John Robinson

He breaks the dawn with a savagery of being, to understand, to know, and be again. He drains the tears and lets loose the knowing within his heart. A victim of trying now he sheds that skin and becomes what he’s always known. By the phoenix within his heart he burns into the shadows and dares them again to embrace or touch or step forth. In one final cry, no more apology, no more sacrifice, no more taking, it’s time for it to die. The coward of sensitive things , he commits to yesterday, and now he gives back with exhaustion, such concentrations of pain where no scars will ever show and none can tell – it’s time to be what he always meant to be.

Blessed and cursed by the same deliverance of understanding and yielding to the tempest of blood and beautiful fury, he controls his own and serves back once upon a time. He knelt in darkness, and the blackness almost consumed, but with a glittering sense of perception, the venom of passion bites back and the inky depths draw away – like an angel in the void, demons dare not walk in his wake.

No more words, no more softness, no more at all, just iron pumping in his being at yesterday things. He tattooed into his soul, moments to remember and with all that at once was and might have been, this swirling mass now rips through the darkest veil.

He denies the pity and self taught meanderings, he redeems the madness and fights back altogether at promises from yesterday’s grave, now gone and laid to rest. Where once he stood alone, he stands again, he whispered the only name that saved his mind and dearest silence resumes and now he destroys the clouded night sky, burning away by the fire within his eyes, these moments, such moments gone, such epitaphs, it truly was time to die. He has come back to last this time, one final time, no battles, no crosses, no walls or shame, a seething chaos of extinction and rebirth again.

To have watched, to have waited, to have renewed was all but spent, but a path he cuts anew by the intensity of this his own soul. He tempers not, and content to be forgot, but all actions deserve a blaze and he ignites the night and all that could have been. He owns his own composure, he owns his own contentment, now he strides forth, complete again, by himself, for himself, towards the peace he ached to have.

Life parted and distilled in boxes with no names – tidy little compartments where life does not dwell. Purest objectivity, perhaps not even that – smokeless fates and the burning tempest of prosaic things.

For ever after understanding what will be now, and mostly much of what will transpire – the perfect honesty of imbalance no dreams to assuage the nightmare of colourless vision. There is security in knowing, there exists safety in comprehension, but no surprise, no expectation. They all fall down and ring the roses with rusted fences and mild mannered suggestions. It only blankets the knowing of futility.

To stand alone even for a moment, testing against the razor’s edge of mediocrity and surrender to the consummate imperfections of beauty’s shroud and in the blood know a temperance of controlled fury. The hard reality shreds the dreamer, closed the book angry at the ending, the poetry of life and the consequences of others’ decisions. A soulless contemplation of the things which have eluded are mistakes again and again, where symbols of the Ouroboros abide and haunt and taunt. Pathetic. Foolish. Airs of apology silenced in a thunderclap.

Now to know, now truly knowing. The soul, the heart, and the mind, its uses are expelled but rage protests in dull hollows where a thread of barbed wire stitches into being fabrics of normalcy – again and again. No swans, no doves, no more blue birds in the clouded sky. No trips to take and none to die, no shadows now, no shields and no fields to walk just ordinary anger at mundanity creeping in the violet sky.

Sitting down on the battlefield, no race to race, no fight to fight, not in it to win it, lying down on the battlefield, just a clouded sky no dreams exist today within my eyes.

Cathedrals of glass and steel.

Walking over crucified zebras,

to markets fit for super heroes.

Metal beasts with moons for eyes,

litter the court expelling music.

Where chariots powered by people,

rattle by as if filled with plunder.

With little monsters clinging on,

drinking chemicals under the sun.

Blackhead: The Burren. The fields of rock on the west coast of Ireland.

Dysphoria

Sky cast steel where feathery rivets tack,

against the wind against the shadow falls.

Where statues hold their breath emotions lack,

harbingers of night when the darkness calls.

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Sainted glass of small ambiguous cracks,

and fiery angels turn upon the night.

Where hushed ravens in the gloom mope and vex,

opals of the heavens cast out their light.

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Smooth silver caresses their leaves of jade,

where stone pillars stretch out greeting twilight.

Then summer dwells where memories do fade,

drained of colour this time of delicate slight.

The Abbey of Corcomroe, Sancta Maria de Petra Fertilis, , the Burren. May 2010.

Where gravestones have lost their names and seem like stepping stones to heaven, a place where angels rest and demons fear to tread.

The Burren.

Fields etched with silver and purple shadows, reflecting thoughts back at us, sit tinged in green hues as infinite as the memories they make.
Nature’s ponderous exclamations in weathered Erratics – pitted with time having scored out lines like God’s hand through the fragile earth. Boulders and slabs rest like tombstones without inscription or epitaph, marked with the language of the wind and rain on their surfaces – an alphabet lost but meaning remains.
As ageless as the sky, the lands presents stepping-stones as if across time and in their fractured wake buttercups, purple marsh orchids and dandelion puffs, gather in hushed pockets of council where house-martins dance and swim in currents of marble heated air.
This rock-scape, with a haunting presence softened by carpets of green, but broken by blue, yellow, and brown like freckles on the land, provokes the heart with a beauty of no conscious memory.
There exists a knowing in the shadows of the Dolmens, those megaliths of dreams cloaked in myth. This home within the settled wind, this city of stone, where the rock themselves seem to hold their breath.

A sense of unknown holds dominion in the twilight forest and a whispering with the breeze sooths and inspires images of secrets and things kept away from daylight times.
The world drained of colour by the ethereal light of Heaven’s Eye summons the mystery of peace and calm. In the company of majestic antiquity, trees like stone sentinels with jade and glass for leaves shiver in the night against a heartbeat of sound – a scurrying of padded feet then soft feathery wings disturb the night air.
Then a hush blankets the monochrome as an owl finds a lonely branch and with gimlet attention, its liquid dark eyes search the night, then turning its head, it swoops silently away.
The night deepens, life continues.

Myoclonic Jerk

I close my eyes, drift, and feel the dark press in on me. The emptiness swells within my mind and distant images flicker, slow at first, gathering speed, flickering like silent movies, jittering then static, faster and faster too much to hold in my mind, pressing, pressuring, lost within the disconnected menagerie of images, washing over me, pushing at me – too much. I go rigid.
My eyes snap open harried by a torrent of images, now sounds, now memories, now smells and scents. Sleep is faraway and the night like day within the menace of my imaginations. Tension like a spring, brittle like glass, agitation like a hungry lion pervade my awakening brain, chasing sleep like a dog and its tail, marshmallows drinking coffee, hazards acting friendly, a machine cranking onwards ignoring the rust, fractures like reflections teach my inner thinking senseless things, and senseless moments sprout teeth within my mind, gnawing at sleep wearing it away.
I twist then turn in my wide-awake bed, with my wide-awake duvet, and my ergonomic wide-awake pillow, damn it I am wide awake now!

Where once he stood now tears remember an inward pain. Upon a breath, upon a word dreams falter and stall. The wind screams the sound of his soul not now not never again. A Shadow relents and watches while Eden slowly falls.

These words capture neither the ache nor the depth of soreness he visits, watching with tired eyes yet another grey dawn. Where rain once fell upon his soul, memories assuage not the migraine of pain within his mind.

A tenebrous silence seizes his heart, gone is her voice, her face, and her presence in kind. It matters not his endurance as prosaic futures stitch together before his gaze. A lasting eternity he cannot see beyond the ruins he set ablaze.

Inhaling smoke against painted thoughts, a reverie of glass, and walls, and sadness endure longer than his measures. He was once soulless amid so much darkness until her words reached him once and once again he returns.

He knew her before he saw her where she impressed upon him a sense of namelessness in things only felt. But now, lost in a daydream of questions that haunt his heart and mind, she is gone, and an empty place exists in his soul made colder by the place that she had once owned.

He could compare her to many things but the déjà vu of his life fills him with a knowing of certain things. A fighter, a phoenix, but a woman, all the same. Her understanding and fierce compassion weathered the worst of times, her eyes captured home and calm places which give way to loneliness and an abject sorrow of homesickness.

Her love bridged the distance from his head to his heart, now so far apart, he wonders was it ever real. Her quiet strength and tenacious spirit once upon a time rivaled the hurt and ache that the world now inspires, now all he can do is succumb to his dread and embrace the turning nightmare in his face.

Knowing her was a delight, holding her in his memory aches when as he must let go, he knew her once and he said her name in the dark, she was there perhaps not always but lingering now only within his heart, within his soul, now slipping away, away between daydreams and forgotten thoughts where shadows dwell.