Poetry Website

In between
the hyphen
two words
feather peacocks
wrestle in raucousness
laughter, banter
Language is enormity
mystery, apostrophe
and, hyphenated words
loosely orchestrate meaning.

“A lot of people would see this and rightly panic
and advise you to try and avoid this darkness
and treachery which is approaching.
Firstly, you won’t because you always
face everything head on anyway.
Secondly, you can’t, I have already looked
and there is no way around it but through it
but I think you know this, almost as a sixth sense.
I believe you chose this because it’ll wipe the slate clean.
I wouldn’t like to go through it personally
but then again, I am not you am I.
It will change you for the better,
your enemies unwittingly fuel your metamorphosis
in a positive way, they’re unconsciously helping you.
There are bigger things at play here,
it would break most people
yet you will come through it shining and triumphant,
stronger and far wiser than before.
Your sensitivity, compassion and empathy will be reigned
and you will no longer feel lost
for you will know yourself completely through and through.
But you know this anyway, you’re cleverer than you let on,
you flit in and out when you are alone, from this side to the next
and there is a chain of lives behind you,
each as powerful as thunder
and as remarkable as that mischievous twinkle in your eye!”

More at http://paultristram.blogspot.co.uk/.

I could love
you with your
dark eyes
and dark hair,
do not look
away so quickly,
I could make
a fantasy life
with you but
in reality, it
would come
to a crash, two
cars going the
same direction,
injury, noise.

Leave, she said, but leave
I could not,
knowing I would never
be another, knowing that
I could run away and still
wind up back
at my old self, crusty
breath, busted knuckles,
bruised conscience,
Leave, she said, but did
not mean it, or I thought
she did not mean it
until she turned and spun
and left me with cobwebs,
regrets about myself.

Full-blooded nights of twelve or thirteen hours
are one of my favourite Christmas traditions,
spent having you all to myself,
collecting the years I didn’t know you
greedily together
in one room of deep reds.

We watch rubbish movies
as you pull my cardigan close around yourself;
it swallows you up.

I don’t love you.
Not like that, anyway,
I say it again, again,
again, until the words become
your name.

I want to be the knit stitch of my own cardigan –
weave myself into you.

Characters laugh and the film
fades in and out.
The slow, content, silence grows
and I smile for tradition.

I’m my own man
understated
elegant in a rough way
a cup of black tea
in a coffee frenzied rush hour
not a pretty boy
I don’t do things to be different
I am different
if you’re looking for cool
look elsewhere
I’m pleated pants
in flat front chino land
no validation needed
comfortable with silence
wearing a 1950 black Omega Seamaster
wind up baby

Dodging the draw and drag
of a black hole

our lens telescopes
through space

to fix the final,
hypnotic dance

of a dying star,
its two glowing clusters

flaming apart,
an embryonic

cell dividing,
but with the future reversed,

its white heat shivering
in the cold of it,

needing our eyes only to verify
its dark energy,

we are star stuff
contemplating the stars.