Paul Tristram- Three Poems

An Ode To Nothing

When the fear and pain

have fallen away.

Passions both good and bad

have extinguished themselves.

Hunger and thirst are sated.

Memories and experience dismissed.

The core,

hollow and still

and quiet

without yearning.

When want is unwanted.

Truth irrelevant.

Climate merely background.

And true seeing

involves more than just

the eyes.

There

you will find me.

Whispering

my ode to nothing.

Brain Blisters

This impossible concentration is crazy

I feel like smashing my forehead

straight through a brick wall.

Sometimes writing gets like this,

too many ideas and images

racing around inside of me.

Shunting against each other angrily

fighting for the spotlight, I swear

there’s road rage going on upstairs.

I can’t eat or sleep or sit down

until I organize some of this chaos

and get one or two more of them out

birthed and alive upon the page.

I picked the wrong day to stop

smoking, drinking and sniffing glue.

But here is another one almost complete.

I can hear those engines rev louder again.

It is time for some more mental surgery

to lance one more blister upon my brain.

Tenterhooks

She is in the corner hotel

upstairs and rushing

from one window to the other

hoping to catch a glimpse of him

coming up the wet Glastonbury street.

He is 5 hours late already

and they would have found her note

by now and know that she has run away.

Her head suspects that something’s wrong,

that he’s changed his mind?

But her heart will not accept this!

She takes another swig of laudanum

whilst looking at his likeness

imprisoned inside a little wooden locket.

Then she is back to the windows

frantic once more.

And that is where we leave her

hanging upon desperate tenterhooks

as the afternoon dims into evening

waiting alone with her fate.



Paul Tristram is a Welsh writer who has poems, short stories and sketches published in many publications around the world, he yearns to tattoo porcelain bridesmaids instead of digging empty graves for innocence at midnight, this too may pass, yet.