It’s the kind of sadness that makes you sing;
where the chimes of a piano makes you fall
and before long there are tears in your eyes.
I’m thinking of a train station between the trees,
in a place I may have never been but I can feel.
It’s strange, but listening to someone talk about their passions
is stirring me, and I wonder what that song sounds like
but I’m too afraid to press play for fear it will send me over.
I’m not sure;
maybe I’m happy. Something hurts though.
They gathered around the fire and told stories about politics and the river. The snow was relentless, as it had been for many years. Warm summers were lost to the river and the boats that sailed round like jewels on a ring. A new governor was elected and a headline printed, then another governor came and the newspapers were burned, but the children spent their days fishing and forgot that they would be hungry again in the winter. They were wise then and they were wise once more behind their failing bones, and the years in between were spent attempting to do what they assumed was the right thing. “It would have been better to have spent every day by the river.”
Oh lord what passes for Christmas anymore?
it aint got that spirit that knocks you out like fire
and makes you open to good fortune
whatever that is. You tramp through the snow
As though Chopin personally chilled the sky with his nocturnes.
The overpriced coffee almost makes the stinging chill
worth it. With that new reference book you’ll find out
which frogs are poisonous and how long did Henry the Eighth
reign for anyway? Then you slot it in between a travellogue
and a hardback collection of Dickens. What about a time when
neighbours showed up like they were made of plastic
and shivered at the notion that you might know about their orgies.
What a treat to know that your fathers wages went to something useless
again this year, but he’s drunk now and a new year is coming.
Maybe this will be the year that he leaves us for the Bahamas.
Oh how he wishes.
You don’t notice the world when you’re talking.
When you remember the scene, you remember everything:
The temperature of the wind, the sounds of laughter,
The pebbles parting beneath your feet.
And parts in-between you paint into view,
Like the camera angles that would have captured you best,
The lingering shot on the moment they looked at you,
The song that should have been playing, just audible enough.
But at the time you lose yourself to the small things that you say;
The things that make you happy just being there.
The simple things I long for
Like blue skies over cable cars
Only happen in the movies
Littered with forgotten stars.
Warm fires on winter days
Romances to light the summer sun
Seem so close to touch
Yet remain hidden when the day is done.
The good life in the streets
People smiling, birds in the trees
Are locked outside my door
Maybe waiting there for me.
But the simple things I long for
Come from technicolour stories;
The right lines to the saddest songs
And people chasing down memories.
A lord lived there once. The floors remain;
A high, proud place. It still stands in parts,
On a hill in the midst of a field
Where the grass is cold and dull.
This lonely tower, a wreck that bore
Storm after storm, still holds within the life
Of someone lost to time. Someone who once listened
To the singing birds in the near-by forest –
The same songs that I heard not long ago.
I always loved the sound of gulls in the morning.
My father complains. They no more shatter the dawn
As the arriving cars. They are the music of the sea
And the sun shines with them. Who cares if they steal
From time to time?
We hold each other in the arms of divorce
I tried to keep it together but used too much force;
And before I knew it we had made up our minds
And I was left staring at the walls.
We had seen the bombs fall and fall again
It didn’t concern us as much as the autumn rain,
When we were locked inside with memories
But neither of us saw them quite the same.
It was in the cold light of day we fell to the floor,
We knew we couldn’t fight together anymore;
All the empires that we conquered we watched fall
In the glow of the early morning news.
I traced Rome from your fingers to your toes,
But what about a person can you truly know?
Just the street signs and the ruins you let go
Because you realised they had no use.
I got up and followed you to the door
Hoping you’d turn around and say you weren’t sure;
I couldn’t tell if this was the last minute we’d have
I just knew we’d remember the ones that came before.
Just for a moment,
A shadow that lay over your life lifted,
And all that could be seen in your dark eyes
Was sincerity, insecurity,
The need to be loved and happy.
The cold plague that held at you,
And the voices that tried to remind you
Of the troubles of your years,
All fell to silence,
And just for a moment
You found that the simplest words would do.
I miss conversation
That falls like wrong notes
In the right rhythm;
That played about the air in the summer
And melted the snow.
It was always about nothing,
But to feel the words,
And to hear the music of another,
Builds a moment in time.
laughingheartsite 