Peter Lilly: Poems

What can make darkness itself illuminate your room? What fills you eyes with images yet takes them from your mind? What keeps your attention while shortening its span? What can teach facts, while lowering intellect? What stimulant acts as a depressant to the imagination? What makes writers' names known yet takes away the desire to read? What can make darkness itself illuminate your room? My wife and I do not own a TV and we find it very liberating! This is not at all a criticism of all TV programs! It's more concerned with the lifestyle of switching the brain off and switching the TV on, watching hours and hours of TV per day and also the adverse effects of exposing children and infants to too much TV, educational or otherwise... The poem can also be applied to facebook, twitter and youtube etc!

There's a clamour in your veins hoping for some warmth. Crisp futures thaw slowly and collage the pavement with decaying autumn. There's a clamour in your veins and your blood is sedated. The frost-bite doesn't bother you when you're nodding through festive freeze, unaware of your own shivering. There's a clamour in your veins and it soothes you from conscious fears. Childhood promises are all cooked up from poppies and when you're permeated with gear it feels like Christmas. There's a clamour in your veins; track-marks leading from pinpricks to amputation. The pain of withdrawal would bring the beauty of future but you're perforated by these fairy lights that suck significance from nature. So you choose this clamour in your veins; your own consumption, and you'll defrost from this winter still bitter, but without the means to taste it. Written December 2012.

Agony doesn't talk, it shivers. It tries to blink away expression in wallpaper cliches. It is the bloodshot eyes beneath. Agony maligns teeth in tension. It thinks in spirals of acute intentions in the deliberate delirium of endless cause and effect. Written on the  9th of  June 2012. Written in response to a specific circumstance but my reading of the poem has expanded since, so I deleted the explanation.

Diazepam dribble stains your off-white shirt the colour of the skin it sticks to. The contraption in your hand should have been a book, any book. What is this aversion to the light of the sun and it's reflections? All these artificial sources are sharp strings scraping the backs of eyes; wired- open. Despite the depressant. Class A prescriptions, yellow like sodium lights, douse anxiety in the calm before unexpected withdrawal. Mangled mind, confused by wires and rigid unyielding from the IQ-sclerosis of salty sedatives. Just floating on the surface of society approved sanity with the buoyancy of benefits and the opinionated ignorance of contentment in vicious complaints. Saturated by a lack of depth, a rebel made a drone by needless needs; absent family; fake independence; medication; and the denial that there could be anything more than symptoms. Written mid-June 2011.

Snakes inhale clouds of incongruous trade An elegant contrast Made available by the finger tips Of latex gloves in the stomachs Of the desperate. And they have the stomach to make decisions That affect other people? Lean against an exposed nerve And the pain is masked by pleas of ignorance, But there is one revealing question, Will this blinding ignition influence decision? Will revelation cause change? Will, as good as dead serpents sprout legs And breathe life, And exchange poison for water? Written September 2010. This was written while reflecting on people I know who by fair trade, are vegans, but also use cocaine. There is no such thing as fair trade cocaine! It was probably harvested under terrible conditions and almost definitely smuggled into the country, in a pouch made from the fingertip of a latex glove, or a condom, in the stomach of a poor and desperate drug mule. That just seemed a little incongruous to me.