Peter Lilly: Poems

Pictures of something achieved lose their reality when you touch the flat surface and realise it is only an imitation of three dimensions. I would try to chisel a sculpture but I've never had the time required to select the type of rock. So it's paper cuts instead of crushed bones, and crocodile tears instead of wailing. It's waking up instead of being born.   I couldn't grasp the intention of the new medium. I got lost analysing the brush strokes, and a world of feeling breathed and pulsated around my lifeless sums. Written in the summer of 2015.  This poem is about beauty's fragility to dissection, an observer's susceptibility to pride, and the imagination's vulnerability to desensitisation.  Sometimes we must  consciously humble ourselves before beauty, whether it be man-made art, that of nature, or the beauty within the divine, so that we do not remain unaffected. Emotional responses ...

peterlillypoetry · Displaced redemption There was a world, displaced from its axis by repeated tragedies of its own making, as the inhabitants attempt to grasp the credit for it's own creating. An entire macrocosm misaligned by embezzling clutches and throning lusts. Who's history is marked by a needless taking, and just in case, a pious faking to appease a possible divinity as either a patsy or a machine. There was a world, decomposing in it's own folly. Spinning itself dizzy flailing after impervious redemption. And inside that world there was a people displaced from its milk and honey by a ruling superpower. As the globalising tar of Rome spread to paint the Empire one culture, this people had been waiting. Listening in silence for the reason of their plight, Waiting for the sword of a rallying leader to severe their shackles, and the throats of the chain-bearers, alike. Waiting with the same attitude ...

Today's snow is the literal icing on 255,500 yesterdays of this building. The walls give way to weathered cliff-face; the beacon of the capital of the crown of Britain. Snow capped monuments to literature point upwards to the castle, that has bled out the streets of this city in slow running tributaries, not of death, but new life, new redness and new heat. A city that keeps on breathing and looking up to it's frosted castle. Written while looking up at the castle from Princes Street Gardens, in the snow of January 2013.

He says he chased her away so now he falls asleep on trains. He says he chased her out when he started drowning her voice with whisky he can no longer afford. So he drinks cheep cider and falls asleep on trains. He says he chased her out with his money making schemes, and his time inside was too long for her to wait. So he clouds his memory with heavy liquid and falls asleep on trains. He says he chased her out with all the responsibilities he pushed to her side of the bed, and when he was released she didn't try to hide her impatient infidelity. He ignored it with liquor, yet no bottles were smashed until the last time she slammed that door. Now he wants to stay nauseous and he falls asleep on trains. He says he chased her out and she left. That empty crib and shelves full of gifts and photos were too much not to burn. He hates the drink but he loves the way it's killing him, even so, part of him still does not w...

Muted, we watched as the cheshire cat's teeth morphed from pearly white, through plaque yellow, to blood red. As the sickle moon descended into its silent grave in the horizon. Written September 2015. My wife and I were traveling  from Lyon to Montpellier, with some rather awkward covoiturage companions. The sickle blood-moon was ominous and haunting in the silent journey, and I penned this as well as I could in the pitch black of the car. 

Listening to directions  From a drunk man, Whilst trying to read a map In the light of a half moon. Progress is slo w . Written in 2009.  Persistence in the key!

What becomes of us? Circling our ambitions in tentative pigeon steps, not awaiting permission but opportunity, which some take as the same thing. Anticipation takes our breath until we are light-headed, spinning, it repeats and repeats. I wish this circle was a spiral, but I recognise my tracks, our tracks in the flattened grass and compressed dirt. Our internal voices circle our potential like hungry vultures, waiting to pick the bones of what might have been, in the approval of regret. A Poem written as an encouragement for endurance. It's difficult to start new initiatives, to build something sustainable that is in the image of something greater than yourself, to live a Christlike life. Laying foundations feels like walking in circles. But these foundations are important and it is right that it takes time! For, to build without foundations is to build in ignorance, a fatalistic and pointless exercise in egotistical squan...