avalanche ...

under the hurt the ice forms somewhere near the heart and the feelings that were once so fiery grow cold and sour it's the end of love again and still there's no sense to it no sense to the way falling in love seems so easy and wonderful while falling out of love takes on such a monstrous unravelling as the world breaks up into puzzle pieces around you and buries you in an avalanche of confusion and cold snow when the crest of love collapses it's never any one person's fault when two are willing to scale great heights over uncharted rocky crags and icy precipices they always risk the slip of faith and the crash of hope until too often the story they struggle to write gets lost in a sudden and endless descent its final chapters left to be the unwritten empty lines of what no one can ever know some say love is fleeting but that's not really so love binds us together for a lifetime in memory if nothing else and over time the beautiful moments burn up and out of the ice and the thought of the one who was once wrapped in the anger of loss is transfigured like a fractured beam of sunlight through a dangling crystal seeking a way from dark to day bringing with it a special sense of everlasting grace like the one you caught in a gasp the night you let me go Copyright © Kennedy James, 2009. All rights reserved.

waterfall ...

i am writing to you from the dark rooms of my helplessness where i sleep between dreams in the same beaten bed pushed up against the dull window where i lie in the twisted moonlight to watch my heartache bleed black like a river that runs off into the night only to return in the morning just before dawn i have danced naked in the midnight flames of desperate fires felt the heat of your betrayal wash over me like an apocalyptic storm but how was i to know you would prefer solitude to my soft kisses pooling into blue depths under the trickling waterfall of my passion the stars fall from the sky on nights like this and though i catch every one with my seared and ragged hands though i throw each bright jewel back into the night sky i cannot do what i thought i could i cannot write the failing and final chapter of a love lost i hear your voice in the cracks of dawn's light the whispers and sighs that stream across the pale sheets and i remember how you made shadow puppets on the opposite wall and said to me that life was like that just one blink of an eye and everything that was so real and full of wonder is gone not just for the moment but for forever Copyright © Kennedy James, 2009. All rights reserved.

i am the shoreline ...

i am the shoreline ... i am the shoreline the crags of rocks and piles of flotsam running past the harbour town where you live where on so many past Sundays you would wander into my world and dip your tiny feet in tidal pools while sea crabs scrambled on stilts from under your path i left you messages then love letters written in shell fragments and seaweed but you never caught on to the script that tumbled in the white wash and you would leave for church under a broad yellow hat that glowed like the sun you would never say much except for the one time when you turned to the sea and called out what sounded like my name but i guess i can't be sure your small voice seemed so vacant in the roar of the north-easterly winds and no one heard but me of course that was long ago just a month before you married Peter Adamson and had the twins Sophie and Michelle before the years and years passed by years when you stopped coming down to the shore and gave up watching the ebb and flow of algae and fry that slipped and skipped along the beach amidst the heart stones and bright spots of sea glass half buried in the sand and just as i had resigned myself to your permanent absence suddenly you have returned as unexpectedly as you left your red coat like a flare on a dull winter's morning your auburn hair now streaked with grey and tossed back over your shoulders your eyes bright as if you were looking for something you lost so many years before and i can't help but wonder if now you have remembered and have returned at long last looking for me Copyright © Kennedy James, 2010. All rights reserved.