I tried to escape
My feelings for you,
But feelings were traced
By doves wearing blue.
They kept me in cuffs
While your heart was true,
And when I woke up,
He loved you anew.
Tag: ego
Haiku #642
642.
Should I write poems
I write for you. Ego’s old,
Selflessness is new.
Little Mjölnir
A hammer I found
On a tall mound of earth,
Only man-made,
So little like Thor’s.
I swung it at mountains
Of old washing up,
I heaved through the trees
Of ancestors lost.
The townspeople laughed
As I toiled and I huffed,
Its handle unvarnished,
Its corners were scuffed.
Look at him missing,
They sang and they coughed,
But they couldn’t see
The meaning of moths,
Shattered my ego,
Departing the docks.
The Coast Of Devotion
A part of my curse,
Inculcated, in marrow,
Nearing kingdoms of self
A wider gulf narrows.
I’m rebuffed, beaten back,
By bluffs from sea-sparrows,
Fall from a deck
On to self-tinctured arrows.
Where you are on green,
I’m red at the light;
When I dreamt I was falling
You stood through the night.
I expect this will pass,
For the future’s in sight,
Where I can’t compete
With gifts in your life.
A future sea-faring
In circular motions,
Just out of reach
From shores of devotion.
When all is extinguished
Find new attuned heights,
Blessed by Love’s arms,
Devoid of the night.
Haiku #630
630.
Behind my good eye
A typewriter, font and ink.
I think I should write.
Haiku #629
629.
All those car owners
Driving by, I did not know,
Before they too died.
An Exhumation
There were traces of me,
Some burnt vestiges
Found under mulch,
Detritus in strata, then debris.
I didn’t look very much like me,
But the finders were keepers
And they all disagreed.
They could have just left
The stagnant shell of myself
Where I’d slept all those years;
My mouth full of moss, and behind
My green eyes, fern-flooded ears.
After their initial shock
Discovering me in those woods
For a while I wondered
If they could return,
Yet they did, armed with candles
And prayers and books
With scripts I’d unlearned since
There’s nothing to read
With an ego interred.
After they repatriated me
Within the appropriate earth,
All the towns seemed different,
New, not shiny or imbued
With ores, nor for once subdued
By saddening flags and blankets,
Whose seven colours draped
And sometimes secured
Our feelings, through sombre times,
Thankless times, where we found
The end of heaven.
Mirror Image
I became an image of me.
Too late, I wondered
Where my true self should be.
All this time squandered
In the mirror image of me.
I cried out once, inside my love,
The replica baffled my sounds;
So, hidden in hollows
I caused all the sorrows,
Treading his unhallowed ground.
Look at the colours they said
Look at these bones so profound.
They could not have known
If I am kind, to suppose,
Of how I remained below ground.
An Unrestarted Heart
This road is the road of my death.
I stood motionless in its lucid waters
Where parallel to the ocean
I speared a neon fish.
He admonished me with a fossilising
Shock of ages, waged in his eyes
Which were tiny, glaucous opals.
He once danced and shone
In shoals unknowable as stars.
I am opposed to my own taxidermy.
Standing in the sea leaves me thirsty.
The sky is perforated by jars
For storing a catch which is ours.
Lobsters, swordfish, octopus hearts,
Once the muscle is stopped
It’s almost impossible to restart.
I witnessed it only once, as a boy,
And mythology claimed it for herself.
How far we had journeyed.
I envisioned my existence
With gulls and oppressive seasalt air
Which stripped the elders of teeth
And their ability to remain human,
Their silence as fragile as chalk,
And it corroded all moments
And customs, the colours of
Spring summoned in my lover’s hair,
The jigs of tradition around
A pole each townsmen bore
To the beach with such gravitas
Commensurate only to their souls;
The saline air froze time,
Woven into their hair, banded
Together like a comet’s tail,
Like the spawn of the golden eels
Which are reeled in by fishermen
With the sun tattooed into
Their ganseys. I too will be spry
And fry, live and die,
There is nothing starker.
For now, I arrive and I cry
Behind my steering wheel,
A harpoon through my hope,
Ego skewered by a dart
Outside an unlit supermarket.
Haiku #626
626.
Me and my ego,
Bigger than the universe,
Though I’m just six feet.
