Grit your teeth and bite your cheeks,
Craft the moment with your bare hands.
Let the words slip out, just in case
They’re never on the brink again.
Give your heart, clasped with shaky fingers
And fight for it – life is short.
Catch me before I fall – A poem
Your brain speaks without thoughts if you listen.
Humming in clenched teeth tension, creaking
like an old door or chattering (but I’m not cold)
Soft & Sweet – A poem
The ripest peach, soft and sweet
Juice down your chin in a sticky streak-
The taste of summer, wonderful and warm.
But in a desperate, hungry gulp for more
The stone sends cracks through your teeth –
And tumbles down your throat’s hollow street.
Ocean life – A poem
In youth you live a pond life,
Submerged up to your ankles,
Orange fish nibbling at your toes,
Pebbles clear as day just a few inches below
The surface. You pick one up –
A perfectly round pebble.
You smile, and that’s enough.
A good kind of parasite (I guess) – A poem
A heart wrapped in hope – a gentle embrace,
Puncturing one root at a time, now a heart encased
In hope – it grows. Implanting dreams of could be
And vision encompassed by a vignette, a keyhole –
Painted on the back of my eyelids is an outstretched hand,
Promise hidden in every second glance, every smile, and
My heart is in the clouds while my feet are on the ground.
If only I could pull them back together somehow –
Sunday morning quiet – A poem
They surface in quiet moments. Starting small, with a spark,
with a glimpse into something else, a flash of mind,
like a blink going the other way, but they build in an exponential
crescendo and soon I’m stopping every minute to take my gloves off
and write something down because the thoughts just keep coming,
and by the time all the dishes are clean, the bubbles have all disappeared
and the water is only on the verge of being warm.
A box of past things – A poem
I collect pieces of life as I journey through time –
Bookmarking days and moments as mine –
Ribbons separating pages saying: ‘come back to this!’
The view from a dream – A poem
Echoed thoughts in a deep dream, speak
Of splendour in a mirrored world mind –
At the close of day, and the dawn of sleep.
Haunted house – A poem
Some nights make a haunted house out of a home,
when the midnight sleep silence leaves the awake on their own.
A phantom hand on my shoulder, a chill in my room,
or the faint scent of an oddly familiar perfume.
A dream caught by a thread – A poem
I awoke without thought,
Just blank in my head
And a dream still hauntingly
Hung by a thread,
Unravelling a deepening
Hole in my chest.
Lauren Kathleen 