All posts by mE

Father, partner, author, chocoholic, recovering caffeine addict, IT manager, poet and lover.

Love

So what is love, she asks,
As if there is an answer
What is love,
To you, is what she means,
So I tell her –

Love is the only thing you can give away
And receive back more, the more you give,
Love is caring about someone else’s happiness
More than your own, wishing them well
Even if it poisons your soul to watch them smile
The green demon of envy reminding you that you are not only human,
But partially, at least partially, ugly inside, like all the rest.

Love is what you do when you have nowhere else to go,
No tree to hide behind, no road to run down, nowhere to escape.

Love is what you do when all else is lost,
And you realise that time itself is a mystery,
Not flowing forwards and backwards through space
With you in tow, like you were trained to believe
All those years ago, in school, through life, in memory
You realise life and time are intertwined
As is love, the memory found of some lost scent
Some distant song, come back to haunt you
From somewhere deep down, a place you thought you lost, for once
For ever, never to find, but in love, now
As you once were.

I could explain all of this, but stick to banalities,
For banalities are all I can think of, as love
Coursing through my veins takes my head and spins it round
Rises my gut and the pulse that comes from within
Spits in my face the steam of lost thoughts and broken dreams
And reminds me that, once again, I am no more
No less
Than everyone else.

memory’s burn

I received a call today
Not for me
But for my soul on legs.

She smiled when she heard the long lost voice
It was the missing, one day out, wishing her a
Happy Birthday from afar.

My heart broke again.

This is like a test, a test of me
Of the lengths I can stretch to
The distance I can bend, before I break.

I can feel that familiar ache again,
Another sorrow marked on the walls of my soul-cell
Deep in the gut where I was born, inside of me.

This happens again and again,
Even knowing that I should be focused elsewhere
On the Workshop notes I sketch, now hidden behind this document.

But I lost focus, because my heart broke again,
Only
Softer this time, somewhere in the background.

There are true loves and
Loves that are true, then there are
True lovers, but that’s a kettle of a different colour.

Today I was reminded of all three, by that phone call
That phone call that was not for me, but
My soul on legs.

Today my heart broke again, in the quiet of the background of this thing that is me.

The Paperclip at the end of the Rainbow

There is a journey to be taken, if you step inside the rainbow.
All of the colours of the universe will rain down inside of you,
Leaving you wanting only to know, what is at the other side
Of the rainbow? Well, I will tell you now, for I have seen
I have journeyed from here to there, and everywhere
In between.

The rainbow’s colours are not refracted light,
As the scientists tell us, I know that is just not right.
I have been inside the rainbow, seen the light fantastic
And realised it is nothing more or less
Than the emotion of love, refracted.

And what holds this emotion of love, in great arching curves
Across the sky? I will tell you now, so that you know why
I say that it must be love that holds us all together
The earth, the sky, the moon, the stars,
For it is ours and ours alone to wonder
Who and what and where we are.

So this love, flapping loosely through this universe
Of ours, wandering desolately amongst the cold vacuum
Of stars, has but one wish, to make us happy, not just us here
On earth, but everywhere there is an ‘us’, in every time, in every space
In every parallel universe-like-place. This is what love is,
An action, as compassion is active caring
So love is active life, and rainbows
Are acts of love.

That is why we look up and smile and share,
Telling total strangers, look, look up there,
It’s a sparkling, shining sign of love, for one and all of us
In the sky above, look, see, can’t you tell? And we know
That this is special, deep down, all of us, because it is
The true sign of love, the one single power that exists
In the world and universe around us. All else fails to understand
You cannot overestimate, the power that this one true force has
Is all there is holding us, down to atomic level, in one place
We are stars, once cold and distant, with love searching forlornly
For something to hold and warm, hug and feel,
Now we are here, not alone, not distant, not cold in our fiery embrace
But warm human beings, one people, one life, one earth, one place.

Love brought us together, from distant stars,
Dust of the past, the future is ours, so remember now
What I have said before, the rainbow is love’s promise
That forever more, we can live in happiness, together forever
If we only learn to love each other.

And what holds the rainbow, to the ground?
What was it, that I found
On the other side of my rainbow swim?
Come closer now, I’ll let you in
On my little secret, I know what’s there
No pot of gold, or carrot-topped hair,
No leprechaun , nor fairy sprite,
No lost children, nor Pegasus’ flight,
Instead I found, come closer here,
Let me whisper it quietly, in your ear
It was nothing more than a paperclip
Holding earth to love
And love to it.

So the next time you think of pulling hard,
On the love you feel, don’t
It’s a mistake. Love is something you cannot break
But you can lose it, it will float away,
If you pull too hard, come what may
That paperclip will disentach
And rainbow all will disappear
Up into the sky, for another year
Or a million more, til we get it right.

When you see a rainbow now,
Remember what I have said, that this is not a game to play
In or out of your head. This is no sweet savoury bliss
But the most deadliest serious stories, this
That the only power you will ever have
Is to love each other with all you are
And realise that this is true
The only reason there is a ‘you’
Is because Love’s force was wandering through the stars
Wanting some focus for love’s test
Saw the stardust floating by
And now you know the rest.

Cracked White Ceilings

The soup of my soul, drips from my eyes,
As the sweet-fruit candyfloss that grows between her thighs,
Sugar I can’t have, a life without worth,
The comfort of depression, my heart drawn forth.

The entrails of my self, drag on the ground,
Gathering filth with every step, with a strange slosh-slosh sound,
An empty glass that held hope, a mind without fear,
Cut off in mid-sentence, like Van Gogh’s dead ear.

The angry circling of any caged beast,
Restless inside, to say the least,
There is nothing more that can pull me apart,
For the first was the last, she had taken my heart.

I wonder, not for the very first time,
Why the thunder of life-joy is no longer there,
And the luck that flows through me, like ice,
Carries not the feeling of comfort that once lived inside.

For there is nothing more that I can do for my Self,
That stranger to me that lives deep within,
Only calling out to pull the rest down,
Under again I go, but never to drown.

Sarcasm from the mind just won’t let me rest,
No comfort to be drawn from any soft breast,
The pure poetic justice of life’s empty fight,
The silence that wraps around with effortless might.

There are no winners in this eternal war,
No severed heads, nor blood on the floor,
There can be no more truth, for truth is truly dead,
The 20/20 vision of pure sight is simply a lance in my head.

Nauseous knowledge, forgotten feelings,
Nothing to watch but cracked white ceilings,
Counting the distance between my Self and the Empty,
Realising they are one and the same in the end, that I will never be my own best friend.

Funny this empty repetitive shit,
For all the emotion it holds init?
What I would give for one small glimpse,
A taste of the life full of love, happy, warm thoughts and feelings,

Again…nothing to look at but cracked white ceilings.

the day i forgot to be sad

This day is the first
I have not shed a tear, though
I crashed as hard
As I felt I would
For I forgot to be sad
Today.

I have had days, before
Where I forgot to be mad
Or angry or bad, or just plain
Bored, but this was the first day
I forgot to be sad,
Today.

There is no sense in denying
I am tired, for I am
Bored, a bit of ennui goes
A long way, to explain in my own head
Why, but not all the way
Today, forgot to be sad,
I.

This is just another cycle
Another round-robin thought,
Just another broken record
Of something I forgot
I am no hero, no wonder
No saint.
There’s a really long list,
Somewhere,
Of all the things that I ain’t.

I ain’t no happy-go-lucky free for all,
Travelling salesman
Bar in a brawl,
I’m not alone,
Yet no one else, adult
Shares my space
The whole of my hole is mine
Alone, smiling in the knowledge
That this is my way.
This is my way.
And someday I’ll remember to be sad,
But not today.

Like some others who make space
For the songs of the West,
That great call to duty
To cash in like the rest,
Some fight the good fight,
Leaving smiles in their wake,
Their happiness soul-deep
No drink do they take
Before ensuring that all those once around
Have had their fill first,
These happy souls have I found.

These and others I’ve seen,
Read, heard, kissed, cried,
I’ve felt the closeness touch,
Watched my own tears, they’ve dried
I’ve sent good ones away,
Held warped lives close
Tried hard to hold on
Stayed longer than most.

Fought valiantly with
My family, inside
Quiet voices of hunger
I can just barely hide.

There is no way out,
No abracadabra spell,
No running free from the blood
My blood, that I spilled.

Red claret is mine,
Shame of deep heart,
Shown all too often
And too often thrown out
Like the sad melodramatic crap
That I write
No matter how hard
Try as I might,
This thought circles back
I taste the sense that I lack,
For today I forgot to be sad
And will pay dearly later for that.

Alas,
At last,
The tears come, not too late,
Not torrents of soul
Or cries against fate,
But the poorly held poise
Of life’s old-young boy,
Not beaten as yet,
Not yet, beaten
For today I forgot to be sad.
Until now.
I remembered to cry.
Now if only
If only
I could remember…
Why?