Your Soul is a Work of Art

Don’t feel less than anything.

Merely because your skin does not shine evenly like polished boughs.

Your teeth are not all twinned.

Your contours are not what you would have

If it were you who had fashioned your own visage from soft clay.

Don’t feel less.

They’re invisible to me anyway.

I’ve already been blinded by your soul.

And staggered by your heart.

Your essence has me in a stupor.

You are a work of art.

God furnished you with beauty

To tear me all apart.

I can’t continue with my deadened days the same.

Your soul is a work of art.

And I can tell you don’t see it.

That uncertainty that’s always in your eyes tell me

You always wonder if you’re doing anything right.

And I don’t know how to tell you

You change everything around you, like a light.

Now I don’t have the courage

But one day we’ll sit and I’ll tell you the ending from the start

You’ve turned all this into a gallery

And your soul is my favourite work of art.

My Place

You’ve held me in all my darkest turns.

You’re the comfort to which I continually resort.

You hide me when trials of fire come and burn.

With you lie my freshest tears and deepest thoughts.

This may be why I hold so fast to you, when I should be leaving instead.

And when I do, I’m yearning to be back, secured and warm. I long after you.

Bed.

Your First Time

I wish I was there to pry his reptilian fingers away

When they slid round your unready frame.

I wish I had told you.

This time isn’t the right one.

 Wait first ‘til you’ve unearthed a treasure.

Someone who knows your form is a temple for love.

Not an ornament for his basest ego.

And I would tell you this

Not because you must fashion and maintain

A facade of ‘innocence’, as this world loves.

But because your body is your own prize. Not his.

It is for you to cherish and teach others how to.

But even if I had spoken, you would not hear me

Because this is a world that eats diamonds. And souls

And it shouts loudest with its demands.

Mine is already half consumed. I’ve accepted

Our daughters could be giants.

But they must bow down.

To fit in.

Eve

The sight of those who know love for you

Was misted. And to their tongues you tasted

Something like perfection.

And born through all this adoration

Is a life furnished with every verdant and beautiful gift.

You had everything.

And to him you were everything.

Truly mother of all the spoiled and beautiful,

You wanted for nothing. Yet you wanted everything.

And with all ten fingers you felt for

A semblance of something

To appease that deep deceptive hunger

That all your daughters know.

And the hunger ate you alive.

He blamed you.

Now they blame your daughters for everything

When they fall.

They blame you for what they feel.

That their thirst for you leads them
To pools of madness.

They blame you for the stirring of desire.

A twisted game of shame.

They blame you

As though self-control is a myth.

And it's you who has spiked 'strong' minds with love

Or something like it.

Poor Eve

You were always easiest to blame.

Love of the 'Ordinary'

Life was a whirling mess of city lights

And pay-check shackles.

I began to forget myself.

When the cracks had finally worked their way

To my core

I realised I was wholly broken.

And it freed me.

I left my little space

Walked out.

Walked out and neared myself to the ground.

I smelled warmth and grass

Played in it with my fingers.

I felt home.

I saw the sky

I was arrested by its comfort.

The air moved like a kiss

I began to cry.

I admired the small birds above me

And apologized

Like an adulterous love begging forgiveness.

I’m sorry I neglected  you.

This whole and perfect beauty.

I lay there until evening fell

And I grovelled to the stars.

Please take me back.

I’m so ashamed.

I let the noise of concrete lies

Drown out the sound of your everyday love song

For me.

Invisible God

Mock me not for trusting after an invisible God.
Gravity is an invisible force
We see it work behind everything around us.
Oxygen is not captured by my eye
Yet it is essential unto the core of me.
I’ll never hold the gales of wind
But they move me and I know they are real.
He made all of these
To show me powerful forces are invisible.
That’s why He’s called ‘Love.’
And please don’t blame me
That even my breath believes in him
Even though his world is sick and dying.
For the moments of respite he offers
From the Earth’s exhausting sorrows
Comfort my aching bones. He’s still at work
‘Cos Love is there
To make the unbearable bearable

I Breathe You

I tried to shut you away
And you bled through my fingers.
My splinter set fast.
Blue bruise sorrow.
That I’m a thousand dreams far from
Who I think I ought to be
To arrive at even the cusp of your brilliant force.
But breathe over me still.
I need it in my lungs.

A Mother

I would avoid being around when she is

A resentment spoils our air.

My cold glass words are her punishment

For birthing a universe of human mess.

That I must live with.

For making me feel like a mistake she’d made.

I was.

She and my ‘father’ were enemies for a while.

The mistake was another man.

He suffocated her with words like molasses.

And just as sickly.

But a woman who wakes in the morning

To find pieces of herself falling in her hands

Loses the discernment from her tongue.

And a boy who knows how to build those pathetic fragments

Into an ornament unto his ego

Will be a momentary saviour .

So, as they say the universe is

I was birthed out of chaos.

And when the young man’s fingers became tired

of holding those pieces up

She returned home.

With a bounty of strange sorrow and new shame.

Many years later she finally spoke with words

The reason for the disjointed

And fractured bones holding our ‘family’ together.

I wouldn’t blame her for the mistake.

I don’t blame her for compromising herself for a semblance of love

Few women haven’t.

My special malice for her is for all my years

Of treating me as merely a flesh covered reminder

Of a time when life showed her she was unwanted.