Licheri

To look at each other

Though not eye to eye,
Yet search for the lover
Concealed in the lie.
To hide in a shadow
Escaping emotion,
Afraid of rejection,
Afraid of devotion.
To sit in the darkness
Refusing to go –
When you hear love say yes
Who are we to say no?

D

When dreaming in whispers

That shout in the mind
And mock human madness –
Will you stand by my side?

As life becomes blacker

And answers more rare
What lengths will you go to
To show that you care?

While wishing for death

While sinking through sand,
Yet not wanting to fall –
Will you hold out your hand?

When lightening strikes twice

The same star in the sky –
Would you take me home
Or just leave me to die?

In a void of existence

If living alone
Would you ever write
Or pick up the phone?

Could you be so empty

To humbly agree,
And give all you’ve got
Yet get nothing from me?

The Death of Love

On one side of a spinning coin

There lies a quest we’ve lost,
Yet hope to find the love that’s gone
At reckless human cost.

While in a world of love and hate

That frequently confuse,
We run towards love’s closing gate
Forgetting how to choose.

You find by night the places that

You’ll never find by day;
Yet still refuse to speak the facts
That no one wants to say.

We were the ones the heartless kissed.

Emotions with us toyed.
We speak the words the Bible missed –
‘Thou Cupid art destroyed’.

Negativity

You can’t last forever

Nor live without death,
While loving in silence
As time holds its breath.

Though you capture a moment

That shouldn’t have been,
You can’t close your eyes
To things you’ve not seen.

When you whisper in darkness

For dreams to come true,
To fight back with silence
Is all you can do.
 

And life in its wonders

Keeps feeding you lies.
What you thought was love
Is just hate in disguise.

The Suits

By dawn and dusk they infiltrate

The ways of British Rail
So no one can facilitate
The service to avail.

Beneath the boredom of their task

They neither smile nor frown,
Nor let the dreams of childhood past
Exist on different ground.

And every little boy at school

Dreams every dream he can,
Yet swaps his smiles of youth and fool
For the monotony of man.

Tomorrow

The time is now, or perhaps it is yesterday, or possibly even tomorrow. No. Not tomorrow. For I promised myself I would feel better tomorrow, but at the moment I feel nothing at all. I remember when I was young the first time I incurred anger. But I do not remember the second or third or even the seventieth. They have all rolled into one cantankerous memory that swells inside my brain with shallow pride – refusing to be forgotten. How soon we flee from childhood. How soon we lose a treasured innocence and learn the art of hatred and revenge, sacrificing love for bitterness. The games we play, hitting one another’s feelings like a tennis ball from player to player. But things will change tomorrow.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror but couldn’t return the stare. I doubt I ever will again. Too much pain lies behind the familiar eyes that look more strangely on me day by day. Layers of dust have settled throughout the house like snow. Every moment causes choking clouds of bad housekeeping and womanly neglect. Dust is but the carpet of the poor. But tomorrow I shall be rich.

It is getting late. The gentle heartbeat of the clock reminds me of the seconds that are passing, the minutes that are lost, the years that have been wasted. It chimes. Another hour is reached.

And then comes night -  a creeping sort of darkness that drifts aimlessly into every nook and cranny. A darkness filled with dreams and thoughts of love. I dreamt of love when I was young and thought that love would last forever. Nothing kills your childhood fantasies so heartlessly as life.

And mirrors do not reflect, but expand. The enlarge the world we live in, send image after image of glassy reality as far as the eye can see – if the eye can see at all. We do not live by hope, we live by mirrors, always seeing more than we can ever touch. Then someone takes the hope away and no one’s there to pick the pieces up. But tomorrow I shall not hunger for the realms of life that I can never know.

The bloodless pain of life still drips in my mind. It is not clouded by dust nor hidden by night. It is always there, life, ceaselessly festering in the gutters of the earth; breeding multiplying, growing, oozing out of drains and into air that once was pure. Life – spreading it s ugly black cloud over all that is beautiful, poisoning the good that may once have existed, as a parasite to death. And life – finally – to consume itself within the evil flames of bitterness that it exudes, and screams curses at the world with stolen breath.

Life shall be no more with time. The time is tomorrow. Time that drags the weary life out of us all, and the song still plays though the record’s stopped turning.

And soon dawn will crack the impenetrable darkness of the night with spears of sun. And run to hold the vision, throw yourself in one last bid from freedom from the world’s dizzy heights to land in the cradle of dawn, the arms of death, the caress of tomorrow.

And Then ...

What is death –

A final goal,
A gasp of breath.

And what are lies –

But kinds of truth
To close your eyes.

They are combined –

The ultimatum
In our mind.

We disbelieve

The power of love
That we conceive.

And all alone

Begin the lonely
Walk back home.

 

Omega

A whole life can go wrong

Before things turn out right,
When you’re staking your heart
In a love given fight.

Is there reason in life?

Is there living in death?
Is there much to be gained
From the story we left?

With the devil inside you

You dream of the past,
Remember old loves
And the hatred they masked.

So you think this is it,

He’s the love of your life.
But it’s always like that
And there’s no one who’s right.

You may re-live the nightmare

In another new land –
A new life, a new dream
But not a new man.

 

For Motives of Mercy

Night has begun its claim; spreading dark fingers around the world of human lives.

Within a house deserted by love a figure moves slowly among the shuttered shadows. Someone moves from room to room, searching for an answer among the remnants of a painfully remembered past.

He tried to see it the way it was, attempted rationality. Mirrors show us what we want to see; but sometimes we look into the living, human mirrors and then briefly the fantasising has to stop.

Once again, he had reached their bedroom. He smiled bitterly as the memories of the love nest it had been swarmed around his mind, refusing to be forgotten, pushed away.

She lay there sleeping, in semi-darkness; half dead, half dying. Before the affair he had believed in love; now he only believed in death because to him it was the only thing that existed with the promise of being fulfilled by every life; surer than life and fictional gods.

And if he let her have the baby it would be to him a lifelong reminder of wife’s painful unfaithfulness.

He wanted to destroy that part of her which had turned away, and to hold on more desperately than before to the woman who had a place in her life for him.

She had called it a childish fling, a meaningless inconsistency which could be forgotten – but for the baby. Yet she must have felt something for him, somewhere deep inside the bottomless pit of her heart. She must have needed, must have wanted, must have loved him. If only for those few brief moments.

And he loathed her honesty. She could have said it was his child. She could have lied to show she cared. Yet she chose to hurt him with her truth. She stabbed him in the heart, then twisted the knife. Her honesty repelled him. He tried to love her, but the more he forced himself, the more intensely repugnance surged through him.

His hand drifted restlessly over her sleeping body and lay on her neck.

A warm glow filled him, a replacement of something lost. He tightened his murderous grip. The warm glow was followed by another.

And then another.

Paradise Mislaid

The curtain rose – acquiring a silent grace of its own – revealing sylph-like, motionless figures cast into passionately constructed movements at the striking of a chord. He watched their frenzied forms gliding in unnatural grace across the stage, like falling snowflakes gently nudged through the air by kisses from the wind.

It was then that he saw her; when forsaken by faith in life, having failed to ever to more than simply exist, to feel his unforgiving past crumble beneath his feet sending his empty world into turmoil; a failure afraid of being found out, who had nothing to show for his pain, and he was struck by the hopelessness of it all in the silent crescendo of one unmerciful moment – he saw her then.

She stood there, lifeless, yet exuding a powerfulness of existence that reached into him and mocked his own unlived life. In a crowd of figures she danced alone, though never took a step; balancing on her toes in silent beauty as an image of infinite motion. Assured of sufficient attention she threw every part of herself into the role she had to lead. There was no element of her body which was not infused with tragic emotion, no proud smile to contradict the far away look in her eyes. Life is made up of light and shade; and as her feet greedily absorbed the floor beneath her she drifted from a shadowy silhouette against histories of snow to the concept of untouched love, which and virginal in a wicked world.

In a silent orb of her own, a universe inhabited totally be her, she drifted; oblivious to the fragments of people and visions of life that lay scattered around her; lighting her lonely path with a waning candle.

The music leapt once more into his ears. The lights blazed and his heart stood still for what was only a second, but seemed like the whole of his life.

With a vigorous intensity of love man formed the first link of the bonding chain to her. The unrequited love between them only emphasised the lovelessness within his own life, the realisation that he had no one left to turn to.

The sleep walking dancer flowed from one movement to another, tormenting her lover. And he felt so alone. He looked along the row of faces beside him, impassively staring at the mode of entertainment before them, indifferent, emotionless, not allowing two dancers to pick out the faults in their lives; or perhaps they had none. Now he felt as tormented as her spurned lover.

We are whole. In loving we become half. You cannot expect to gain unless you give, but who will sacrifice their soul for the sake of a heart they’ll never own. He watched, transfixed, as the two solitudes came nearer, recognised and protected and comforted each other, the heroes of their own story.

Was there nothing else to life but to love and to be loved, love learnt by loving, love that he never received and never felt. His life was not more than an assumed concept upon his soul. It had no meaning, existing in a vacuum – society’s world.

The jealous husband leapt upon the stage and stabbed the young lover. He would die all over again tonight at the next performance. He would live and die for days. She merely stepped over his sleeping body. It is all a part of her dream.

He looked once more down the row of blank staring faces awaiting enlightenment, and saw tears. For what did they cry? For love? The thought stretched itself around his heart, engulfing him, choking his breath. And with one hand he clasped the other because he had no one else to hold. Alone he tried to rediscover the half buried memories of his past.

We go through life looking for someone to make us whole, change and choose partners while dancing  to a silent love song. But somewhere out there it another person who’s looking around for you. He wanted to stop drifting.

And it seemed to fulfil a need in him to go on and on, fighting against all odds in pursuit of a hopeless goal, living beyond death and still forcing himself forward, staggering inexorably onward to the ultimate peak, the finale of his journey, not to be replayed at noon. Weary with existence, existence pushed him forward. Tired of life, life forced him onward.

The curtain dropped.

He felt the void of hell within him as the heavenly fires of his soul were gradually extinguished.

 

The applause died down.

He felt the pain which they pretended and filled with meaning the emptiness in their eyes. In rivers of emotion he suffered alone.

As the lights came on he realised that he would never be able to live for the sake of himself. It was time to cleanse himself of the assumed concept upon his soul that he called life.

 

To Live by Death

To see your life

Through blinded eyes
Afraid to suffer
From surprise.

Afraid to live,

Afraid to trust,
To run from love
And into lust.

With your own creed

To disbelieve
In all that lives
And all that breathes

To count your blessings

With one breath
And pray to God
Yet live by death.

 

Love Is

A woman in black

And a child of the sun,
A beginning forgotten
And an ending begun.
A life in the stars
And a love of your own -
But what I wanted to say
Is existing unknown.

A future in hell

And a past in heaven,
A safe place to hide
Until all is forgiven.
An image of night
Yet a vision of death –
But I said the wrong words
With my final breath.

But at the end of the day

You’re alone in the room
And you blew out the sun
Just to turn on the moon.
With your face turning skywards
You long for a kiss –
And refuse to believe that
I am, you are, love is.

Hypocrisy

A man lies bleeding, his face is in ruins. No one stops to help him. Car headlamps momentarily release him from darkness, then plunge him back into it, ignoring his need. Flashes of light representing the passing feeling for him.

A man lies dying, his shattered car smoking. It’s getting late yet no one calls for help. No one gives him their time, no one wants to console him back to consciousness. No one slows down as they pass, but merely glance at the scene and hasten on into the sanctuary of their lives.

A man lies helpless, his blinded eyes unable to see humanity’s bitterness, his wounded arm unable to grasp for a hand that isn’t there, his bleeding throat unable to whisper to deaf ears that stopped listening long before he had started talking. And he is treated as a stranger and alien.

A man lies dead, too late to be saved by passing cars. And still people go by; never looking, never stopping, never caring, and drive off into the distance. So do I.

 

Grown up Children

There comes a time when logic dies

Though wearily life rolls on.
You see dawn fade in youthful eyes
As an eternal present grows long.

And yet there is neither a future nor past,

It will always and only be now.
You live through a day that may be your last
Forever reluctant to ask how or why.

You whisper alone with your final breath

Refusing to beg from the sky,
As silently you freeze to death,
Too shy to live, too proud to die.

A Solitude Called Peace

Amidst the sound

Of falling rain

Removing life
From earth again,
In gentle footsteps
On your mind
Are bitter words
That should sound kind.

The part of us

That life abhors
Will push us all
Through closing doors,
And yet protect us
From the sting
That always comes
When love begins.
 

But it’s too late

For feeling sad,
To dream of lives
We never had.
We’re too afraid
To see our wrong,
The crime in singing
A different song.

And yet there is

A subtle peace
That only comes
In deepest sleep;
From pain of love
This peace ensued
For love alone
Finds solitude.

Our Move

Like a dream that keeps recurring

Through the hours of the day,
And a heart that keeps on loving
When the mind has turned away.

We say the sun will rise and set

As it moves across the sky,
Perpetually able to forget
The astrological lie.

People search for lifelong fame

Yet fail to realise
That more impact can be made
From the way in which one dies.

As the richness of the dark

Forms the skeleton of a day,
We re-ignite the spark
Which burns itself away.

And as the truth of ancient lies

Is in itself a danger,
We find it hard to socialise
And act the deliberate stranger.

Like a game we’re always playing

To while away the hours,
In which the sun is always saying
That the move’s forever ours.

Kind words unsaid, good deed undone,

And yet the world evolved.
Look up one day and see the sun.
It stayed still while we revolved.

As Others Saw

In a world of couples are single figures

A heart that dreams, a mind that lingers.

Through remnants of love some lives will wander;

The heart to reflect, the soul to ponder.

In rivers of doubt some swimmers drown,

And heavenward eyes despair in a frown.

Though love will return to re-kill the reborn

Naïve victims whisper ‘this time won’t be wrong’.

 

 

Standing on a Beach

While water laps

Around the feet

Of those whom fate

Allowed to meet.

 Beneath a light

Yet dimming sky

Are lovers gazing

Eye to eye.

And other lives

Seem out of reach

To lovebirds standing
On the beach.

Along the stretch

Of golden sand
Are lovers walking
Hand in hand.

Surrounded by

A secret charm
They’ll walk forever,
Arm in arm.

Never Too Late

It’s never too late for love

If you’ve got a heart of stone
And if your soul can rise above
The unknown and the known.

It’s never too late for caring

When you’ve nothing left to hid,
And the memories worth sharing
Are locked too deep inside.

It’s never too late for dreaming

If you still spend nights alone
And if the love you’re feeling
Has never yet been shown.

It’s never too late for crying

Over abandoned desire,
To smile instead of lying
And learn to fight fire with fire.

 It’s never too late for goodbye

If there’s nothing left within
And the relationship you tried
Is reduced to living in sin.

It’s never too late to forgive

The wrong you were done in the past;
For it’s like a party we live
And parties aren’t meant to last.

Endless Love

All that’s left of us is love

Though we’re nothing at the start.
All we have is what we give
And we give away our hearts.

Like the look that says so much,

And continues what’s begun
By the magic of a touch
That searches for someone.

A never ending story

That says too much too soon
About potential glory
And inevitable doom.

Yet deaf to heedless warnings

Of romance’s hidden charms,
We’ll spend our nights and mornings
Wrapped in each others arms.

 Like a sun that goes on shining

We will love until we die,
Always on and upward climbing
Until we reach the sky.

Jade

The whirlpool of feelings

That crowd my mind
When looking into your eyes,
And fight in vain
To keep confined
Are hard to verbalise.

The words you say

Are all infused
With sweet simplicity,
And leave behind
A heart confused
By electricity.

The gentle touch

Of tender hands
Within a shortening night,
Opens up heaven
And all its lands
As darkness turns to light.

To fall in love

Then have to part
And leave the one you’ll miss,
Yet go on fighting
Heart to heart
With only a photo to kiss.

 

More than Loving

In waking hours

To dream of you,
Behind closed doors
And masked from view.
To hear words echo
Around my head
Of all I felt
And never said.

 To dream of love

That lasts forever,
And know that we
Will stay together.
As one to live
Till life expires
And terminates
Our joint desires

To find an answer,

Cold, forlorn.
Lacking someone
To keep them warm,
And offer love,
Love to receive –
The one who doubted
Now believes.

To whisper truths

That say so much
And hope you’ll always
Be in love.
With honest hearts
That seem to know,
To say ‘I’ll never
Let you go’.

Were you There?

A land torn by war;

A desert called home,
Where it’s hard to ignore
The lost and alone.

A child that is crying;

A baby to feed;
Yet people are dying
From another man’s greed.
 

While beautiful faces

Fight back the pain
They dream of oases
And pray for the rain.

A child of the future

Who’s hounded by flies,
Surrounded by torture
And hatred and lies.

Will death’s victory sound

Before the blind see?
Or will men still drown
In their blood, on their knees.

If we don’t live together,

Together we shall die
From petty feuds that last forever
Beneath a barren sky.

Steps of a Ladder

You turn on the light

When it gets dark outside.
Someone is screaming.
Someone just died.

You sit drinking sherry

From cut crystal glass,
While others sip dew
From blackening grass.

Out of the window
You fail to see
The homeless ones crying
For what cannot be.

You throw away boxes

That someone calls home.
When charities call
You hang up the phone.

You choose to forget

The ones you don’t see,
Yet expect to be helped
When you are in need.

While you dine on three courses

Till full to the brim,
Someone survives
On scraps from the bin.

And all you can do

Is hold out your hands.
For you nearly stood
Where someone else stands.

Do you go to bed dreaming

Of how to befriend
Those who wonder till dawn
How the nightmare will end?

Optimism II

To pick up the pieces

And start again,
To dream of sunshine
While standing in rain,
To try and make sense
Where none can be found
And keep your feet
On trembling ground.

Yet you were there

To put me together,
You gave me the strength
To believe in forever.
You picked up the pieces
That I couldn’t find,
Put hope and believing back in my mind.

To wander in darkness

And sleepless nights
In the hope that a friend
Would turn on the lights.
You walked beside me
To show that you care,
And when I reached out
It was you who was there.

Another Orchid

We live contained in separate jars,

Humanity concealed;
Stare vacantly between the bars
Across life’s cruel minefield.

We see the lives of other men,

Feel guilt for being a spy –
Make desperate efforts to wave at them
Who are about to die.

We breath ice messages on our walls

Which no one else can read,
And want to live by different rules –
A want, but not a need.

Irrational movements to afar

Will smash the glass we dread,
Running in life from jar to jar –
Someone’s already dead.

Cocooned within fraudulent liberty

We look back on our days,
Dark corridors of mystery
That reach into a haze.

Different words on different lines,

White orchids have turned black.
We’ll run from jars a million times
When what we left comes back.

For Hoy

If ever troubled in my mind,

In need of someone’s care;
Forever just a step behind
I’d turn to find you there.

Whenever things went wrong for me

I always turned to you’
Persistently I failed to see
The pain I put you through.

Beneath an ever jealous sun

We laughed each year away,
To finish off what had begun
Some long forgotten day.

It is as friends that we survived

Each day time makes us start;
As friends we kept ourselves alive –
It is as friends we’ll part.

No one else can ever know

The ups and downs we’ve had,
The tears that we will never show,
The times of feeling sad.

And it’s so hard to keep for long

The friendships that we make,
And promise to let the bond go on –
A promise that we’ll break.

I tried to make it on my own

But always needed you.
I doubt if we will sing alone
The songs that once we knew.

Candle of Love

As a candle newly lighted

Strange emotions grow inside,
Like a world that’ just been sighted
Surrounds itself with pride.

We cannot change the feeling

Mistaking it for love.
The eternity we’re stealing
Will not add up to much.

He stood like an angel at sunset,

He shone like a candle at night.
We reach out our arms for what we can’t get,
What cannot be, yet might.

With somebody’s arms around you

It’s impossible to surmise
That love has finally found you,
That the cynics told you lies.

But the flame will go on glowing

And laugh at fools like us,
All powerful, all knowing,
Re-phrasing love as lust.

Innate desires to connect

Makes partners of us all,
The joy within we can accept
As life before the fall.

As melted wax solidifies

In tear-like drops of pain,
We recognise our little lives
Cannot support the flame.

And life does little to redeem

The void in which love thrives
A vision, a wish, a childhood dream
That lasts us all our lives.

The candle finally melts away

Like love that falls apart,
And leaves us nothing to take away,
It was nothing at the start.

Pictures

‘A sunset’, said the artist

As he put his easel down;
Mixing paints before he started
To reproduce earth’s crown.
 

Blood red streaks of pain

Around a crimson sun,
A vision that won’t remain
While indigo clouds convene.

Existing in a fiery glory

Like joy before the fall,
An epilogue to the final story –
But life’s not like that at all.

The canvas burned with colours,

A life beyond our reach;
Skies blended with one another –
The unity we seek.

A stranger saw the picture

While passing on his way,
And said ‘a fine depiction
But the sky I see is grey’.

Disintegration

To fall asleep

And never wake up.
To close your eyes
When you’ve seen too much.
To find a friend
When all alone,
And inspiration
Of your own.

To whisper dreams

That can’t be heard,
To find a place
Within your world,
Beyond the stars
A place unknown,
The chance to always
Be alone.

To turn out the moon

When evening lingers
And paint the dawn
With trembling fingers.
To see your future
In the sky,
And stay alive,
Yet want to die.

To feel a smile

Grow on your face.
Within the world
To find a place,
To find a truth,
A paradise,
A private peace
Within your life.

To miss the people

Whom you leave,
To stand up for
What you believe.
To hear the laughter
From above,
Yet want to love
And to be loved.