Category: Poetry

“Love Burns In My Heart”

I like the structure of this one, the slow fading of the first sentence exposing different angles each time. It’s not especially deep or clever, and I assume there’s some technical term for it that I’m missing, but it’s one of the things I’ve written that makes me feel proud each time I encounter it anew.
Written August 22, 2015.

Love burns in my heart
Young and pure and true
A sweet and all-knowing insanity
A passion that warms me always

Love burns my heart
Strong and hot and painful
And forever in ways I never anticipated
A fire that marks me always

Love my heart
Scarred and battered and standing still
Bleeding but never emptied
A still-smouldering coal of incredible heat

My heart
Hollowed and echoing and haunted
A wound the never heals
An subterranean seam occasionally flaring in sight

My
Heart,
In love,
Burns

“Your Face Is A Memory”

A simpler poem this one, long on cliche, and leaning on a sort of seasonal montage for its structure (and looking at it, not at all hard to see which is my favourite season). It came from a time when a friend and I were enjoying trading insults in which one person says a sentence containing whatever-noun, and the other responds “you face is a whatever-noun”. I said the title of this poem in one of those exchanges, and it chimed something inside me, and about ten minutes later, I had this poem to show for it. Which is nice.
Written December 18, 2014.

Your face is a memory,
Like the faded flowers of last summer
That we picked and twined in each other’s hair under the bright blue sky

Your face is a memory,
Like the fallen leaves of last autumn
That we crunched underfoot as we danced like mad things in the softly chilling wind

Your face is a memory,
Like the snowflakes of last winter
That we gathered into balls and snowmen in a world all turned white

Your face is a memory,
Like the breezes of last spring
That we inhaled and were invigorated by as the green world bloomed

Your face is a memory,
That I carry in my heart

Untitled Poem

Another one from the vaults, written on September 11, 2009.

The spiders have spun webs between our fingers
So long has it been since we
Picked up a tool
or
Curled up a fist
or
Caressed each other

We sit or lie,
Reposing endlessly,
Reacting against the imagined pressure of nothings
Simply lacking the volition to move

The screens before us stutter with light,
At times our eyes flick back and forth across them,
But less frequently as time passes

We can no longer feel our feet,
Cannot tell that the rats gnaw our toes

Our stomachs no longer rumble,
Having finally accepted that we are not listening

Our knees and elbows are rusted into place,
Our hips and shoulders will not rotate

Our genitals are swollen with imagined lusts,
But no consummation will ever return to them.

Perhaps one day, the dust that settles upon us
Will make us sneeze
And we will be either broken or arisen,
Powered by the dormant force from within us

Untitled poem

Found this going through some old notes, sadly, I did not think to date it when I wrote it. I’m pretty sure it comes from before I moved out of Coburg, though, which would put it around 7 or 8 years ago.

There are places I go back to again and again
Seeking the things that feel lost
That perhaps were never found
But seem closer here than anywhere else

I am a pilgrim, a time traveler, a spelunker of the heart
In my efforts to recapture, I explore so widely that memory’s territory is expanded beyond its making
I walk these paths so many times that the memory of walking obscures the memories I would excavate

Sometimes, I come up empty of revelation
But times when I do, it is nothing words can capture
It is a sensation and a gnosis, a warmth in my blood, a febrile ease
A relaxation in my heart and lungs, breathing meaning
A sense of rightness and of truth, of finding home’s front door in the fog

And always, the knowledge that this is not enough
That I will return again
That there is more. That there is always more.

Always another epiphany that I’ll struggle to describe