To The Athlete With A Broken Leg

To The Athlete With A Broken Leg
(A Quatrain for A E Housman, whose attempt I find altogether too morbid)

Look up; the clouded, mottled stars

Speckle their light on sun-faded plastic

Of the dew-dotted rafters, beyond the bars

From where you run to greet the dawn.

Your routine, your farce, your dance

A race to be faster, to push that limit

Your ideal shoes, the optimal stance

The gun fires, and you are gone.

You know this, and they watch you go

Your morning glory blazes the tracks

The clouds' chorus lights the world aglow

As the sky twitches your puppet-string heart.

The sour coach sneers, never one to impress

And you dance your solitary Sarabande

Now you're hopeless, sleepless, perennially less

A verdant world a hair-sliver apart.

Your face is crisscrossed with despair.

Despondent, discombobulate, pained

With a mangled, neglected salvation prayer,

A cast embracing your weathered foot.

The seed has consumed the sower's soul

A broken, confused face, with sadness painted

Your career feels rattled, all through its whole

The collapsed pedestal where your laurels were put.

The selectors say sorry, with their cold dark eyes

You know they'll never be sorry enough

You know that you will take months to rise

And much more time to regain your speed.

The coach shrugs his shoulders and shakes his head

Another foolish child, broken on the track, so still

A dream deferred to another pair of calves, not dead

Fresh targets to make sweat and cry and bleed.

I would tell you it's okay, that this hard luck will pass

The universe equally hates all of its saplings

But it's really not- you mourn on shattered glass.

Your foot is broken, short-circuiting your spotlight.

You will heal, and perhaps you will not be most fleet,

A silence will permeate your every sprint

But you will run, fulfil your inner athlete

Look up, how the stars shine from the rafters tonight.

Someday, they will shine in the day for you too.

The Ramshackle Bagatelle

The old man smoking outside my trailer park

Has choked on his willpower to live, once more.

Glossy, thick, and persistent, delightfully dark

He keeps it safe with his snuff, his secret store.

I've seen it shining in his eye, like billion missing stars

Blink, and it's staring at you unceasing, from his hand.

There's resilience in people here, like the decaying cars

A sort of crooked perversion of mankind's last stand.

Is this the edifice, our spire, we left upon our land?

A stoned, unkempt puppet of the heavenly cogs?

Our nobility dances its swansong sarabande

To the incessant baying of the sleepless dogs.

He laughs at me atop a can, a worn down petrol drum

Age has licked us all, but to him, irony is clear.

He shakes his head and he massages his gum

Beneath the ashen grey of the stratosphere.

There's no mobile signal here, no memories for keeps

It feels like a farce, a husk of a world, plain

Upwind from the desert, a single strain of thought creeps

Through sludge before being squashed in the drain.

The assassin might find something funny in this wild

An elegy for lands that never ceased to stop being

The thirsty stove sings its song, ever beguiled

By the gilded vision of salvation it's seeing.

I have long stood here, pondering this rot

And why I'm a place in its tableau

Where everything just falls, nothing is got

Every eyebrow is furrowed with woe.

I was born here, in this very shed of rust

When I was a child, it was lush and green

Now everything has been subsumed by the dust

Barring any return to how it had been.

The old man has smoking been here every day

He chuckles and offers me his oozing pipe

Tracing out the heavens and laughing all the way

He says I am but a boy, far too ripe.

Some day, maybe I will be like he-

Mapping out my own version of the truth

Perhaps it doesn't matter, it's a leaf on a tree

But my eyes are tinted by the lenses of youth.

This winter, I decided to leave my decrepit home

And discover the wiles of the myths of outside

But some strange force guides me when I roam

Bringing me to this place where I reside.

There's homeliness found in the notches in our bones

And there's a blessing that will let us persist.

A prayer etched into the tired-out stones

That we will live grasped by decay's wrist.

Perhaps that is the goal we all seek

To find an unconditional home to dwell

Marked by its own trees and its little creek

Will I find one? Only time will tell.

Till then, I will weather the wind and foam

For it is far better to finally fall

While discovering your own place, your home

Than to never have changed at all.

Tears Into A Forgotten Vial Of Memory

A dark one about the environment.

Today, I am hunting all the mermaids my sand-blinded eyes can see.
The blood of the modern Daedalus seeps from the skies
Proclaiming, "Behold, my steampunk soliloquy blesses heaven!"
But all we hear on this canvas are sobbing, stifled cries.

I stop to drink where the riverbed has melted away
Where they clean up the squalid streets with their brooms
I believe the great surrender will sweep away all the dirt
Except the one that pirouettes in our souls' empty rooms

There is an unearthly peace on the land as the ash sets in
To cake everything it sees in dust, the dust of dreams
This was once a dollhouse, this, a copy of Jane Eyre
Eaten away, destroyed, like the storm upon triremes.

The sky is green, the sky is red, the sky is an ugly palette
When you've mixed in far too much black with the bright
The clouds fester and grumble and shake the world
Winter now a distant dream, a feverish vision of unbroken white.

A beacon of hope is a thing of the past, no light shines
The black soil, forbidden chocolate, is choked dry
A crescent moon, neglected, sleepless, insane
Bears witness to the slumbering silent sky.

Acrid smoke, thick and foul, rises from a ruined heap
Was this a planet that once harboured life? Could it be?
A hieroglyph is scrawled hastily onto a rock
It appears an epitaph, to a long-dead tree.

I was an astronaut from afar, and my seeds of hope
Are poisoned and are perished by your scythe so sharp
You foolish humans, reaching bony arms for the skies
Knees condemned to never blessed with an angel's harp.

The land is burning and roars, wounded and bleeding
As I sought another world, for what it's worth
A house needs a lot of living to become a home
Why didn't you make one out of our mother Earth?

Onward, To Charybdis!

A bit of a change of tone with this one...
Charybdis was a Greek sea monster depicted as a giant whirlpool.

I am as lonely and lovelorn as a clam
That rests beneath the roiling waves
For her, I be enough just as I am?
Or will I be cast into forgotten caves?

I am the ship and I am the storm
I am the captain's screaming plea
I am the lighthouse, I am every form
I am quicksilver, like the azure sea.

I am as fickle as the shifting tide
Ebbing and pulsing and rising beneath
For the ocean, it is wondrous and wide
And all I am is skin and teeth.

She bursts and smashes below my feet
An austere, alluring dance of death
Onto the time-worn cliffs, a beat
As rhythmic but as erratic as my breath.

A puzzle is written into my eyes
And the embrace of time pulls my cheek
My hair is like the clouds in the skies
And I crack like a rock when I speak.

I have seen it change, its turbulent face
Every day as I wait on this ledge
Now it seems to have collected an empty space
That it tosses around about its edge.

I am as puzzled as the starfish
I am like the turtle, wandering free
Locked into a dream, in a twisted wish
Before its vastness, I am a flea.

Every day, nature's colours fade
And spiral into rotten gray ravines
Yet from what I knew I have not strayed
Through the games of kings and queens.

I tilt myself forward, towards her maw
Her swansong, it sings ballads to my soul
The morning mist and foam, they draw
Their grappling hooks across my whole.

Onward, to Charybdis! And over the cliff
A twisted body tucks and curls
Eaten by the whirlpool, like a skiff
Into its tumultuous swirls.

Towards the rocks, nay, into her heart
I am closed up, an old hero, like Priam
In water we are together as I fall apart
I am as lonely, as lovelorn, as a clam.