Openness

tremors

Fragile centre
Like the clam to the shell
Open the box
Inside like wax
Melting, freely, (not too freely)
Fragile indentation
Please don't be so rude
You left your muddy bootprint
All over us
What once was sealed
Must be reopened
Some day
And the only way
Is soft like putty
Draw some blinds
Find a safe place to hide in
Give yourself time

tremors

Twisting daggers
How quickly the mood turns
With a phonecall
You always know best
We're just too alike
My heart compassion fatigued
How I'd love to wish you well
But how I wish to let you go
Still there must be something in there
Lurking
There's always something behind the sting
I try to find it senselessly
And pictures more gracious start to tug at me
Like the faded-glow ghost ship
Sailing still black waters
Lines stretching onwards in the night
Meaning in pictures
That haven't yet come out
My ghost ship rides alone
But you
You
Have a scratched knee from the thornbush

tremors

Cosmic ordering@thedigital laundromat
Chuck in detritus
Lock the door
Add a hefty dose of truth
Don't spare no dirt here
But keep the central vortex
Clear
You can stand well back
Or lean on this machine
It doesn't care
But you will vibrate
And what comes out
when the door is opened?
Run too hot and bleeding colours;
Run too cold, still festering in shit
But set the dial right and they guarantee you
What comes out
It's always new

tremors

I've got nothing to say
Especially about whatever it was
Separation to the nth degree
This ceiling they call mind
Blew away years ago
And something else came in
The unspeakable without boundaries
It used to scare me
- I never knew if I'd come back
Today it just bores me
I've come back one too many times
Today I don't fear the ceiling
Or its open skies
Today I feel this feeling
Go high but parachute back down
The pills help I guess
The first time they got it right
All those years and all that money
To try and turn me into someone else
(I resist)
My mind I'm afraid has outwitted the best of their doses
I took them but refused the inertia, refused the stammering, refused the lock down
Rose above it
I learned to fight that right down inside me
And when I finally got my life back
I took charge of its decline
Believe me I tried to fight them at the time
Tried to stop them putting it down my throat
I guarantee you they have means
To break your will, break your body, break you down
There really is no escape
But how come I'm the only one of them that knows
Knows what this did to me, to my self
The struggle
The daily struggle
And now they've got one
That almost seems my friend
I guess it must have slipped right through the net
This rage at my annihilation
By chemical, by force
Still burns on
One day I'll break something good
And then they'll know.

But mind still flies
Beyond that ceiling
Tears still cry
And years pass by
The thing I'm trying to put my finger on
- Is the infinite terror of the really loose mind
I told you it bores me
They lined up every demon
And I took on each one in turn
Now
I can soar
I can float back down
I can talk
I can cut through that fog
My heart though is beating
Just waiting for my prey
I've a long sighted rifle
And I'm biding my time
So well trained; fury so well contained now
That I'm almost forgetting my target
But when I see them I'll know it

Click, click
and gone

tremors

I won't forgive them
They made mistakes
and had me bouncing off the walls
Last year
Cutting the throat of my own family
with their razor
Tripping every night
I in my solitary room hearing the raindrops abuse me
In plain English, clear as the day
But the worst thing is
They never listened
Never listened once
Me, scared shaking, terrified and tripping
I tried to tell them
I tried to tell them
'You're ill'
No
- Your mistakes cost me my mind
A tiny voice
Disappearing down the plughole
It's petrifying
Me, alone, having to work out what was wrong
It was the others who told me
Don't take that shit man, it messes with your mind
And so it cost me everything left in the tank
To work out how to tell them
I cursed everything senselessly
I didn't sleep for months
They didn't believe me
A simple mistake
But the crime is they don't listen
They never listen
They sleep safe, so far away, and know better
I tried to tell them

I tried to tell them

mysticweed

sonofabitch
what happened to you
did this happen to you
what a trip to the dark side
for sure
exquisite writing
jaw dropping reading
fuck

tremors

chickweed wrote:

sonofabitch
what happened to you
did this happen to you
what a trip to the dark side
for sure
exquisite writing
jaw dropping reading
fuck

Yes it's all happened to me unfortunately!

Thanks for the words

mysticweed

tremors wrote:

chickweed wrote:

sonofabitch
what happened to you
did this happen to you
what a trip to the dark side
for sure
exquisite writing
jaw dropping reading
fuck

Yes it's all happened to me unfortunately!

Thanks for the words

my words are inane and insipid
well, except for fuck
but they are from my heart
take care
g

tremors

I liked the fuck, and the 'exquisite writing' bit!

Thanks lots g

PilateOfTheStorm

i've read these a couple of times over now
and i simply have no words

love them
love your writing
thanks tremors

tremors

electricxlovex wrote:

i've read these a couple of times over now
and i simply have no words

love them
love your writing
thanks tremors

Thankyou my friend

tremors

Birdsong
Daylight
Half an hour in the car park
A mother's hand
Fleeting silence
Memory
Of surviving something worse
Fragrance
Blossom
Looking through the doors
Unlocking them
with sheer intelligence

tremors

Machine winds down quickly
Hums to a halt
Body dysmorphia
Courage retreats
I look in the mirror
And see ugly old me
The one before they took me
The one before I realised I could fight
The one before a penny dropped
Deep into that night
The night I collapsed
Vacated
Prayed, silent pleaded
Left
Got up and slowly pulled my nine hole boots on
Courage deserting
Faltering flames
Fingers slipping
From all I have gained
Hit me one time
And bring it all back
Make me hard again
I dare you

tremors

If I ever see his face again
I will tell him the same things I did then
Now the boot is on the other foot
They cannot be repeated

mysticweed

tremors wrote:

If I ever see his face again
I will tell him the same things I did then
Now the boot is on the other foot
They cannot be repeated

if the object of this is a doctor
put that booted foot up his hiney

tremors

chickweed wrote:

tremors wrote:

If I ever see his face again
I will tell him the same things I did then
Now the boot is on the other foot
They cannot be repeated

if the object of this is a doctor
put that booted foot up his hiney

I was tempted to, many times. I gave him the sack when I had the power to do so. He was an evil, incompetent, misguided power crazed fool. There must be something in the training that encourages psychiatrists to become as 'nasty' as possible. In the interim though I have rerouted my career, and am in the process of dismantling the entire profession of contemporary psychiatry, and replacing it with something better. I think it will take me 20 years to pull off.

tremors

Here is one of the first things I ever wrote, aged about 19 - so 19 years ago probably. I still remember it, because it has a melody attached to it too


Smell of molten tarmac
mingles with the scent of chapatti
We cycle and we're 8 years old
and make it back in time for tea
Looking up I noticed life
will pass you by, insanity
But things were so much simpler then
when it was just you and me
You grew up before your time
and as for me well I'm still trying
to figure out if a wanderer or
a ______ is something that I wish to be


I forget the ending now, and was going to write a new one, but decided not to!

acrossssSsssshittt

tremors wrote:

Find a safe place to hide in
Give yourself time

tremors

acrosSShit wrote:

tremors wrote:

Find a safe place to hide in
Give yourself time

Hey acrosshit - I have a feeling I will be revisiting the poetry forum in a while from now. Friday evening, always get kinda...... y'know...... reflective.

Hope all is strong with you (somewhere)

tremors

In the University library
1993
You were gorgeous
In your boots and leggings
I had a yearning
to know you
yearning
It took me weeks
but you let me in
You smiled
You always clutched a cassette player
Tighter than your books
Always had a faraway look in your eye
And the first week I knew you
I asked what you heard
You looked awkward but showed me your ear
It was alive
I didn't think much
But this was the starting bell
For sleepless nights and poems
I wonder if you still have my poems
You were drifting so far away
I was trying to reach you
Trying to bridge your divides
I wrote and wrote into the early hours
A torrent from places a young man
shouldn't have to reach
I wrote through the night sometimes
It was a love, a pain
A cracking up
My innocence in freefall
Your stories made me cry
I just wanted to prove to you
That it didn't have to be like this
That you didn't deserve it
That the way you looked
The way you made me feel
Filled me with
Something
Something good
You were on an ethereal plane

I joined you there

It cost me a lot

tremors

Unenviable positions come with first light, the rust in the tonsils, the wool in the head. The first waking hours like cracking off the crust. Chipping away until around 11 o'clock there is breakthrough, and I'm free, I'm me again. The accelerating slide, down a flower strewn hill. Heading for sunlight, light reflecting from surfaces turned inside out. Leaving the stagnant house behind and striding. Forth. Into somewhere. Anywhere but here. Reaching a rhythm, steps and footfall, and bouncing from the pavement, and winding in and out of my neighbours - all set off for something, on a headless chicken mission to 'buy stuff', 'buy stuff', buy stuff. And so I join in. Buy me some coffee, buy me some tat. Sit down and smoke, and then after that? Yesterday on my return I watched the sky burn deep orange, so aloof from the traffic, like a heavenly furnace, deriding our surface. Our surface efforts, our surface woes, daily trials and tribulations - to the furnace.... nothing. It burned onwards, inspiring all who looked. Did anybody look? I gulped it on down before I opened my door. The people I passed, chatting - they didn't seem to care. They talked of their children, they talked of his hair. I wanted to grab them - shout 'look at the fucking sky!'. But I didn't; I smiled, and walked right on by.

tremors

The young man who grinned a sick grin. Who kept me locked, and locked my arms, who was first to join the punishments, the beatings, the deprivations. He seemed to revel in it. I can still see his sick grin, it's been haunting me like a crescent moon. Until just now, I realised what it was.... There's a gulf fuelled by my envy. Which he had no desire to fill. The gulf from sanity to insanity. Why try and bridge it? It gives him power, it feeds him. In more ways than one.

So instead he stands there on the bridge, grinning at me as I go insane, beating me up and rubbing my nose in it. It makes him stronger as I fall, helpless, unhelped, a full foot beyond alone. He smirks, he grins, he teases, he plays games. He runs to the fray with relish. And now I'm where he was. In the land of the lucid. It makes me shiver, how anyone could be so cold. I'm tempted to find out where he lives and show him some lucid fear. Watch him as he realises 'this is really happening', to him, to me. Let him see what I went through; at his hands. He doesn't want to bridge the gap. He goes to work to gloat.

But there's something more beneath this. I know his face. That pretty man is sick. And he's in his element.

tremors

Lake
Settling
Birds corkscrewing
Trees
Billowing
Warmth
Home
Replenishing
Mind
Spiralling

mysticweed

tremors wrote:

In the University library
1993
You were gorgeous
In your boots and leggings
I had a yearning
to know you
yearning
It took me weeks
but you let me in
You smiled
You always clutched a cassette player
Tighter than your books
Always had a faraway look in your eye
And the first week I knew you
I asked what you heard
You looked awkward but showed me your ear
It was alive
I didn't think much
But this was the starting bell
For sleepless nights and poems
I wonder if you still have my poems
You were drifting so far away
I was trying to reach you
Trying to bridge your divides
I wrote and wrote into the early hours
A torrent from places a young man
shouldn't have to reach
I wrote through the night sometimes
It was a love, a pain
A cracking up
My innocence in freefall
Your stories made me cry
I just wanted to prove to you
That it didn't have to be like this
That you didn't deserve it
That the way you looked
The way you made me feel
Filled me with
Something
Something good
You were on an ethereal plane

I joined you there

It cost me a lot

soooooo goooood
goddamn i was there with you
and i was there without you
soooooo goooood

tremors

chickweed wrote:

tremors wrote:

In the University library
1993
You were gorgeous
In your boots and leggings
I had a yearning
to know you
yearning
It took me weeks
but you let me in
You smiled
You always clutched a cassette player
Tighter than your books
Always had a faraway look in your eye
And the first week I knew you
I asked what you heard
You looked awkward but showed me your ear
It was alive
I didn't think much
But this was the starting bell
For sleepless nights and poems
I wonder if you still have my poems
You were drifting so far away
I was trying to reach you
Trying to bridge your divides
I wrote and wrote into the early hours
A torrent from places a young man
shouldn't have to reach
I wrote through the night sometimes
It was a love, a pain
A cracking up
My innocence in freefall
Your stories made me cry
I just wanted to prove to you
That it didn't have to be like this
That you didn't deserve it
That the way you looked
The way you made me feel
Filled me with
Something
Something good
You were on an ethereal plane

I joined you there

It cost me a lot

soooooo goooood
goddamn i was there with you
and i was there without you
soooooo goooood

Thanks very much g. I always think it's hard when you write from 'memories', to know if any of it is making any sense to anybody else.

tremors

She came drifting barefoot
The second and only
Love of my life
She wandered the daylight
Plucked the petals and gave them to me
She had no sense of time
Her touch was like cool water
Sizzling at it reached my fire
As she stroked my brow
I felt shackles loosen
Deep down inside

She came into my life
As I came into hers
And we slow danced around it
Until it was time to part
The only one who didn't rip me
As she left me
Didn't bail out
When I left her
Standing alone again

A year later
I returned to the church
Where a year before
We huddled on the hilltop
Wrapped up in each other
Wrapped up
From the shuddering wind
I looked out across the valley,
Placid now
Unlike the aching in my chest
As I went inside the dark, the musty
Woody shelter
I felt an arrow in my heart
As I read back through the visitors
Scrawled in blue and going back so many years
I recognised your writing
You said
I wish to marry
will you marry me K?
I took the pen and wrote
What I said to you back then
I wrote
I love you, Yes

PilateOfTheStorm

tremors wrote:

Here is one of the first things I ever wrote, aged about 19 - so 19 years ago probably. I still remember it, because it has a melody attached to it too


Smell of molten tarmac
mingles with the scent of chapatti
We cycle and we're 8 years old
and make it back in time for tea
Looking up I noticed life
will pass you by, insanity
But things were so much simpler then
when it was just you and me
You grew up before your time
and as for me well I'm still trying
to figure out if a wanderer or
a ______ is something that I wish to be


I forget the ending now, and was going to write a new one, but decided not to!

I love this

tremors

Thanks electriccccx!

tremors

W.M.E.

You met someone who gets up
When you put them to the ground
You met someone who knew
How to rise above the screech, smart and sting
So you stung him again
And again
And again
You met someone
On another plane
You know so little
You don't know what you're doing
You met someone better trained than you

You're used to squashing violence
But found it harder to squash peace
You didn't like it when your wristbands
Only brought you greater danger
You believe in brute force
You'll never understand where I've been
I wasn't going to let you take me
I can dig a lot deeper than you

In the end you did what you know best
You increased brutality
Took it over the top
You increased numbers
You couldn't afford to lose
You had to break me
With all that you had
You were frightened
By things you didn't understand
Not everything lies in the text books
They teach in this land
You got your victory
You must have thought you all did a good job

So how come when I saw you last week
It was you that flinched?

tremors

The Monster

I watched the Hulk last night
And it upset me
How I hurt the people around me
How I scare the people around me
They look at me
And see the monster
Even years later
Through the furrowed brow
They look inside and see the monster
I look back and see the monster
Who on earth can love the monster?

tremors

Retreat to fear of zero
Let it fall back to the earth