like unshaken dust.
You are the words, the rhyme, the symbols,
The plot, the beginning, the bitter end.
You are books.
++ my backspace key is on the verge of breaking, this could be eenteresting
