Hope or other

 

And I stare at the sky,

the twinkling of airplanes

soaring over my head,

memories bleed into memories,

concepts become shared dreams.

Scattered memories,

shattered illusions and mind chemistry.

Something unsaid. A word remembered.

A world seen like an opaque video screen

into somewhere lost to times bleeding seams.

 

And in those memories

I remember waking in bed,

Alien presence in the air overhead,

no airplanes. Not yet.

Visitors from another dimension and time

Somewhere closely tied to this modernity.

But from a place unaligned.

 

In a sugar high, I feel sweetness

but I taste lies, loss and enslaved lives.

In sleep deprived haze

I gaze at life and see the strain.

Clinging to the backwater of life.

I hear a voice. Illegible.

But I understand the sequence of

symbols and frequencies.

A countdown hidden

in clear sight, our plight. A

burning night. As humanity

shows its stains,  

but I feel both fight and flight.

 

Fear pulls tendons tight,  

tendrils twisting in the night.

A pain inside, the screams,

like a cat unburdened

of its nine lives.

The black knight satellite serving us

messages in the cosmic Wi-Fi.

Lately the signal lies,

in a misevent, a galactic tide.

The 6g sign of five oceans colliding,

As fortunes collapse, in a trio,

the atriums of heaven triumph

over earths lonesome swans.

The atrium of otherness

in demonic form?

When the birds no longer roost,

but fly free, to gather their hopes

in one moment of life, or a stolen hope

swooped from their beak.

A blank display over

internal video screens.

As zero moments now lay ahead.

 

The sky bursts colour.

A rainbow.

Is it hope or another?

I swear I heard

a murmur in the other.

A word to cling on to, a word,

Together.

Together.

 

A tether?

 

A tight binding

of us and them.

A message in

the sign of the swan.

A symbolic union.

Freedom. Doves

 

Love. Amongst all.

A call, unearthly,

a symbolic fall,

a crash of worlds,

a clash of words

both big and small.

 

As I stare I hear the roar of jet engines

cutting apart the air.

 

And I watch in despair

as humanity fires first.

Downfall or glory?

 

And the last hopes in our story

burst into flames

in a second of stupidity,

or was it release

from a prison

we couldn’t see.

A prison with only blue skies

and no escape from the rising seas.

 

I close my eyes and see nothing.

Echoes of you in echoes of song

 

Echoes live on in the static that surrounds, 

like a radio dial that keeps jumping around.

 

Fizzle, fizzle. Crackle. I fumble the dial.

A song breaks its shackles and bursts out.

Embracing the airway, Marvin Gaye,

followed swiftly by the sonic imagery of

The Temptations, The Impressions,

The Drifters. Song after song painting pictures,

swooping through the airwaves, like bricks

thrown through mental windows,

or a bird in flight, wings beating in harmony.

 

Memories collect memories, gathering together

in a puddle of songs, reflecting your love

and a heart that would always beat so strong,

along with the tears and the hurt, that we can

no longer share in the story or share in the song.

 

Echoes live on in the music that chooses to play

when things are going wrong, or we are having a bad day.

 

Fizzle, fizz, crackle. Crash.

The little things you'd say, snap through the static.

Wordplay, deft, daft, delicate, sometimes delicious. 

They echo in the wind, sayings you'd created, jokes

that would hang in the silence before our brains

could connect the links.

 

You thought with cleverness,

and you fought with your demons,

But would always fight ours first.

A deft touch of poetic flourish.

For your words were never there to crush,

but to aid and nourish.

You didn’t talk to talk. You'd let the words

have purpose, so that every message

was imparted with wisdom beyond all of us.

 

So many memories, one for ever channel.

I turn the dial, slowly, trying to pinpoint

a voice, a memory. I hear so many.

Some heartbreaking, they bend and scream,

breaking reality, a heartbeat fading in time.

Memories a son should never see,

moments of life stolen away.

 

The dial slips, now it is spinning independently.

Some echoes are there to mend the fractures

of time's broken screen, to repaint the smile,

which has worn so thin.

 

Echoes of you live on. I have memories.

A list so long. I can just retune the dial in my head,

and a different moment comes rushing in,

a wave over a riverbed, these whispered kisses

left to always be read.

I remember holidays away. I remember

you cooking dinner every day,

and whilst you were not the finest chef,

not even in the top 8 billion, to me

you were a 1 in a million.

 

The memories screech past at blistering speed...

The poet, the comic artist, the thinker, the writer,

the avid Marvel viewer, the film buff, the collector

of stories, a mind full of memories and moments

we will never get to see.

 

I have too many echoes of the day

that your life slipped away.

They deafen me. Frantically trying

to compress your chest, to keep death at bay.

To give us even one more hour,

a minute. A second. A memory I replay

every single tear-soaked day.

What I would give for you to open

those eyes and say it was all a mistake.

But it wasn't to be.

 

Now I see you in echoes of memory,

in the echoes in the mirror facing me.

Stories that will never die,

Memories of a sunny sky,

whiling away on a sunny afternoon,

as The Kinks suddenly break through

the gloom, and I know somehow

that somewhere you are sitting back,

your records playing loud, singing you heart out.

 

Out of tune with the words all wrong

but it didn't matter because that was love,

you loved the sounds. You loved the song.

A game of hearts

 

I fell under a black moon.

The sky stained with lost fortunes.

I danced aimlessly into

a game of chance, a game of hearts,

and I lost to you.

You gave me sanctuary

away from the solitaire life.

Free parking when I didn't drive.

But it was all a ruse, a bluff

where the house always wins.

 

And this house was a house of sin.

 

For I never stood a chance.

The game was rigged

when you passed go.

You advanced,

as I slid down through

snaked pathways,

as the slippery ladders were

snatched clean away

from my hands.

 

You risked my heart,

by gambling on my emotions.

You took apart the cards,

picking only the winning ones

from your stacked deck.

You scratched

the scores in illegible

scribble, you made me scrabble

for my scrambled emotions in

a mentally disorganised mind,

feeling I wasn’t an equal player

on this field.

 

"Checkmate"

you state, as I fall

to the cards of fate.

The cards of hate?

 

You rolled all the dice

I just counted

the numbers,

6 6 6

Devilish grin on your face

I couldn’t ever win.

 

Or so you thought.

 

I cast aside the dice.

Instead of anger

I took out my rage on the page.

Not flipping the board,

or flipping you the bird.

I offered my arms open wide

I smiled in your disgrace,

and I said goodbye with a hug

for I wouldn’t keep

playing your games.