Halloween, Love and Death

Poems and reflections

I was asked to contribute something to my friend’s Halloween themed creativity thread this evening, and found myself finishing off this poem below (Raven).

Often, poems or bits of writing, sit as pieces of cast-on knitting. I have many half done sleeves knocking about…..

I started remembering other older stuff I’d written that lent itself well to this genre.

Halloween, hey?

Often, I feel like a ghost. Maybe many of us do. Part of us here - moving, functioning whilst our true self watches on from a higher plane.

Dual lives. Our fantasy. Our reality.

Then there’s the idea of restlessness. Of being haunted, taunted by people from our past or ideas we can’t let go of…. They are the ‘zombies’ that won’t lay still. They keep coming back.

So, here are a few pieces I found relating to things of this nature, starting with the new one.

I must warn you, some of these do get a little melodramatic…..

You know what I’m like though.

Raven

5am, I’m staring…

At my favourite tethered bird 

Your suffering eyes pierce through

Like a dramatic song I heard 

The notes of you, they lift me

Before they crash right down

The rollercoaster climb of joy

Awaiting smash of ground 

I wish that I was soaring 

I wish you were my air

Inhaling all my birthdays

On your raven’s wing and prayer

But we stalled like ghosts in lift shafts

Our time flew into a jar

An earthly cage of pent up rage

At odds with where souls are.

The Overdue Meeting

Let’s reconvene the meeting

So your ghouls can sip my blood

We can thaw iced conversation

If you dare to greet the flood

I’ll herd poor recollections

Scatter words, beloved jewels

As you smash up our reflection 

To spoon the shards to feed my fool

Ghosts

The sepia rejection ribs, 

Like mustard coloured toast

Chafing ego’s fondest portrait

As a thin unbuttoned ghost

And she passes on the stairs,

I sometimes meet her in the night

And we hug and cling and struggle 

And we scratch and kiss and fight 

Oh…she plays me as a violin aches violet to the moon

Dipping every dusty angel in patchouli oil perfume

Then we swallow, go to bed, 

Tight and taut with sweet disease

And we’ll wallow til the dawn 

Will raise us fraught with silver freeze

What we carry, is our swollen heart

In body and on sleeve

Phantom lovers on our shoulder

Stubbornly refuse to leave

Dark roses on the grave of love

April’s child knots moth violas 

In hidden ditch of passion’s place

Making necklaces for bruises

Of each curse that she must face

Dusk crows…. a spurned and jaded cockerel,

Searching for her endless morn

My lily ghost mows merry shadows 

On memory’s alabaster lawn

.

I’ve come to lay dark roses

Pay my cordial respects

For the last time….until next time 

And the next time and the next….

.

Come closer, fated love of mine 

Let mince earth gravel my esteem

Watch me rock our rotting infant 

In the crib of jagged dreams

You drove our flaming chariot

To a burnt molasses end

Nailed our crosses to your festering post

At mercy of harsh wind

Do you feel me freeze, in crushing rags?

Lashing breeze churning your salt

Fairies gagged by mocking gargoyles

Demons pointing to my fault

My voice splits as your oozing kill

I wail hanged song to the abyss 

It’s time to leave, I’ve had my fill

I vow you taste my damson kiss.

Phantom Life

My heart stalked each room as if pacing an eerie haunted house. And - as I imagined it would be for a ghost - there was a feeling of both connection and disconnection.

I remembered the emotions, yet no longer had capacity to feel.

I wore old love as a dead bride’s veil.

I came to know the clumsy distortion of touch you feel through thick woolly gloves.

But I wasn’t a ghost…..I craved skin.

The phrase is to ‘fall out of love’, but it’s more that you fall into something. Another space that isn’t love. The movie is still there with the same characters but the colour has drained.  And it keeps fading and fading, until one day, you see someone on the screen, an empty, cheerless shell in this terrible, dull film, and fail to recognise it………as you.