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
Category: Poetry
Poem #8
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
Poem #7 Notes on the Indestructible
If I cry in public
Will you believe me then?
Is the onus on me to display my vulnerability ?
Must I wear it like a badge ?
If I make myself small and weak am I then deserving of care ?
Is it the rough skin on my palms?
Is it hard to believe that words of pain are truthful from a mouth that speaks them with such assurance ?
I practice them you know
I don’t sing songs I’ve just written for fear that my crying will crush them
and I’ll never get them out
You have to pull yourself together
Or you would fall apart in front of their eyes
It is learned poise, a pretend
Strength as an artifice I made
That now I cannot end
Poem #6
Held like an unexploded bomb
At full arms stretch
a threat that must be neutralised
Restrained, Contained
A wild cat in need of neutering
A small unknowable thing
At both the centre and the edge of it all
The burning episcentre and a bit part player in the story of your own life
Unsure if you’re the factory floor
Or the silent partner haunting the halls at the top of the tower
Like a bad tempered Repunzal
After countless calls to let down her hair
she cuts it all off
Content to cocoon in her seclusion
This is a coffin or a chrysalis
For eithers sake
a prison break of sorts
#4 Final Words
Let this be the final time you steal the very words from my mouth
For now you must make your own sound in the dark
And the hallowed other ground be yours alone
To make of what you will
And still remain the memory
Of all you used to take from me
# 3
I try to remember clearly
That when all my walls were falling apart
We went to fly a kite
The winds were gusty that day but you kept it off the ground
Untangled and afloat
You were no master but with diligence,
a certain flair
A careful sequence of minute corrections learning as you went
How to manage thin air
#2 Commodity and Access
Commodity and access
You’ve come to move me around
My unmanageable, malleable demeanour
Predictably, difficulty direct
In all it’s acerbic assurance
Displeasing unreasonablenesses
Why won’t I submit
Learn some willingness
Still persisting in this path of pertinaciousness
“Take us to the light, make it alright
Do the fighting for us
Too lucky in your blessings
Too assured and you’re forgetting
You’re just commodity and access”
