Journey by Aaron Flynn

Here to there,
And back,
Or not,
Maybe further along than that
Or less
Or even stay when you get there
Never to return
Or just to visit (grudging or not)
From the womb to your tomb
From one crotch to another
Lover above us
Or below
So slow
Or too fast
Too narrow
Or too vast
In the future,
Present
Past.
This life will never last
So enjoy while it’s here.
Every day is a journey.
Every hour.

Swoop by Aaron Flynn

Swoop...

Descend on shafts of light;
seek out the truths which elude you
from your perch
up there
so clinical and detached.
Come down.
Where all is real.
Where pain is felt
and not just imagined,
not merely a philosophical debate
on synapses and nerves,
but all too sharp, and cruel
and real.

Virtues by Aaron Flynn

It Takes Courage

It takes courage
to admit
you are a coward;
to draw
sharpened steel
across your flesh;
to inhale
the exhaust fumes
from a car as though it were
a salt-tanged breeze.
Please.
It takes courage to be a coward.
The Lion was wrong.
Courage and cowardice
are not opposites,
they are bedfellows.
They are
the most intimate of partners,
joined at the groin,
at their loins,
separated only by
perspective
and nothing
else.

Ocean by Aaron Flynn

Turquoise,
colour of the sky
after storms,
cobalt,
hue of my mama’s eyes
when she smiles.

II
Restless.
The word “still”
has no meaning for you
Miss Ocean,
Mrs Sea,
mother of moisture,
progenitor of precipitation.
Lifegiver. Lifetaker.

III
I love it
when you
smash
against rocks
and spray foam
like an exhausted horse
or
a broken boxer.

IV
I swam in you once
naked
as the day I began.
You were cold but warm,
and as dark and
unknowable
as the night sky
you reflected.

Harmony (Sleep) by Aaron Flynn

Dawn dawns, the bleakness
of rheumy eyes, the bleariness
of banished shadow.
In the machine
as the copier sputters into action, dead white
light passing over and above, taking half a long
rotation to pass. Passover.
Rather pass out, or at Least
the desire to.
To sleep: no more.
To put an end to the en masse tiny aches of Awake
and bask
in the healing blanket of sleep,
to feel it trail through your fingers.
Smouldering, spangling sunlight playing
along your skin,
through your fingers
as would sweet thick water
to those
dying of thirst.

Surrender by Aaron Flynn

Surrender

Give yourself up
to the wafting of the breeze;
throw yourself upon the mercies
of the vibrant pastel azure
of the sky in any, in every, season in either hemisphere.
By goat or crab it has no matter, no meaning
but how it is interpreted. The granite blue of deepest despair
or the baby blue of a new-borns milky sock.
Turbulent sea can represent passion, not only
indecision; can show the tempestuousness of
a lovers lusty indiscretions or the
torrid intertwining of a scalene
ménage a trois.
Relinquish all before the planes of
nature: feel the cold sea on your naked flesh;
taste the kamikaze-rain; witness
the murders of the sky as our star
wakes and sleeps; inhale the perfume
of blossom, of trees, of fauna; hear
the cries of every specimen of
creature in existence.
And marvel.
Surrender.

Dream by Aaron Flyn

Dream

The sharp and scarlet fence droops,
and its sign
proclaims, in dire letters, a warning to all
who would seek to climb
and clamber
into the ragged
fields beyond
where the disem-
bodied
heads of youngsters peer above
sallow grass, their screams echo
through the twilit air. A sour breathy breeze
stirs the pollen from the grass,
and on the sharp and scarlet fence
that nobody should pass
its sign which reads
SHADOWERS EXPECT DYING

City by Aaron Flynn

City

Muddy serpent writhes, cloud-
dappled light spangling from the squalls,
entangling
with manmade acrid clouds
acting as shrouds for the spite,
for the right to exist,
to subsist ,whilst people
suffer (or excel) and everything
between: a prism of humanity
where purple are the battered masses,
yellow the chosen few who succeed
at everything they do.
And we?
We are the crimson, the sapphire,
the emerald and the fuchsia riptide.
We are the in-betweeners, the
down-and-outers.
We are the forgotten.