Monday 20 May 2013

Creative Writing: 2 New Poems

This is the first real creative writing I've done in about a year. As such, I doubt it's of much quality, but, even so, I hope this gets the wheels greased and turning again, so to speak. Feel free to comment, and regular blogging will continue hopefully tomorrow.

Burning Room

Just every last thing should go up in smoke,
yes, every one. Nothing of worth in paper
and plastic, nothing in metal, jewel or tusk.
Little of this mess missed, no
canopies of trees, feelings of grass and soil,
nothing that could not be made whole.

Free to start, free to be, memories
of old home, dappled in bird egg
paint, and wails of a child's tearing
gone from it. Would it be so?

Floating portraits of faces half-shadowed,
names missing their vowels, shaken from
their high places, smashed about on the
cobblestone of terms from a textbook;
that is where we go: there.

Last place to look, the cellars and
wicker baskets, paving trowels and cinder pieces,
that common old fear, monsters running around
in the dark. The first feeling of an unanswered
question, a snuffed light in the night; the
 bones of an early age, those thing the
man with a clipboard says are all too common. Yet,

they are us, in the end.



What I Wanted

What I wanted to do was be with you. But,

sometimes I'd think of my name in
a light box, blinking out patterns
in gold-grey hue upon the shadows
of 4AMs somewhere in the rusted parts
of an old city, where they thought
of better days and slept for an
hour or two more. It was only too
thoughtful, it was only too brave, it was
only to make something else appear.

And then I'd think, when the tonal music
hovered about me around midnight in party
rooms amongst the beautiful people, all
cut and draped with ambitions to match
that I'd never equal them. I could
sit with a thousand people, tea and toast
and coffee, with their lives all spread out
on silken paper, and never have known
what it was to be lived, to be loved,
to be real or not. It is not the city,
the time, for those matters.

Red, and red again, I was stained, every
twitch a mirror of itself. Though I cannot
believe my fortunes, there is more
truth in our old park, the sunsets and
willowed trees soaking the ground, than
could be known by this lifetime.

All concrete and tails spinning upon
their owners, wrapped up in finery and their
own heads. Good people, all or most,
I cannot be nervous about them, unlike you,
still.

This thought is merely the furious chime,
of winds and echoes rustling about old
porches, stirring cobwebs and drowsy hounds
from slumber; that, I could say,
and smile, and go on, and live,
and be happy, and be sensible,
and learn. Still the same place, trodden
back and forth as the dusty pathways
lining the forgotten hamlet I came from,
and as where I end, always.

The time is gone once, and again, the
closeness faded; people chattered, as
they do, with their little blades of
verbage, they draw nothing, nothing is
there. They ask, they ask, I
am always here, and there, and
never too far, far enough for a lifetime.
There was a lie in my very thinking,
as the words came tumbling out, some
little flaw in a worthless rock. I said
one thing but the truth was, always,

at the beginning.