Sleeping Alone

I had a dream in which I was asleep,

and when I woke the world was much the same.

I rose to greet this strangest near-real day,

and did not think to question all the things

which in this world were slightly different.

The rain still pattered on my window frame,

the postman still delivered the wrong mail.

The homeless still held hats for falling change

and the drunks still leered from pub doorways and

spat and cursed the serving barman’s name

who’d cut them off with sun still in the sky.

I walked on through this place that was not mine,

and realised when I got home to rest

that what was changed and missing was my bed.

It was a bed for one, I was alone.

That moment I awoke in a cold sweat,

to find my own world waiting, dawn breaking

lying in my bed for two, beside you.

Forty Nights with the Son of Man

When I walked into the desert I saw
a man on fire and you told me:
"He is a light to steer by, he burns forever
and there is no water to douse him"
It was as if by looking into his
eternal eyes I saw my life's ambitions.

When I walked into the desert I saw
a pillar of salt, and you told me:
"It is the wife of Lot, and Sodom lies beyond her."
It was as if I had found a signpost to my soul,
but she pointed to the earth itself.

When I walked into the desert I saw
a plain of obsidian, and you told me:
"There lies man's Eden, burned to the ground."
It was as if I had turned and looked back
into the world, and its glass cities.

When I walked out of the desert I saw

a tower of smoke topped with a star, and
you told me “Babel has pierced the Heavens.

Man has found his God, and His name is Science.”

And I left you there, the God of the sand.

Night Trains

The people travelling sit suspended
Dead-eyed and listless, niether here nor there
Slumbering feotal curls in a four car coffin
Coiled and waiting to rise and walk again

Cold steel caskets hurtling through sleeping towns
Lights of their lives floating islands in darkness
Here in the belly of the serpent
Isolated, sodium-lit cradles
A world to itself, sealed to the outside

Brief intrusions from reality
New worlds, street-lit and strange
Some sleepers quicken and stretch
Stumbling out of their segue interrupted

Others enter, and bring their lives with them
It will not last, they will sit as we did
Slow, fall silent and curl up as we did
The night trains fugue will claim them as it did us.

Long Pork Pies

I was born free to speak, and bleat I did.

Lamb-like I fed at mothers teat and ran

in fields of random unlearned thought.

Brief frolic with freedom before the reap,

when bundled into a crowded bus I

was sent like an offering to be taught.

Cold and alone for the first time I sit.

Shorn of childish comforts, pencil in hand.

I am not ready for black gowned headsmen.

I am plum ignorant, apple stuffed. They

feast on me like crows with gnashing teeth.

My eyes are tasty treats for them, plucked out,

my tongue numbed and ears pecked until deaf mute.

I stumble out of their factory of lies,

one more of their walking long pork pies.

A Life in Flames.

Ashes stir around my ankles

Broken glass in blackened shells

Upward reaching shattered fingers

Bloody rags and tattered clothes

Leaden hangs my weary head

Heavy arms and hollow eyes

Burning bright autumnal fires

Leaves like hands turn black and close

Sirens return me to the world

Too late to save my smouldering home

Slowing cars and staring people

Their lives go on, but mine is coal

Crossroads

We stand at a convergence of black lines,

at night they turn to streamers of white light.

All destinations are chosen here,

and indecision may lead us to stray.

There is no straight and narrow path to tread,

only treacherous and winding roads.

There is no knack to finding out the way.

No map or compass, no God to guide us.

We are all of us lost travellers.

We walk with hands outstretched, blinded by light

or forsaken and misled in darkness.

Stumbling, we carry on our journey.

The few of us who find each other

band together, desperately groping,

blindly seek the way to where we're going.

Our tethers loose, we are impermanent.

Our own origins are a mystery,

we are never who we were yesterday.

Our destination is really much the same,

tomorrow's way-points may not be today's.

Though we are each of us just a moment,

blind to the consequences of our lives,

we each struggle in our time, our choices

are what make us who we will be.

Dawn Chorus (Australian Dreams)

I wake to a cacophony of sound.

I surf this roar semi-conscious, demi-aware,

my ears frail as shells on foreign beaches.

Sulphur crested, red and white tailed waves,

Kookaburra laughter rolling me over;

rousing me, and breaking upon me.

My eyelids are heavy. They rise like the sun,

swollen and lazy, gorging on the night.

Light brims over the horizon of my

mourning mind, I shed tears of sleep and sit

up to greet the day, up to meet the sun.

I stand, still dreaming of beaches, of seas.

Oceans of red sand no ship may cut through.

I am on the coast, back to the ocean.

Gum nut trees and grinning parrots, parched earth.

Cloister Island

There is a place within my sleeping mind

where I retreat when I can't face the day.

A place of tranquil rest beneath the shade

of stretching boughs and arching colonnades.

My toes sink into ivory grains of sand,

in the shallows of a crystal lagoon.

It is still as glass, the waves are broken

by a covered marble span of harbour.

Take the walk across the shielding rampart;

between pillars, under the red clay roof.

Lie in dappled shade or gentle water,

or stand and watch the sun quench in the waves.

Personality/Memory

I leave behind me this string of past selves,

shed like old skin as I leave their moment.

They look like me but they are alien,

with the hand of the last on my shoulder.

A chain of forgotten identity.

These old clones strut behind me in lock-step,

a regiment marching to my heart beat.

Eyes forward, each ignores the one behind.

In single file, each believes itself alone,

But then night comes and we must close our eyes.

Haunted by the selves that went before me,

the tiny deaths that I live day to day.

They crowd around me, I can hear them breath.

They cry softly, I can't see through their dreams.

Dead shells rustling in the evening breeze,

old wishes bleeding through leaking seams.

The Bear Pit

There is a tunnel between here and there,

that place to which I wander when I sleep.

There is no great light, though it is well lit.

It leads nowhere though many wander it,

the lost, broken and fearfully ignored.

Great trains of thought rumble over my head,

Their freight of dreams to feed the minds of men.

What muses then wander these deeper paths?

These lonely tunnels, their anorexic light,

that bleeds and bleaches colour from the night.

I hear them muttering just 'round the bend.

Gnostic prophets; their senile visions dark.

What drives these to run screaming from the day?

To squat in filth and stare with gleaming eyes

at their hoarded piles of dirty trinkets?

Running boy

I go running through shanty cities,

with grass stained bare feet like old boot leather.

I have no fear of glass or stones in my heels

or laughing children all rag and bones.

Tin shacks lean and creak like old cripples where

inside men play mah-jong in opium hazed,

red toothed raucous back-room games.

And when I return to my tower at night

to the dusk chorus of crickets and frogs,

I ask my father why it is that those

with the least so often smile the most.

He laughs, and kisses me goodnight and says

something about the wisdom of children.

Moments

There are moments in everyone’s life when time stands still. When you seem apart from yourself, and your world is turned upside down. As I sat in a small white room, slightly nauseous from the smell of disinfectant and sick people I felt that separation. A pallid doctor sat across from me. Her careworn face wore a mask of concern that could no longer quite reach her eyes. She talked, and I nodded and even smiled. I didn’t really hear anything she said.
I just held my fathers hand as he cried.
We drove home in silence. I thought about how I couldn’t even feel the ticking bomb in my chest. Dad thought about… Whatever Dad’s think about in these situations. I hope I never know.
Everything had a detached quality, like a dream. As we pulled in outside the house, my dad broke down again. I gave him a hug. He shook under my arms, and I couldn’t understand why I felt so calm. It would occur to me over the coming months that perhaps it is easier being the one who is sick. I just sat in small white rooms and tried to hold down my lunch while soul scorched nurses tried to make me ‘comfortable’. I didn’t have to wonder what it would be like when I was gone, or whether I could have done anything different. I didn’t have to pick caskets and headstones, or leave flowers on a patch of grass and cry because I cant quite remember the way I used to laugh.
The ironic thing for me, is that in being sick I found myself. The peaceful core beneath the waves of discontent and rage. Despite the drugs, and the operations and the endless parade of those who were grieving me before I have even gone, I was the happiest I had ever been (or at least the most content, for happy is a loaded term). Life was simple, and all the things I had to fear were clear and immediate.
So lie in small white rooms I did, and I chatted with cheerful but sad-eyed physicians, and tried not to scream when they put the last drug on the stand, the one that felt like acid in my veins. I sat and read books, and lost my hair, and occasionally chatted awkwardly with someone from school who would call even though we had barely exchanged a word in six years. I became a bit of a saint, as well. You don’t speak ill of the dead, after all. And dead I was… right?
Wrong.
I have to admit a certain amount of satisfaction in writing that word. My outlook when I was diagnosed was grim indeed, and survival really wasn’t on the cards. But more even than I didn’t feel threatened by death, I wanted to carry on living. I had gained something in being sick that I had never had when I was healthy. I had gained peace. Peace for me was a combination of perspective and strength. I could see my life for what it was, and be happy. Too valuable a gift to easily let go of, my body rallied and I surprised everyone but myself.
I still remember the smile on my doctor’s face when he gave me the news. I think I always will. I sat in another small white room, looking for all the world like a baby bird with my skinny neck and big, bald head. I sat and for the merest moment, I knew what it was to fly. I had conquered the odds. And so for the second time in a small white room, slightly nauseous from the smell of disinfectant, time stood still.
This time though, it was my turn to cry.

First Post, Last Post?

Hey all, for those who don't know me (and aren't reading this just because I told you to) I'm William Wright, an aspiring writer and poet based in Bath.

I am intending to use this space for the online publication of my short stories and poems, as well as anything else that comes to mind. I hope you enjoy the content, with any luck it will expand quite quickly.