Tonight we dance.
With Electrified bodies
With minds floating far from concerns,
Tonight we riot.
All leather skirts and red lips to the ready
We use our fashion to scream at convention
At the uniform
At the mundane business of the working.
For tonight is Saturday
Every hour of this night is our own.
So let us lavish in laughter, in dancing and gin
As we brace ourselves for the week to begin.
It’s not here
The Fear that plagues you
The Love that binds you
The Desire that drives you
It’s not here
The mechanisms of love
The barriers you place around it
The romantic illusions that pollute it
The myths that mask you from the truth
It’s not here
The saving grace
The divine light
Blazing away sorrows history
From your veins, from your veins
It’s not here
In that powdery embrace
A nose full, a mouth full,
a forbidden pharmacy
It’s not here
In that liquid luck
And all the ways you try to orchestrate your own destruction
It’s not here
It’s not here
It’s not here
Look within.
Here’s to us;
Making it this far,
Another year approaching,
Ready for us to take it in our stride
And as we dust down those resolutions,
Reviewing the messes we’ve made,
The triumphs we’ve tasted,
Taking a shot for every disappointment
And dancing in the embers of the past –
We bound forwards,
Revelling in the victory
Of all we’ve overcome.
Nothing compares to this strength,
The courage it take to evolve
And survive the torture of our cocoons.
For now, we emerge.
Glittering and ready
For all this year, this life
Has in store.
Loving you
With this kaleidoscope view
Of haunting visions
Misleading me & you
But caught up in the passion
Of the red & blues
Entranced by the mystery
And drowning in a history
Of powders, pills & booze
Consciousness – in & out we fly
We swallow up weeks
As we soar through the sky
And in my mind’s eye
I see you
Dancing in transition
Flickering red & blue
A dizzying display
As you multiply from one to two
To an endless supply of you
Of this haze
Filling my days
With dreams & nightmares
That torment when I crave
My next ticket
Soaring up high
Together, you & I
We’ll reinvent the meaning
Of floating
Through this life
Cheers to crashing countlessly
From the great heights we soar
For I remember truly
Loving you was an emotional war
For my unwavering patriotism
I refuse to leave
For as long as my lungs allow me to breathe
And as long as my veins bleed
Blue
I will continue
Continue
Loving you
With this kaleidoscope view
Of haunting visions
Misleading me & you
To a grave uncertain, but coming, but true
Called by the knowing
The inner whisper from
The timeless
To a timezone
Where seconds melt away
And potential burns through
The transition
The disquiet
That follows one passing phase
Into another
With all of life
Brimming and bubbling in the bones of you
Here births the realised dream
The magnetised pull
To the future you
That is already fulfilled
Already the dazzling wonder
You feel so vividly in the distance
One you are with this dream
And all future yous
Living fully
In the present
No substance truly annihilates forsaken pain
No chemical can cure the crash
Crash
Crash
Of a shattering heart
Breaking
On the floor of your chest
The bleeding,
The agony,
It cannot be avoided
Numbed, perhaps
But that is like
Walking bare foot
Over the shards of your own heart
Pretending the wounds aren’t there
Pretending
That the pieces
Of your once whole heart
Aren’t now festering inside of you
Like a malignant lump
No longer beating
But bleeding
Seeping through every crevice of your soul
Until you are utterly consumed
Neglected pain
Cannot be numbed by illegal substances
That promise of temporal joy
Temporal escape
Temporal release
Because as the substance leaves you
And your plane lands
And you feel yourself descending
Down a very deep hole
The pain will greet you there
That misery you left on stand by
On hold
Because life got in the way
But I know, love
This world is still cruel to the kindest of souls
And life doesn’t stop
Life doesn’t give way
Life doesn’t allow you to process this pain away – naturally
So we drink it away,
We smoke it away,
We love it away
But when your plane lands
And you feel yourself descending
Down a very deep hole
The pain will greet you there
Larger than before
So do not expect it to whisper
Do not expect it to meet you conveniently
Expect the room where your pain resides to be empty
Cleared of any redeeming quality
So when the chorus of your pain takes to the mic
Expect its volume, its power to be
Amplified
It was the mystery her midnight eyes exude that I found most alluring. The little tell tell signs of emotions that eyes of a different shade would reveal unconsciously; her dark brown hues kept hidden.
And I gaze into them; searching for the dilated pupils, the star struck glow, that faint glimmer and airiness that would all but confirm my suspicions. But instead I lose myself in this search; in an opal sea, for it is only her eyes that have the power to overwhelm and entrap me.
– I love her wildly.
You are the poison in my veins
But I inhale you
Still
My Mayfair sky blue
We create heaven
Clouds of euphoric ecstasy
But I still choke on the aftertaste
I still gag on the fumes of you
Of your disregard
You cause havoc on my insides
Yet
I inhale you, still
I had the spark you needed
Potential ignites
You pass through my lips with a violent kiss
Straight to the lungs
And I watch as I breathe out the daydreams
My fickle fantasy
This habit is not as artistic as it seems
But I watch the sapphire smoke dance in the wind
Haunting the skies with your fleeting beauty
The embers of our love
I prolong the last breaths of you like meditation
Clutching on to the chemicals
The high
For as long as I can
I burn through the nicotine as it burns through me
For if my body was a temple
It would be a shelter for the homeless
A second chance for sinners
A gateway to God
Through the love that radiates in us all
There would be no pretence here
No “holier than thou”
No role playing
No mask wearing
Just a group of God-fearing sinners
Trying to make their way Home.
There would be no saints,
For I am not one
For the good that I desire
I do not do,
But the evil that I do not want
This I practise
And it is in this temple
That only this kind of biblical vulnerability will reside.
Where there is no shame
For the reality of our human experience.
For all the ways we sin and fall short
Of God’s glory
Time and time again.
My temple would be
An abundance of loving arms
Mirroring that of the father of the prodigal son
Welcoming all home
Like estranged family
Ready to start anew
Oh, how eagerly God welcomes us home
Oh, how he yearns for us
How he pines and bleeds for us
But alas, my body is not a temple
This temporal cage does not deserve such recognition
My body is more like a prison of flesh
That my soul battles in
Constantly battling against my own human nature
Drifting me further and further away from the divine
May the Lord help marry my nature to my nurture
Help to bring peace to these two duelling entities
My innate sinful inclination
Versus
My holy burning aspiration
Only in you, Lord, will I find
Harmony and wholeness in this fatal human condition
For this I know:
Your Grace is sufficient,
Your Love is enough.
I am the tower
I am home
I am family
I am security
I am where safety should be
I am where you can let your guard down
Until…
Friction.
Two opposing forces cause a spark
Left in me because too many believe me to be
An eye sore,
The reason you clutch your purse tighter,
A reminder of the unattractive reality of poverty,
When you would much rather
Be left behind the veil of ignorance
Wealth gifts you.
So they give me a ten million pound paint job
To cover the cracks of financial inequality
Without actually dealing with the problem
– This becomes the fuel
To the fire left in me by the scornful eyes of the rich
By the powerful
Who measure worth by bank balances
They are the fuel to the fire that grows in me in the quiet, unsuspecting cover of night.
But, unfortunately, in this case
The fire is not a metaphor for love
The fire is not a metaphor for passion, for intensity, for purpose, for pleasure.
The fire is a fire
The fire is death
The fire is pain
The fire is destruction
The fire is neglect
The fire is the government, the biggest furnace of corruption
The fire is a life destroying entity
The fire is trauma
The fire is hate
The fire is what happens when we neglect social wounds; such as classism, racism and inequality
For so long
They begin to fester and persist.
For I am no more
No more am I the myriad of lives, loved ones, hopes and dreams that inhabited me.
I am now a derelict shadow
That will not be not be ignored, society.
Society is the ashes, in which the
Phoenix will rise.
Welcome to Ruth's Rhapsody 