Image courtesy of Brian Gaynor Photography
Silent, surreal, forest of dreams,
Light dangles angles in slip-streaming beams;
Art meets reality, merges in song,
Who I could be was me all along…
Image courtesy of Brian Gaynor Photography
Poverty stalks around railway bend,
Where ignorance breeds its progeny vile;
This is where death and madness contend,
Where misty obscurity dulls each mile.
Who will step out of the shadows now,
And block His passage to innocent child?
Who will lift banner and force His bow –
To relinquish the lost, save the defiled?
Plague and destruction will mark His ingress
As blinded, we see Him, and sound no alarm –
Hooded, He’s coming, His footsteps are sure,
His fangs will spare no one, His progress spells harm.
Image courtesy of Brian Gaynor Photography
He didn’t know his was an altered existence –
Unaware that others missed the colours he felt,
His eyes conjured visions with remarkable patience.
In his other-world, where golden imagining dwelt,
Sunshine bred leaves, and reflecting waters shone
With an insistence born of cold necessity.
In his tightly woven shell, his soul withdrawn,
Only his eyes connected to this world only he could see.
To him, it pulsed with light, it breathed in hues
Like fairy dust; creatures of bedtime tales
Haunted its vistas wrapped in heavenly dews,
Visions and sights against which the real world pales…
Image courtesy of Brian Gaynor Photography
Winding, winding, ever winding.
Incessantly insistently stubbornly winding,
Path called to reluctant Feet.
As always, she could only see a few steps in front of her nose;
Obscurity wore the pants in this relationship.
Path liked to cloak itself in mysterious profundity,
Slinking under sheets of rain,
Shrouded in turban-cloths wound into mist,
Wrapping itself tightly into fists of fog.
And always, her feet followed at Path’s insistence.
Somewhere ahead, somewhere she hadn’t been yet, was
The Self that she sought in her dreams.
Always elusive, always fleeting,
She caught glimpses reflected from the microscopic mirror-specks of
Vapour hanging pregnant in the saturated air.
Fractured form and function,
Her shattered Self mocked with seven year’s bad luck.
And yet –
The Prophesy that drove her on, that fuelled her falter,
That cried through the whispers between leaves,
Promised a rainbow of Self fulfilled;
Quest beat with courage of steel in housing of paper.
So on Feet crept, blindly faithful,
Winding, winding, ever winding…
Image courtesy of Brian Gaynor Photography
Hooded, he searches restlessly for
the end of the line.
He wonders if it will be around the next bend,
but after a million curves and
a million miles,
he has lost count and
the odds aren’t stacked in his favour.
The journey isn’t what he expected.
The curves and twists are dizzying in their complexity.
He thought he’d be further at this
stage in life.
He thought he’d have gained a conductor’s hat;
instead, the caboose is overloaded with baggage
he can’t even begin to tag.
Hope doesn’t conduct well on rails.
Emptiness washes him out like a hollow horn echoing back
from the trees,
chugging with used and belaboured ‘I-thought-I-coulds’.
Is he on the right track?
Will he run out of steam?
Maybe, the next bend will clatter with revelation, illumination,
be a station to pull into.
Maybe what he searches for even in his dreams
will be around the next bend…
