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Hope fled long before,
On wings I could not share.
That which I adore
Left nothing but despair.
I cower in the dark,
And now that Hope is gone
Life sears bright and stark
With smiles plastered on.
Through this mask of joy
Eternal wishes fly
For Hope’s return, coy
I pray it’s not goodbye.
Content soon, I hear
"Anon, I come" Hope sings
Quelling creeping fear
Wrapped softly in Hope’s wings.
Another short story. This one is about childhood; not necessarily mine but some people may recognise themselves! It follows first day at playgroup, nursery and school and ends with the first time you realise childhood is not perfect, not a fairytale. It’s not about loss but about the awkward transition from innocence to experience.
Once upon a time, not so very long ago, in a distant land, not so far from here there lived a girl. A girl who was not a princess but who never gave up hope that one day she may be. It was not the riches, the dubious celebrity, the contempt of Mrs. Jones, Mr. Smith, their kids, step kids, pet hamsters that she desired. It was not even the inevitably insipid looking Prince Charming that drove this dream. The thing she most wanted was to be like the beautiful, happy princesses from the animated films that had punctuated her childhood with their spinning dresses and sweeping hair and sweet songs and happily ever afters. Dancing in a field, friend of the birds, (strangely coloured, fat and charismatic birds, sometimes even clothed), singing like a nightingale (not clothed and possessing the normal levels of charisma for a bird) and utterly enchanting to look at, even though the happily ever after dress and hair hadn’t happened yet. Read the rest of this entry »
“Ignoramuses!” she exclaimed. And then added, “Or should that be ‘ignoramii’? She lay down the pen she had been using to mark the essays with. Green, never red. Red looked too threatening. Too much like school. She couldn’t help thinking that judging by the standard of the work she had just been subjected to, the red pen probably wasn’t employed enough at the schools of some of these fools. Spare the red pen, deal with the consequences. Maybe what they needed was a good dose of the red to show them the error of their ways. Or was it perhaps the errors of their beings. She preferred the latter. Sighing, she swivelled around in her scratchy, black office chair to face her computer desk. She noticed she had an email, an internal, urgent, marked red. There it was again. Why was it acceptable for someone to use red on her? She opened the email and read: Read the rest of this entry »
The fluorescent glare saturated even the most olive complexion to a dull moonlight grey. Faces became throbbing orbs of nothing. Blank and white and all the same. Tired eyes, sunken into the skull from the late nights; devoid of fun. Still late though, but only from the spinning boredom. The eyes were dead, glassy like a cold, dead fish, staring through the monotony, blinkered because nothing was great anymore. The eyes had died because somewhere, sometime, they had stopped looking, stopped searching for that great something. The life that had danced in the eyes, animating them with the longing of youth, all the desires and hopes and nightmares and fears were at rest. Long since gone to somewhere else far away. A great brick wall had been built on that old, old path between the eyes and the heart. All links severed, no way through. No way back. They were just organs now. Working in the way all the texts books say. That something else, higher than mere biology, had long since been compromised away. Left for middle age. Read the rest of this entry »
Elusive sleep bestows shimmering kisses
Smoothing willing eyes with her benign
Temptation. Submit, she bids. Abide, she wishes
Repose in Lethe, shroud of forgetful divine.
Hand in gentle hand, she winds her labyrinth
Around the cruel enigmas of your soul.
The spectral cocoon of this drowsy nymph
Brushing invisible rainbow, paints you whole.
But you lie heedless of her gossamer call
A wonderer, wandering darkly through
A fractured conscious, obscure mirrored hall;
Mysterious, worldless, slumberless you.
Clawing at the bleeding dark, wall of words at your head
Velvet tears, light crawls in, illumines numb and weary dread.