Paul Tristram- Three Poems

It Only Hurts When I’m Awake

It only hurts when I’m awake

and I’m Fucking Awake!

© Paul Tristram 2012



Roar, You Bastard, Roar!

Though, the Lightning strikes
your furrowed, troubled brow.
Splintering slate fragments
of anger, inwards,
to soar and rage through veins
like coursing, molten dynamite.
Tremor your footwork, steady,
balance the bloody bayonet
of counter-attack with precision.
Unleash with impact and control!
Teeth at work like gears, now,
senses almost a separate creature,
like a Ballerina pirouetting
inside an armoured Tank.
Every part of you is a weapon,
a battering-ram heartbeat
furnacing the violent whole.
Roar, you Bastard, Roar!
and rip right open the seething skies.
No one matters before or after you
for nobody has ever been this so alive.

© Paul Tristram 2015



Flash Back

We were on a Y.T.S. (Youth Training Scheme,
for 16 to 18 year olds) called N.A.C.R.O.
(National Association for the Care
and Resettlement of young Offenders)
And on this particular day in question
we were all rounded up into a side room
and given a lecture on the perils of drug abuse.
As soon as the topic of LSD
and Magic Mushrooms came up
I could hear him start to giggle
off to the right of me somewhere
(We’d been in the same gang together
for a few years until his head went,
it was either drugs or the kicking’s?)
When they started in on Flash Back’s,
he stood up and shouted neurotically
“Fuck off, I don’t believe you.
You’re saying this to wind me up.
You can’t just start tripping on your own,
without taking anything first?”
And with that he walked outside for a smoke.
That was the morning, in the afternoon
we were messing around in the carpentry room
when he banged two hammer heads together,
one of the Supervisors saw it and yelled
“Don’t do that, I’ve seen them explode,
you’ll have someone’s eye out, you Muppet!”
He went red, then purple, his eyes a mixture
of rage and fear, Paranoia made him its bitch.
“You’re mental, hammers exploding,
why are you all fucking with me today, eh?
I’ve never heard so much bullshit in all my life,
was you having a flash back when you saw that?
You’re all in this together, aren’t you?
Fucking with my head for no reason at all,
well, you can all fuck off, I’m out of here, losers!”
And he walked out of the building just like that
and started drug dealing in the Town instead.
That is, until a short while later
when he hung himself from a tree up The Gnoll,
only a dog walker stumbled upon him
and saved him the first time, so he went back
the next day to the very same tree and succeeded.
He was alright him, I liked him, a bit weird like
but ain’t we all a little strange to some degree?
I once punched him in the face so hard
that he started frothing at the mouth like an dog
and he needed stiches in the back of the head,
we were both aged around thirteen at the time
and it was over gang stuff…I regret that now!

© Paul Tristram 2015

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.co.uk/