The uncageable bird no longer flies free,
chains of ‘real life’ crossing across her
broad tail-feathers and beautiful wings.
The world heard her roar,
or enough people to make it a shared
beautiful
and otherworldly case of loving and losing,
but never thinking about the losing for long.
I still don’t know what love means –
the thoughts dance on my sweating, red face –
and I’m not sure I ever will.
Time flies –
a bird freed and straight and endless –
whether you’re having fun
or not.
People will try to make you feel small,
and you can let ’em,
as long as you will be a little lion –
ferocious, hungry and insane –
on your comeback trail.
Disregard all care for your mind
and toss aside all small barriers to
success and love and living true
and roar and burst out into the jungle,
for the jungle is yours to command
and yours alone,
and you can watch all the little cowards –
the ant people –
pat your back and smile at you as your teeth grow.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Andy Veilleux 