2 Latest Paintings 2025
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Tag Archives: dream
Dream Home
Inside there are
books piled upon
books piled on
tables.
Broken calculators
blanket the floor.
Factory beige.
Cracks run underneath.
Insects chatter.
Moss grows.
Dead flowers in black vases
grace midnight windows
under fluorescents strips.
A lurid spectacle.
Dusty mirrors show long neglect.
reflections shunned like criminals.
A staircase descends into darkness
on the other side of a door
torn from its hinges.
All the floors
beneath the floors
and rooms behind
rooms behind walls
change between visits.
A stranger not certain
what they should wear.
Webs in darkened corners.
suggest larger things.
An empty trophy case lingers
at the far wall
crumbling
like a forgotten receipt
in a back pocket.
Close as a buried trauma.
Once the wind gets into this place
things become scattered.
Unmoored.
Once the night comes in
it’s hard to get it out
and it’s hard to understand
why.
At The End Of Our Dream
Mist white as a neighbour’s lie
spooks the immediate field of snapped hay strands
beyond the red-roofed townhomes
-rows of white walls facing down on
yards sloping towards me
sparsely populated by chickens with no heads.
A grey horse with an unruly mane arises
from lying on its side in a side alley
and ambles its way towards me.
It has no face
no eyes no mouth.
As I arrive at the dark sodden earth
of a farmer’s field where the houses ended
I knew that it was the end of the dream as well
and that there would be nothing beyond the tree line
etched into a morosely still overcast.
If I continued onward
I would simply awaken
and that this was what the end would be like
-it was not frightening or sad
but just was
and that in my life when I passed
I would simply be awakening from this dream
-our dream,
and I would end up here
somewhere passed those farmer’s fields.
I would go without struggle and
without ceremony
because this is
how things truly are
beyond the curbs and the lights
and the boxes in which everything has been placed
and carefully labelled.
A figure was approaching
from beyond the trees.
A tall, gaunt shape in no hurry.
It is not time to meet them yet
but they will come
as does the night.
As calm as a still sea.
Turning back I see
that the path had changed
from when I came.
The way back home
is a little longer.
It always is.
Daydreamer
Daydreamer
with my eyes up to the sky
slowly slipping away
from the earth
when the pull
becomes too much.
This anti-gravity
gravity
gently tugging me
out from the room
up through the window
and into the clouds.
Weightless,
untethered,
I fall upwards
enveloped in blue.
Carefree;
I have become
so far away
-a ghost from a childhood story
living above the rain.
No time.
No fear.
No regret.
I’m never coming back
down
to this place.
At times
old,
webbed,
dead.
A vacant lot.
An abandoned garage.
“Don’t Worry, Albert.”
Took care of my wife
for ten years
as cancer slowly
took her away
from me.
“Don’t worry, Albert.
It always rains
on a sunny day,
doesn’t it?”
She’d always say.
Two years alone
after she passed
I moved far away
to start again.
It was either that
or put a gun
to my head.
But everywhere I looked
I still saw
a reminder of her
in every woman
in every child.
I worked
then I wandered the streets.
Trying to live.
Trying to cry.
Trying to die.
And one day
I saw her
leaving a laundromat,
laughing.
It was her
but it wasn’t
because it
couldn’t be
but there she was.
I walked up to her
and stared
like an idiot.
Asked if I could
walk with her.
She looked at me
strange.
I didn’t blame her
but she acquiesced.
That was when
on a blue sky
it opened up
with rain singing across
all the streets
in the sunlight.
She laughed and she
looked at me with that
gorgeous smile
that always
broke through me
like I was air
then she took my hand.
“Don’t worry, Albert.”
she said.
“It always rains
on a sunny day
doesn’t it?”
MAN IN A HOTEL ROOM WITH A GUN
Taking it all in
one long moment
sitting there
on the edge of the bed
with a gun in your hand
blood on the sheets
a brunette laying across them
naked
pale
stiff
like a mannequin
you don’t recognize the gun
the room
her
your clothes
You don’t know how you got there
at all
so you lie back
upon the bed
your head close
to her hip
taking it all in
one long moment
staring at the ceiling fan
spinning
a quiet shadow
across everything
before you close
your eyes
and try to wake up.
Ease of Inhibitions
The inhibitions
they slide so easily away
like water
across her pallid skin
as I put my lips
to the glass
and inhale the moon.
Spring Lies Beneath Death And Distant Light But Yet I Dream
I dream of wild flowers scattered
across summer dresses
and moving rivers shattering afternoon light.
I dream of colour:
the world exploding into sunflowers.
God’s palette
is a sweeping meadow
and girl’s laughter.
I dream of jagged shores breaking waves
from which great symphonies arrive.
The Earth is not dead
beneath all this death.
Come
come closer
you far away light.
Falling For You
I’ve fallen for you
and I’m still falling
like out of a plane
without a parachute
or from a building
without a net
without a care
without a worry
without any concern
at all
it’s just so rare
that sometimes
it just feels good
to let yourself
fall
to feel yourself
falling
and when I hit the ground
as I surely will
it will be with
open arms
and a
smile.
Dead Girl Writing On A Blackboard (Don’t Turn Her Around)
I lifted my head and looked around me. Mist breathed out from beneath every door down the hallway as though on cue, lapping up against my feet, slowly reaching out for my face. I scrambled back and stood up with a start as it violently swarmed around my legs like bees upon a honey-covered child. Seeing that no harm came from it, I wandered through toward the light coming from a classroom at the end of the hall –unease building with each step. A flickering fluorescent strobe greeted me when I came to the doorway.
Looking into the classroom, I saw the back of an unfamiliar little blonde girl writing ‘I won’t let go’ over and over again on the dull surface of the blackboard. Her hair was tossed over her face like an old mat and she wore a white dress dashed with streaks of long-dried blood. Despite everything screaming for me not to and not knowing what I was hoping to find, I walked up to her between desks far too small for me, placed my hand upon her shoulder, and turned her around.
Her face was gone. It might have seemed like she once had one, but it was covered over by a sickly growth -a veiny veil of taut skin that wrapped like a suffocating shroud around her features. I could almost make out socketless eyes and maybe a hole where her nose had been. But her small mouth I could definitely see beneath as it was opening and closing, working to form the words that she was still writing out into the empty air now that I had pulled her away from the board. Seeing that this situation would be of no use to me whatsoever, I turned her little fragile body back to the board where she continued to scribble away in pretty handwriting – as girls always seemed to have– the same words, over and over and over again:
‘I won’t let go’.
Disappointed, I left the classroom and the sound of her relentless scribbling behind me as I made my way to a field behind the school where yet another phantasmagoric entity awaited to molest my conception of reality.
(excerpt from ‘The Dweller’ – coming out soon)