What The Hell Have I Been Born Into?
In my mind’s eye I can still see him
walking as clear as yesterday
one step forward, two steps backwards,
mostly swaying to the left-hand side.
Down the Midnight Dram Road,
on his way back to his Council House
tucked in the middle of Caewathan
following a night in ‘The Colliers Arms.’
Singing a little bit but grunting a lot
“Yesterday is dead and gone……..!”
and sometimes trying to whistle
as the full moon shone down smiling
all over his drunken head and shoulders.
The gravel, stones and coal dust beneath
his unsteady feet hissed and crackled
loudly into life at his wayward presence.
A cider flagon in the pocket of his long
Winter coat and two thirds of a Woodbine
awaiting its cue behind one of his ears
and as he turns back out onto the road
and into the light he would frown aloud
and almost whisper the very same words
“What the hell have I been born into?”
© Paul Tristram 2014
In A Tangle
With thoughts confused and muddled,
spirits feeling just like a parachutist
who jumped, narrowly avoiding disaster
to end up dangling helplessly from a tree.
It’s almost impossible to finger-pick
a knot that’s invisible and stays always
frustratingly just out of stretching reach.
There’s a crucial piece missing from
the untitled diagram, a delinquent hand
has smudged out the middle of the problem
from the now useless classroom blackboard.
You can indeed feel ill when in fact
you actually register as being healthy.
You can indeed feel bad when there is no
logical reason for you to feel anything but good.
No one cares, understands or perceives
you standing on tip-toes upon that precipice.
It’s that unseen equation that keeps the reality
of the situation from everyone but yourself.
Sometimes your only recourse and backup
is the knowledge and strength that the knot
within you tightens with temper and panic
but unravels slowly with patience and time.
© Paul Tristram 2014
Straw Grasping
To fall backwards
into that nothingness inside of yourself.
The blinding pain
from mental and emotional injury
which makes you scream and shudder
like a wounded, trapped animal.
It is the very doorstep of SUICIDE!
But to turn around at this very point
and fight back against the tide of shit,
face first into the fear, guilt and shame.
As betraying ONCE friends
point envious condemning fingers
from the safety of the side-lines
at your unwashed, malnutritioned
drunken body and cowardly laugh
at your orchestrated fall.
When every straw and ledge grasped at
you had to find for yourself, by yourself.
Until from the floor
you rose and crawled
rose and stumbled
rose and fell
rose and crawled
rose and fell again
rose and crawled
then rose and walked
and walked and walked and walked.
Knowing that you now
owed nobody alive anything at all.
You had done it completely by yourself.
That the weaknesses they pointed out,
the drunkenness and mess
were in fact strengths.
You straw grasped thin air sometimes
but you made it through
that Bastard Mountain
out into the sunshine, blue skies
and lush green meadows beyond.
Learning valuable lessons with each step
about your inner strength,
stamina, resourcefulness, determination,
the fight of your Phoenix Spirit
and the absolute power
of your Universe-Sized Soul.
© Paul Tristram 2013
Paul Tristram is a Welsh writer who has poems, short stories, sketches and photography 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.
You can read his poems and stories here! http://paultristram.blogspot.
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