The Modern Reaper

A slave to the second hands for a life’s quarter,
The slaying of minutes that wretch my skin.
Come may the hours that fill my chesty pockets
With mindless green that ache our bellies.

My dark room becomes darker so nobody can
See the damp corners where I still cower.
May no man, nor lady, nor angel notice my
Bedtime wallows and take this perfect image.

A disposable cog in the effort to make time
And to lose rhyme from the reason of its quality.
These photographs of us children, deaf to the ticks,
Distress me with thoughts of heroic tales.

Tick, Tock
Grow, Hollow
Learn, Yearn
Learn, Turn

Prove, Improve
Work, In Murk
Remember, Dismember
Try, Cry

Now repeat
Until silence…

Latin For Lovely

Excuse me, Miss of misty dreams
Separated daughter of Venus, as you are,
May I have this handshake of twenty years
And re-live the young fairy-tale of lovers and fools?

In perpetuum et unum diem.
How long it had been to suffer in nothing
Before my rusted heart was stolen away
And hidden behind hazel pools, next to a pure soul.
Tease me in my quest to recover it. I’ll play the game.

Sine amor, nihil est vita.
You speak so soft from so far a distance.
Standing now toe-toe-toe, wrap my head in silk
With your angel’s tongue that could shed souls.
Spin until we’re dizzy. ‘Til death do us part.

Nunc scio quid sit amor.
In you, I see my beginning and forever now,
Still consoling the butterflies of our years and
Reminiscing the turbulent lessons of our silver-lined hearts.
Let us be aligned always in our paintings of old

Aere perennius…

In aeternum te amabo.

The Black Dog

Has this world always been this way?
Through eyes that saw rain before stars?
I cannot even see beyond this drowsy fog,
Only that it will soon become the witching hour

Let me be at peace
Stop this sound of ‘life’
Let this black blood
Calm my wretched heart

Nothing seems different when I blink
These things I love, I now scatter
In fields of seven-year adventures
That are now paved with concrete melancholy

Stop walking now, fool
You must catch your breath
Let the mist of the mind
Quell your tiresome thoughts

Do I stop chasing these shadows of me?
Even when they have understood me?
They will follow me forever anyway
Always enticing me away from the path

That’s enough play time
Let me sleep for eternity
In this grey skin of ill
That I will shed for light

Let me be at peace…

How Could You?

I cannot rewrite words of the fallen
That spoke the beginning and end of horror.
With one hand, I could enlighten you
But alas, that was lost to the past forever

In fact, I am all lost in thought and time
Still exhaling your battle gas and
Breathing in the guts of the false ideologies
Forever spilling my veins to the land

My iris explodes in sync with your metal rain
That coaxed death with acid tongues and
Pierced the hearts with your own misguided crosses.
How the melded screams of life frazzle my brain still

The nerves now turn to chaos and fail me
The laws are now broken; a lawfully broken world
Where we now walk on gunpowder and the bones
Of those who gave the world an eternal soul

Threads

Knots in the ribcage to keep our flesh and bones
Close now and forever, hearing my own groans.
My lifeline split between you all now standing so idle
Some close, some distant, but strings on wrists intertidal

I look to you my friend whose face I cannot recognise
From the void that stands toe-to-toe to sever our ties.
I see you tugging, but move I shall not, for I am comfortable
In the skin that I crafted from malice; I am accountable

My bones bear right and I turn to you, my nemesis
Always far, yet always edging closer, and forever my genesis.
The right that makes me wrong, the rod that makes me reel
One day your hauling will kill me, stop forcing me to heal

Familiar faces of my kin, all that I turned my back to
You walk to me but remain in place like some kind of voodoo.
I am my own man who then slacked and tripped on the line
Would you correct my tangles? I promise better things this time

My love, I can feel your presence all around my choked artery
Staring at my bleeding sleeve, calling some sort of search party
So I could find your feelings through the dulcet vibrations
Of your silicon soul shocking my tendons to life in elation

Bones and bonds over alive and alone, I now understand
Connected by blood, we share the same rib and brands
Of odd tastes that make our worlds turn in sync.
I am not perfection, but you, my friends, are my link