My body ain’t a cage
Or an imprisoning container.
The soul flies as will allows,
And any freedom sacrificed is
A personal failure and responsibility.
Is there more freedom worth wanting?
No.
Poetry
Repetition and sameness
The universe,
A river.
A memory being recalled
Over and
Over again.
The details are built
With a common likeness
An inescapable sameness
That all these ugly words won’t capture.
The lust is new again
Until it gets old,
A familiar, ticking timebomb of boredom.
It waits,
As only boredom can.
memories and my circus
The days stopped melting when weeks became a blur and
there was something lucid about this long dream I
could not place my finger on,
or any other useful appendage.
My brain tried to wrap around it all,
warped,
and became a circle of infinity,
forever repeating a forgotten memory
so old it had become snowed out like so many
old VHS movies.
I could sit and stare at the screens for hours,
and the message or medium never changes.
My life as a circus show
minus a few bears riding unicycles,
and a strong woman.
An almost-real reunion
I saw you and I felt your face
Your curves
Your life,
Just in front of me.
You smiled at me,
A smile I had almost forgotten,
And the past melted.
I forgot the fights,
The hatred
And the ending,
Left only with the good times.
We said we were sorry and
We were playful, composed and in love.
You were never more you than these moments,
And then I woke up.
Heart in a castle
Light shines through the cracks in my glorified castle,
The place where I’ve built up defenses against love
In an attempt to keep my heart safe once more.
There is no describing the fortress we erect to save ourselves,
And the architecture is always flawed and impotent.
Love always finds a way.
It might not be good love or the mythical ‘true’ love,
But something always sneaks into my heart,
Whether it scales the walls or swims the most.
Love isn’t clean, or just or pure,
But nothing worth having is.
A starving fire
Fire was and is you,
But maybe less so now.
As if awkward sentences could ever
Capture anything about you,
The flame dances away from the cage
Or goes out when walled in.
You were a free spirit,
Dancing in too much oxygen
Until your appetite saw you too fed
And there was no stopping your newfound hunger.
Now you live as a pilot fire,
Carving out a meagre existence on scraps of air,
Waiting for the day you can be everything again.
Or maybe you had your chances and this is what you are now,
Tiny,
Struggling,
Afraid.
I would have ended you rather than see you so weak and powerless,
If only I would have known it would come to pass.
Sleep and the struggle
I remember the enemy,
Even though its been many months.
There was no counting sheep
Or melatonin solution strong enough
To push aside this demon.
I had forgotten the late nights packed full of
Nothing.
The return felt like a well-worn glove,
Warm, and snug as it stretched onto smooth hands,
Never worse for wear despite missing sleep.
How did I best you before and
How can I defeat you now?
Time tells all stories,
Even when it slows to its post-midnight crawl.
Wide-eyed and finished I
Await another long dawn.
Heavy heart and lust
I lied when I said forever,
although I meant it at the Time,
and every Time I said it.
I could not have meant it more,
and the leaves feel and died
and so did we, baby,
and we had no chance.
A voracious appetite for sex
and never-ending lust for the new
led us to new, but no greener, pastures,
if anything we constantly downgraded.
We dragged along our crosses,
totems to one another’s failures
that we were unwilling to help solve,
and instead decorated the walls with.
I remember your totems and idols and
somewhere along the way the love became sadness
but never regret or a Third Chance.
I’m not even sure I gave you any chances,
or if I gave you too many of them,
because it all blends together in a big mess
of hatred, deceit and misery.
There were good times,
oh, so many good times,
and the cheap smiles we would pay fortunes for now,
had all deserted us, unwilling to be bought.
You were brown, and blonde and red,
but I missed that one,
and I don’t miss you.
Play time in neutral space
And I want to play.
I’m something now but feeling hollow,
time all spent with the same result
life is a neutral game.
The more we push against others
and against objects,
the further we drift from anything that is real.
I find myself in a void with strangers,
strangers as half-empty, half-hollow as me,
but I don’t think they can see it.
New realities
From the skies we see
Lights in the dark
Each one being controlled by living
Specks floating
In the chaos of being.
No tangible meaning
But each one an entirely new reality.
Andy Veilleux 