Poetry

Fall’s failed colours

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Fall blew in, breaking leaves and hearts, in an inevitable march of death. The ravens crocked their piercing gazes as lovers grasped for freedom, unintended pain and hopeless dreams. The strong were demolished by weakness and pride threatened the walls of their castles. The weak hid in crumpled newspapers hoping to not be caught up as rebounds, short-term leased lovers or undesirables. The strong stood in plain view and emptied their corrupted hearts, pouring their souls into any vase that would hold them for a night. The night fell, hard. The sun woke up sleepy, dreaming of a moon forever out of reach – save the occasional one night stand of darkness.

We lived like this. I loved like this. Glimpses of love slapped me on the cheek. Eternal lovers were burned out in only years. No justice was found.  The cool air changed hot hearts, as the rain came in. And the rain did come in. Passion was drowned – a beautiful, illustrious bird trapped in a cage in a sinking ship called salvation. I swam away from the ship as only a captain could.

Memories of faces, interrupted by perfect breasts and sincere tears, haunted my pre-sleeping mind’s eye. The fathers and grandfathers die, slipping their souls into all of these ravens for me to look at, speechless. They look me in the eyes, unable to speak. Their dark eyes meet dark eyes of my own. The midnight days have pierced my sensibilities, leaving an overwhelming darkness. I live in there with all of my accomplishments and successes, but none of the people that love me.

I don’t remember feeling normal. I have always been an incredible overachiever, morally ambiguous and a good person. I love too deeply, forever and too fast. I am passion personified and sadness quantified. The red and the blue. The phoenix and the bluebird. I always get back up, and I always take my hits.

The fall came in to pull apart my life. It was deserved. It was surgical. It was just the beginning.

It lasts in love/ Last in love

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Scars across an aging heart

never seem to heal

and the wind stings just

a little less

across my pricked face amid the

trees of white and brown and blonde.

 

Hair sits atop my head

a messy crown of brown and ash

and the memories weave their way

among the lockets and whiskers and strands

with every breath I take in.

 

A heavy heart is made heavier still

by the endless gravity and march of time.

Anguish and The Changed Man

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There was no way to say it. Reality had found a way to snake through little cracks in the floor. It bled through the once-varnished, now fading floorboards like a bottomless fuel truck mysteriously crammed into a bungalow. What should have been happening at a snail’s pace had blurred together into one long series of tedious events, stuck together by even more tedious sources of glue.

Life has become an abstract. Events were no longer being recorded and stored as concise memories, and not each day passed unceremoniously, pressing its warm body against the day before in hopes of re-igniting passion. It did not come. Either life had lost it’s lustre slowly and surely, or it had tragically happened one day in the past, but nobody discovered the crime scene or body and therefore, no one had noticed. It was more of a getting-sicker-by-the-day feeling than a sledgehammer to the skull.

There was a thick irony about it. Once, he marveled at my discovery that life was without an innate purpose or meaning. Now that his days seemed to lack a common goal or trajectory, days had felt more barren and empty than they had for a long while. There was always the spark though, even when it slept, at least it was there. The Changed Man groaned under the weight of It. Anguish. Limitless freedom, no purpose. It had moved from the boundless energy of limitless existence, to the unbearable weight of responsibility over the course of a few short years.

The Changed Man groaned. He tossed and turned. He spasmed. He actually spasmed. Nothing changed. Had he been wrong? They had said to never put all of your eggs in one basket, but then what was the point of it all? Open relationships were the territory of the confused, the pretenders or the people who should resign themselves to not being in a relationship to begin with, and he was mostly sure THAT was not him. He remembered letting go – making the Change – but he couldn’t recall exactly what caused it. Had it come for him in a moment of weakness? No, he had chosen it.

He looked over at the inbox with all of the messages piling up and decided to do nothing.

Young Mistakes

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Less are made each year,

but I'm still making

young mistakes.

 

The fires of passion burn me

just as they ignite my life

and I am left as charred remains,

no phoenix rising.

 

Pretty new hair molded

into what has been fashionable

but is never guaranteed to remain so

a symptom to an illness known as modernity.

 

The words are slow and heavy now,

caked on mud and dried out dirt,

reminding me of the pain of failures

and times when words shot like lightning

torching our midnight skies

and stinging maladjusted eyes.

 

At first we shone as the birth of fire

to the primitive women and men,

now dimished to flourescent lights 

to the weary school boys and girls.

 

What once was intense wonder,

now a history of young mistakes;

such a fascinating bed to lie in.

Darkness

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The darkness blurs the lines between reality
And
The imagination.
One walks within a dreamscape of their own design
And the smallest beliefs become dogma or truth.

The line between a life well-spent and a discarded life
Rests on the subtle tints and scratches on the glasses.

Love rising

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The fear set in as it always did

A slow, trodding march of remembered feelings

and ghosts of the past.

What was left here waiting for me,

and what was worth wanting?

 

I had spent the weeks inhaling you and

I was beginning to forget where I began

and ended,

and was that not what we all wanted?

 

We took turns melting pieces of ourselves,

bones and souls,

until we were more than before.

 

Emergence came and so did we,

we were delivered

and awake

and new.

 

The fear arrived just long enough to be

swallowed by the love.

What a day

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Some mornings began of love and hope, but there were also the disappointments. The sun had risen in a pale yellow, more of diluted urine colour than the orange of fire. The morning shuttered awake, as difficult and uneasy as a young child holding out against the inevitable time they would be forced out of the comfort and warmth of bed.

The sun rose naked. There is an irony in seeing and knowing the sun is a giant bonfire in the stars, and not being able to feel its warmth through the indifferent late February weather. Or maybe it was the Big Smoke. This city always had a way of taking the raw flesh and passion from the living, and leaving only bones.

There was something dead about the over-populated city. It had become a cancer, teeming with bodies still searching for souls. There was never a great divide, it was more likely the souls had slowly begun packing it in when the city started with The Pressure. Hearts pump life through the veins, but who is living?

Reality or something like it

/ andyveilleux / 2 Comments

The ceiling does not change under
The pressures of human time,
The hours do nothing to make the dull exciting,
Or to change this feeling into something real.

Reality starts to bend under the monotony
And I suddenly begin to see the fabrics of it all
And where they have all been layered
But never properly stitched together.

Or maybe I see patterns where none exist,
A guilty pass time for a trained mind
Always forced to quantify the unexplainable
For money or for grades.

It doesn’t have to be true,
It just has to sound true.

Love for this midnight owl

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Smoke drifts through
A corner of a mirror,
And you were less than a fifth century
And I beyond my fourth.

Youth is shamed by the
Unyoung,
Those who once had it
And now mourn it,
But never by those who don’t miss it.

Youth was beauty
Youth was hope,
But age can still be so.

I stir awake for you,
A slumbering once-nocturnal beast,
Now, maybe, a midnight owl,
No longer with the claws of dawn,
But not far removed from that.

I shake awake for you,
I am something wanted and on
Cold
Hard
Nights
I am all that is.