Peter Lilly: Poems

The country I now call home is bleeding a senseless and panicked red, diluting its pain in the silence of normal morning routines. I still make my love the coffee I promised before we'd risen and seen the news, before we'd thought of the inevitability of children at fireworks, and how this the attacker knew. She looks so beautiful,  eyes heavy and glistening with unspilt tears.  Neither of us knowing how to use words,  how to understand the reality of atrocity.  Beyond the consolations of world leaders,  beyond social media reactions,  beyond the spin this will be used for,  beyond the excuses and explanations,   beyond the claims of responsibility and repeating backlash,  beyond the reports and crafted articles,  beyond the frames of the chosen photographs.  The truth is shards of lacerating glass.  It is a blood-stained truck and pieces of people.  It is a child's excitement dashed ...

Open. Glancing in toxic, hated and simmering shadows. Scolding these curious claws, clattering tarmac in retreat. Always open. Fixated onto logical arguments of crescendo victory. Volume defeats thought with every drop of poison. Still open. In determination, just if I can taste another day of this dirt, but delay is denial of the basics and death becomes you whilst you're still warm. Forced open. Fear of being in truce with your unwanted images, illuminated eyelids never stop with those twisted faces. Half open. Well, come in to my chasing exhaustion. Movement should be left to the animals that pursue me. Wide open. Start yelling suspected memories at my silhouette my spine bends with the slats of this palate that is my solace. Perpetually open. I may jinx my survival with hoping for harbour But this ocean has been licking at my soars for three etern...

So the rungs of your ladder  became blades. But you would never chase your fingerprints as they fall, and a rumour of identity will lie on the blood-stained birthing floor, along with your name and your first pair of tiny shoes. All waiting for the teeth of scavengers. The metallic surface up here has been weathered rough like your face you have forgotten; another discarded picture, ruined by blind obsession. The wind from above whispers only despair as the portraits on currency are merely official black-ink-pop-art. Those notes of paper  take up no space, they communicate nothing, but  flitter a mocking snicker in the blustering; worthless as leaves. Echoes screech for answers in the frustrated perpetual motion of a monologue that wishes for conversation, because all your companion s took their own tributaries and disappeared in distance. With hindsight we can see that they took with them all the scraps of meaning...