The Unbearable Loneliness of the Conscious Being

A shell never to be cracked

The treasure inside 

Never to be seen

Never to be touched

The eternal mystery 

I will remain.

And when the walls finally fall

I will be long gone

Blown back into the infinite anonymity of oblivion

A breath in the wind

A secret never revealed.

And all this time wasted

Staring

Pounding

Screaming

So alone under my skin.

So much

Wasted

Inside.

The mess I am

I found this picture amongst other old drawings I did when I was younger. This one was done in my art class when I was 12 or less I think. We had to draw something out of the outline of our own profile. The result very much reflects how I've felt most of my life...
I remember that day. I was very self conscious as a young teenager and having to do something out of my own body image was a terrible task. I was very much an applied and aesthetically-orientated artist at the time, doing mostly delicate, representative or idealised graphical work. What I did during the session was quite unlike my usual work. The result of this lesson didn't bring anything up to my Conscious at the time. It was a disappointing session as far as I was concerned.
It's only 20 years later that this suddenly strikes me with a very poignant and moving strength. This drawing is such an honest representation of what I was soon going to experience. So maybe it had started already?
I feel so sad for this little girl, whose mind melts in a gory mess, so empty and hollow inside. An omen of what was to come. A snapshot of lucidity.

Enfance

Donne-moi la main

Sautons à reculons

Jusqu'au fossé

De notre mémoire.

Dans ces jours dorés

A regarder le soleil

Derrière les rideaux

A manger des tartines

Les yeux pleins du cadeau

Tout ce temps devant nous

Notre peau un peu trop grande

A remplir peu à peu

Des bosses que donne l'âge

Mais tout cela si loin

Maintenant juste rire

Penser au père Noël

Ecouter des chansons

Et dépenser nos vies

De la meilleure des manières

Heureux et insouciants.

Nous Etions Là (pour le projet "I Was Here")

Assise sur le rebord de la table
J’écouterai les moineaux et la touterelle

L’absence comme un diaporama
Le passé étalé comme du beurre sur une tartine

A relire comme ses paumes erraflées
A remonter de l’eau comme un poisson qui mord

Un sourire, un frisson,
L’empreinte chaude d’une vieille main dans la nôtre

Attends encore un peu
Cela revient

Les jours se mêleront dans une grande embrassade
Et la lumière viendra cueillir le silence sur les meubles

Et je vous reverrai dans chacun de ces objets
Qui racontent les gestes, le mouvement des vivants

Je reverrai vos coeurs dans chacun de ces objets
Qui racontent les goûts insensés des vivants

Je parlerai de vous avec chaque photo
Vous tirerai de la sourde ouatte de l’oubli

Je répèterai vos noms
Debout là comme une preuve

Que vous étiez
Que nous étions tous là.

The art of being alive

The art of being alive

The fear of the blank page

To be started in screams and tears

The chaotic fight of becoming one.

Understanding what it is to be human

And accept the curse of knowledge.

Remain humble amongst the creatures of this pageant.

Push our rock uphill

Over and over again.

Looking for the elusive other

Understanding what it is to be human

And accept the incurable loneliness

Hang on to a stranger's hand

To share the load uphill

Over and over again.

It's really just a work of labour,

Tears, fear and a lot of love

The art of being alive

The art of being human.

Fog

A godly sight
As I look down
Cold witness of a ghostly world
Caught in the mouth of the monster
The nothingness before
The nothingness after

A pale absence covering all things
Canceling contours and erasing hills
Taking away all substance
From this world clinging on
To its transient reality.
A floating wisp resisting the annihilation
Just like a fading memory.

Universe

The whole of the sky
Is looking at you
The ancient oceans
Keep rolling their waves
Upon silent shores
Of star-born pebbles
And of consumed bones.

The echo of the hills
Stretching up and lying down
On the horizon line
The soil and dust and sand
The water and the wind
The stillness of the ages
Through the dance of the tides
The ocean machine
The heartbeat of a God.
 

The mad waltz of the Moon
Around our little rock
Our little home spinning
Shaking and tipping us at times
Into the darkness and the frost
Of an unknown infinity
Another trip around the Sun
Mere unrecordable
Celestial brevity.
   
All this going on around you
Your little dramas and sorrows
And to the day you join it all
Again
Your puny spark of selfishness
And desperate individuality
Finally blown away

So you can humbly return
To be a part of
The universe.

Hold Me

Hold me.
Like some driftwood after the wreck
Like a parachute
A candle in darkness.

Hold me.
Like a balloon on your birthday
Like a promise to a child
A promise to the dead.

Hold me.
Close enough for our hearts to touch

And hum and sing to the same song
And silence our enemies Time and Space...

Hold on.

 

Please just hold on to love.

Insects

Weigh your worth before the eternal beauty of the Universe
Bow and kneel and beg to let you exist a little longer
Insignificant speck of stardust, barely a breath
In the scale of Time and Space and other things bigger
Than our puny little minds and desperate little gestures.

Horizon

Some bones are better left quiet
Untouched by noisy memories
Unshaken by our pining life
Just to be forgotten

Because soon we'll be dust clouds
Undressed of our skin and scars
And heavy brain and leaking heart
Ashes somewhere unseen

In silence
Joining the layers
Making up the line
Of the horizon.

Being Human

Remember the days the horizon

Was but a hair from your head and the sky

A gentle mouth from above

Kissing your brow.

The sea and the waves used to mirror your fears

A delightful crescendo of things

Too big, too deep, too human to handle

Crashing on your brain, crushing the illusion

Of peace within.

I remember the days your skin was a wall

To scratch and hit to try and peer through

A box, a shroud, a promise of loneliness

Forever anonymity and silence.

Remember the days your hands and your heart

Could speak not in words but in a stronger tongue

And it made you bleed, and it made you smile

And it made your life worth the strife

And it made your life worth being that short spark 

Sprung from darkness, thrown again into dark

Bright but for a breath in the cold loneliness

Of being a human, a temporary work of art.

Oath

I promise I'll forget
About the skull under my face

The eternity after me
The presence of the absent

The oblivion to which my name
Is bound and imminent

And who I am in my body
Forever to be encased.

Forget Me Not

I have been sleeping here

Under the birches that lined the way

To nowhere in particular

I lie in the embrace

Of brambles and weeds

Where sunlight

Is never quite invited

But where small miracles can take place.

Because I left
A long time ago.

Gone are the days
When the wind carried my voice

A breath across your brow

The sound just like forget-me-nots

Sighing in the oddly still air

Of another sundown.

Because I went
A long time ago.

I'm barely a part of this world

Ground to the thinnest state of existence

Not even white bones in a box

Under a faded stone

Not even a face nor a scent

In any mind alive.

Because I was
A long time ago.

Ashes in a dust cloud

As someone walks over my grave

I rise again for a short while

Please try to remember my name

As you tread softly on my bed

In that place where birches line the way

To nowhere at all.

Because I died
A long time ago.

Walk in the Woods

The sound of my feet on the ground

A faint whisper, the breath of the dying

The time and the impact

Of my stay here

Barely heard

Barely seen

And gone already

The lines around my eyes

And the weight of my skin, my bones

The slow pull of the ground

Of the things beneath, the call

Hungry for me

To turn me into soil

The shiver every night

One day closer

I get no consolation

From stardust and celestial tales

Nor wind nor rain nor stone

The terror of the flesh

The horror of the mind

And no God to embrace and tell me sweet sweet lies

From Eternity, no comforting smile

A cold walk in the woods

Naked and half mad

No path through the brambles

And no escape from the wolf.

Marching on

The air has a smell again
A flat world swelling with relief
Waking shivers but a big smile in the middle of the sky
for Nature hates being idle too long
And is rubbing Her hands
Like an artist in front of a blank canvas

Late afternoon.

The taste of sweat on your lips.

The smell of the sun on your skin.

But the roughness of your hand on my heart.

My martyr's temptation.

I can't move.

I can't fight.

Buds

On the still blind face of the world today

The scents were back

Filling the emptiness of everything around

With the vague recollections

Of earth and sun and leaf

Of lark and toad and bee

Moss and heather

The reason why I'm here

Suddenly remembered

The point of it all

To feel this

Again.

Poem

The pale light of Winter

Falls across my face

Cold embers of my youth

Like snow crumbling 

But it's colder underskin

It's thin and shivering

A baby bird lying

Amongst the bracken

Of your distant heart

But I will never say these words. 

Because I know
They don't work for you. 

And I know you don't read those words. 

Poetry never made any sense to you. 

But I am really a poem, 

And though no one might ever understand it, 

I'm hoping you'll like the music, 

The flavour I leave on your tongue 

And the tingle I leave in your heart.

Because I am a poem.

Obscure,

Pointless,

But a bonus to life.

Bracken

Show me an easier way
Through the bracken
Back to colour and light
And warmer nights
Back to a time when
I was enough
You were enough
And there were no tears

Behind our smiles.

 

 

January Monochrome

The sky will understand

My desertion

As only you can bring any colour
To this desolation

A world about to drop me like rain

Over the fields of grey

About to blow me like wind

Through the bareness of the trees

I will seek you like sunshine

Through the clouds of January

And hold you like a promise

Of green and leaf and light

In a shivering corner

Of my hibernating heart.