The poetry of you
Is not found in the gilded spaces
Where affluence and privilege
Reside with mirrored faces
Complacent soulmates sharing
An uncontentious point of view.

The poetry of you
Is chaotic and complicated
Each verse a bittersweet ballad
Of devastation, emancipation
Fall colors forever suspended
In saturated summer hues.

The poetry of you
Flows like ink across your skin
Fifty-five stanzas only I knew
But now am blind to
A new line etched for every trauma
Each red-raised scar and cauliflower ear
Iambic pentameter for a turbulent history
That leads at last to liberty, to majesty
Each stumble and recovery
A hard-won stoic victory.

I cannot claim to stand unscathed
By facets of this sonnet’s face
Revised, rewritten, and redacted:
The stranger’s face you show me now
As it turns from me, as you turn from me
As if you never knew my name
My sorrow deeper than my shame.

Yet measure to meter, word upon word
I yearn to retrace your invisible ink
Even as it ebbs from my fingertips
A new rhy…

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The house on the hill stands silent in the snow
The cold, cruel fingers of wild winter wind
Tirelessly tapping its frosted white windows
Eager to enter through keyholes and cracks.

The house on the hill hugs its furnace of fire
The warm-armoured arms of flickering flame
Protecting its parlour, defending its doorway
Dissolving its enemy’s icy attacks.

There is no other house now, no other home
But buildings besooted with ash in the snow
Líf and Lífþrasir reside in these walls
No kin will arise once the bright furnace falls.

The house on the hill and the wild winter wind
Wage war in the dark of Hoddmímis holt
The battle concluded before it began:
Its pale, Pyrrhic victor
Predestined long before
By he become Death
Destroyer of worlds.

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When you wore my hoodie
I saw myself in you
But not the other way around.

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The silence precedes no storm but a drizzle
Wretched mists swirling in gunmetal skies
A million lost lifetimes coalescing
In a moment of realisation
Of elemental anguish,
The rain of his sorrow descending to
His parched, windswept peaks
The ridges at the corners of his eyes
The slopes of his majestic nose
The swollen gully of his mouth.

I am the rainmaker
He is the blame taker
I am the massif erupting in pain
Smouldering lava, molten emotion
As his desolate deluge descends.

He cries a river of redemption
Sowing seeds in arid ash
Sighing like the wind of change
Salving fissures, veiling vents
His tender essence
Quenching me
Renewing me
Extinguishing
My fury.

A sapling surges upwards
Piercing the scorchland
The arms of his hinterland
Reaching out to take it
To tend it
Beseeching me
To make amends
To try again
And green the blackened earth.

I cannot refuse the soul of my soul
The heart of my heart
A mountain formed by different forces
But no less twinned from base to peak;
I spark the sun to warm
Our upturned faces
And finall…

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This poem is available with full audio narration. Press Play to listen now:

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This poem is available with full audio narration. Press Play to listen now:

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This poem is available with full audio narration. Press Play to listen now:

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