Lured

Dug from the depths, you

Confessed within breaths;

With one single word,

I found myself lured;

Without false intent,

With hope to repent -

But before midnight,

I lost you mid-flight.

Threads

The threads of an old life,
Strung out so far behind -
I grabbed hold to them once more,
To escape the cellar of my mind.
My friends still smiled upon me,
Not one was less kind;
But inside something had shifted,
To which I was utterly blind.

Weary of my past well-written,
Aware of my crimes;
I pulled my gaze warily forward,
To forget those good old times.
What was once well was then ill,
In weathered new climbs -
And those fragile bells of love,
With delicacy, still chimed.

The intrigues of my nearest,
Brought silent lashings of my tongue;
Each handsome flight of fancy,
Saw struggling hands wrung.
Yet as I stared through sleepless eyes,
To the past my heart still clung;
As I winced through pleasures old,
Each bell within rung hollow, done.

It was I who blundered, so,
In picking up torn threads -
Friends from then, who let theirs go,
Are present now, with wiser heads.

Working Dreams

January waits with the promise
Of a new
Threshold to cross,
But its inauspicious start
Ends more bitter than cold.
Midnight is approaching
So I start running -
Here comes my bus,
Early for once.

One journey too many,
Or so it seems,
As traffic lights intervene
To force a stop -
A glance left reveals to me
A decaying grey headstone
In a graveyard,
Bearing my last name
And nothing more.

The fatigue brought on
By day jobs and dreams of work
Weighs heavier
Each passing second;
With one eye fixed firmly
On the time,
An escape from my
Constricting uniform
Is planned meticulously.

All the long-held threats
Of optimism
Die when midnight strikes,
As the aromatic aura of
The kissers,
All so murderously beautiful,
Haunts me all morning long -
Sleep becomes impossible
To fight off, then:

Working dreams envelop me;
Some of which can come alive,
At least.

Watched

We watched each granule of time
Slip through our grasping fingers.

We watched every lost opportunity go
Until the next one was lost again.

We watched the world continuously
Write its never-ending story.

We watched what had been written
Struggle to live out its ill-fated existence.

Then I turned to you, hoping you would
Be the one constant thing in this world.

And I found you no longer there.

Silhouettes

Silhouettes in the fog,
Street lights and car lights:
Both hazy, mournful.
A moving window slowly
Erects itself around the carpark,
Restricting nothing,
Yet suffocating everything.
Semblances of things, people, unclear,
Appear as shadows in the mist,
Susceptible to a torrent from the sky,
A buffeting from the wind,
Or a homily from the breeze,
Whose whispered words
Are distinctly inaudible,
Just murmurs unaligned -
And thus of no consolation.
But none of these things are constant,
As silence reigns within this haze.

Time slows as depths grow deeper
In the thickening plot:
Bravery rides through
With facile nonchalance -
In a glimpse, it wanes,
Fleeting, like all deceptions,
For even in the grave
The dead have confidants.
Fear betrays its person then,
With a show of trembling limbs
Shaking with the ferocity
Brought on not by a chill but by war.
Movement becomes a dream,
And in this dream,
Where many shapeless vestiges flounder,
One - darker than the rest - grows,
Restlessly,
From a speck in the distance.

Purposeful, it glides through
The chaos of the other shapes:
A bee-line in its own time.
Eternity passes with deathless futility
In the wait for the arrival of
Familiarity’s ordained new guise.
Voices come from the fog,
Urging prayers to tumble
Into the empty mist,
So salvation will strike
Before the hand of the vestige,
Whatever it may be -
But God is just a phantom menace Himself,
And as the Silhouette emerges,
Removing its cloak to reveal itself,
Air flows freely again
While the fog starts to clear -
And it is only you standing before me.