You asked me again today.
The sound I made was of a vocalised smile.
My answer came differently this time,
I told you more than I had yesterday.
I told you less than I will tomorrow.
'Imagine you're standing on a ledge, a cliff,
Looking down across a varied landscape.
It is luscious, undulating like hills but
Somehow becoming a despairing wasteland
Without even changing.
A radiance is pulsing out from you,
It coats everything in nectar,
In the smell of music,
In the taste of laughter,
In light.
You have that effect here.
There are dark places though. Cages.
Trapped creatures,
Their very beings, horror, sewn with malice.
The obeying chemicals
Mock you behind your back.
From their innocent beakers
Theyll spit up into your face.
Smile to yourself, prove your theory,
As you mix whats inside your head.
So go on then,
Explain this with Science.
Tell me why the cogs and wheels
Gears and prongs and strings and fangs within me
Made me, last night into shaking hands, cry tears.
Oh, pardon me, H2O+NaCl.
These words will bend
And stretch, into real positions
To fill emotional holes.
Pain
And confusion
And fear, dragged from the gaseous swirl
Of my mind
Spun into shapes,
Forced onto the page.
Pins stuck through butterflies.
My statues, forever at my beckoning.
Frozen, still and unchanging.
At least something is.
The house you live in is
Aged to beauty by the sun,
As clay in a furnace and
So content in its space, that the Earth could have birthed it
In fruit-sweet air you sit
In its garden, by a secluded brook
Upon which, willows whisper in foreign tongues,
And dip the water like fingers on a piano.
The air is laced with the flutes of birdsong, and will be
Until the score sinks into strings,
As the insects rise from sleep. The rhythm is as
Rounded as the water's movement.
It is a long time that you smile in peace
At the soft sight framed by your window.
But slowly, like dusk, the painting begins to melt
The colours blur and fade and