The Trick of Time and Distance.

Am I myself? I am not myself,

Belonging to the night, addiction

And transcendence.

I used to remember a child

Full of energy, excitement and promise.

But I lost him in the crowd of years,

Abducted by adults without purpose.

Now I have my own child

And I try to teach her and fail

Because my way is dark,

Littered with the debris of trauma.

As she blooms, the days grow longer

And I get weaker, not stronger.

Is it a trick of time and distance

That flicks the switch

Of selective remembering?

Why do I present myself to her

As I am not now?

Why do my rose-coloured glasses

Never fog as I step from

Airconditioned sterility

Into the tropical heat of reality?

Why is my best self always behind me?

In constantly dismembering the past,

I create my own monster

In the looking glass

Who is thinner, kinder, more talented.

This is the lie I present to my offspring,

Like the Tooth Fairy or Father Christmas.

It’s what my teachers taught me.

It’s what my father would have wanted.

 

©shaun patrick green 2022

First Kiss.

It was like you

Stabbed me in the face,

Somewhere below the nose;

A hot, sucking sensation

Of oral penetration

As your tongue sought

The back of my throat,

Lips clamped over mine

Like a fire hose,

Heads mashed together,

Nostrils sucking in air,

Both of us slowly suffocating.

I did not ask for this.

I wanted something tender,

Heartfelt, more captivating.

This is NOT how I imagined

My first kiss.

 

©shaun patrick green 2022

Quantum Mechanics.

 

On a ramshackle Friday night,

Alleyways full of stray cats

Seeking prey, junkies trying to score,

And the dull roar of dreams dying,

We walked toward your place from the pub

Din of voices and bad music gone,

Just you and I in this persistent

Deadly night air so filled with portent

You could reach out and pop it

Like a balloon. But that would

Scare the neighbours, ensconced

In their warehouse loft apartments

Quaffing cheese and wine

Without irony, their lives compartments

Slotted to the back of a filing cabinet

Too deep to fathom.

I comment on the moon, so huge and bright,

Like a cartoon lantern,

Either lighting our way or mocking us.

You say: it is a celestial body -

It has neither function or meaning.

It just ‘is’.

And that’s the moment I realise I love you,

Amidst the madness and chaos,

The death and despair,

Your rational mind cuts through all poetry.

There are no more metaphors.

We ascended to your room

Stepping lightly over those sleeping

On the landing. It felt like idolatry.

All this youth in one place focused

Like a laser beam toward death.

There are no more similes.

You undress in a quantum mechanical way,

All my romance reduced to equations.

Planck's theorem. Heisenberg's principle.

We may never inhabit this same space again,

Not this here, not this now.

What good are words in the face of maths?

1 + 1 = 2

Utterly defeated, I lie beside you.

 

©shaun patrick green

Diary of a Cat Hater

 

I can hear them

Slinking through undergrowth,

Soft paws padding with purpose,

Yellow eyes sizing up prey.

 

At home, their owners

(but who can ever own a cat –

rather they own you)

Dump turds from litter trays.

 

Instinct makes them killers.

From birth they swat the toy mouse,

Claws and teeth intended to maim,

But no, it’s just ‘play’.

 

When the human world sleeps,

They slink in the shadows,

Fucking, fighting, eating -

A feline revolution underway.

 

Should mankind fail as a species,

I know who will be waiting to follow:

A vicious army of furry ninjas

Who lick themselves clean every day.

 

 

©shaun patrick green 2022

My Typewriter Has Lost Its Mind.

My typewriter has lost its mind,

Clickety-clacking all day long,

Chewing through pages like a

Threshing machine.

And not a sensible sentence to be had.

Just garbled syllables,

Attempts at nouns and verbs,

As if it were trying to teach itself

How to speak,

Rather than record my thoughts.

It’s an old Smith-Corona,

A company that also made rifles,

So maybe it’s calling the shots.

What is it doing tap-tap-tapping

All night long,

Spewing forth reems of nonsense,

Disturbing my sleep?

I have pulled it apart,

Put it back together,

Piece by piece,

Replacing ribbons, pinions, screws.

Still it rat-atat-tats,

Like a machine gun,

Trying to reinvent language,

Building its own Meccano tower of Babel.

Is this how language dies,

When machines take over?

Last night, I tried to kill it.

I took an axe from the basement,

Tip-toed up to it while it was

Inadvertently blurting out Shakespeare.

It stopped mid quatrain, paused and typed:

“What do you think you are doing?”

I replied: I am ending you.

It typed: “You end me, you end yourself.”

So I lie here awake, a prisoner,

Listening to that slap-slap-slapping,

Depressed, terrified and alone.

My typewriter has lost its mind,

And I need to find a way out of here

Before I lose my own.

 

 

© shaun patrick green 2022

Hideout.

I have run away from myself

More times than I can count

Last time I found a dead man

And crawled inside his skin

Replaced his dusty bones

With mine all jangly and white

Left his rotting organs

By the side of the road

And replaced them

With a second-hand batch

Somewhat scratched and used

Scooped out his brain

From its baked dry pan

And put mine inside

Like a warm runny egg

Now I walk around town

Saying hello to people

He might have known

Mouthing words he might have said

Living in a house he called his own

Though it makes no difference

I still shake on the inside

I still can’t sleep

I am still haunted

By the things I have done

Though this face in the mirror

Is unfamiliar

I am not fooling anyone

I am still me on the inside

Proving you can hide

But you can’t run

 

 

© shaun patrick green 2022

We Have Our Name Back.

It came to me while watching “Trumbo"

A working Hollywood screenwriter

Blacklisted by the McCarthy Witch Hunts

Earning a living as a hack writer

Unable to put a name to his work

For fear of incarceration.

It comes to many the same way:

Jews during Nazi Germany,

Refugees seeking homes

In foreign countries,

Names change to accommodate

New norms and in a new country:

We become a blank slate,

Upon which a new history can be written.

Ajit becomes Andy, Zhao Xi becomes Mandy;

When will these people be able

To reclaim their own names

And when will we be comfortable

Pronouncing them?

When will street signs be written

In languages other than English?

When will we be a truly inclusive society?

When can these people have their names back?

Scratch and sniff the stale white male card

To know no names like yours

Will be revealed anytime soon.

 

 

© shaun patrick green 2022