Category: Poetry

I can tie you up in truth now 

You like to lie 

The way you always poured partial truths like a liquid 

Into whatever vessel suited your purpose 

No guiding principles govern your foul play 

But I have been laying the way 

Paving the path of my righteousness 

All this time 

Now I have only to collect on the promises I made 

To the truth, to myself 

I am cashing in on my own consistency of character 

Every misstep you make now further proof 

That what I say is true

And you find yourself constrained by your own move

Check. Mate.

How it can all turn

The hunter has become the hunted 

None of your tricks trip me now

Because I can learn and you cannot 

You stick to your playbook 

Never having need to adapt 

You are stiff 

Untrained and unprepared for the fight you started 

And of course I would have the last word

All the words were always mine 

You stole them from my mouth 

Till I close it indefinitely

Perhaps in this silence 

You will finally hear me 

You can think a sea breeze will cure all your ills 

Escape to its briny saline moisture medically administered by air to the lungs 

The promise of its endless floating freedoms

But you are only ever as free as your own mind permits 

This door is a window where you sit and admire the ebb and flow beyond 

You heard them say “we each are the masters of our own destiny” 

But you scarcely believed it, with that grip on your wrist

The tingling tangibility of your hunter’s trist, trust up in faith you’d never let slip YOUR heart wasn’t in it

You can only ever be owned if you gift your captor ownership 

The door to your mind can always be opened and closed

Be changed from a window to the whole world 

You can dive deep at any moment into oblivion beyond 

He doesn’t hold you 

His weak grip you perceived as slack rope that could tighten at any time 

You thinking a noose

doesn’t kill you till it’s taut 

all danger is impending, imminent, potential

So you believe if you jumped the cliff’s edge it would catch you 

But scissors and knives you never needed exist 

The ultimate trap

a prison with no bars

a window without glass 

The frame and nature of limitation held by nothing but air 

The sea air and you could smell it all along 

 

Hope is a small cut inside my cheek that my tongue continually worries at

Unseen and unspoken it lurks in the back of my mouth

It clings to intangible threads

I only want one, just one, let me have one

Let one thing be alright for once

There is no certificate you can obtain in becoming an artist 

You never applied for the position 

You work in sales on a commission basis 

Like sex work you sell yourself as product 

You have a few testimonials from satisfied customers 

But these are subjective reviews imbued with personal circumstance 

They are empirical truth of nothing 

The money you do or don’t make is no barometer of artistic achievement  

Glittery shit sells and greatness often doesn’t 

There are no catergoricals to be found in cold hard cash 

You could insist the prolific nature of your output is the proof of your pudding 

But you know quantity does not denote quality 

Nor are they mutually exclusive 

So the slimness of your cv is no signifier of success  

Thus you drift denied your definitive 

Like an addict only after applause 

An exhibitionist enabled by audience 

A crowd pleasing, precarious, conditional 

Question mark 

No one says they like the sharpness of my tongue

to be on the parched tip of it

but licked luminant by the light of a thousand forest fires

you were seared into the landscape

never so strikingly seen

lit up bright

bathed in light

may break my bone

my back

is only so strong

so straight

arches under the weight

of dragging you along

As you cling to the fraying end of my tether

for dear life

a guide rope in the dark

your dark

the one you grew with your doubt

that you carry about

With its deepening void

its vacuum

into which

every good deed must go

but never unpunished

derided and diminished

for doubt is all you know

A shadow

defined only by opposition

a negative preposition

needling, feeding on

the only light left

May you linger

in your ashes and dust

rusted by your own corrosion

may it dampen all the fires you started

fade around you

like the smoky plume of gloominess

you are

left

alone

in the

dark

longing to be scorched

upon my cutting tongue.

 I do not speak subtext anymore 
 No longer do I wrangle with the entangled communication 
 If you have something to say, just say it 
 
 However unkind. 
 I promise not to mind more for your honesty 
 
 But don’t try to blind me with your offensive defensibility 
 The trick you stick with is the cruelest of slights 
 The slow trickle of truth from a sewn mouth
The barbed knife, 
Insidious insinuation device 
 
Regardless the work is all mine, to refuse to find the hidden messages 
 To change my ears and the way that I hear things 
 And what I take to heart. 
 
 A place of limited space must not have an open gate policy 
 
 I must finally learn that all must earn their time 
For a kingdom of carefully crafted kindness  

The Monologue 

The deafening silence 

The absence 

The one and only echo in your lonely chamber 

The slow creeping of regret 

The cold sweat 

The restless night 

The sight of it slithering over the brow of the hill 

The still of the sound 

The downs

The reflection 

The dissection of every word exchanged 

The change that is necessary 

The scale of it 

The futile fight 

The missed moment 

The opportunity skipped over 

The clipping of wings

The sound of it singing 

The words endlessly ringing in 

The begin again 

The end