Garden Gate – May 2025

I was watching a movie recently and there was a scene of a funeral. So I took some lines from past poems and combined them as if to say them at a loved one’s funeral. Let me know what you think
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The midnight brigade of the sweet and the sour
A prize from each side of the fountain
Candlelight sparks
Silent walls within my heart

Her harlequin mind
Every color of the rainbow
Each one brighter than the last
Sweeping silos of black ember

My guts twisted like a rose
Drinking tea with the executioner
Selling herself alongside the everyday discount
The siphoned moonlight in her autumn-burnt eyes

Her all-knowing peppermint peel spirit
Tick goes the hangman’s clock
Each day a year
Each year a day

Redwood, elm and oak
Whisper, weep and regrow
She is a dormant melody remembered by many
The weight of a river upon my shoulders

The ritual of saying goodbye to anything good
Starlight and firewater
Riding on the edge of time
A drunken wager I can’t wake up from

The weight of blood
Drums in the deep
Pumps a new strange heart
Waiting for animals to start crossing again

But when I think of her
A grin comes in like an early tide
Of tribe, of nation
A message woven between stars

Crimson flakes of peat in my lungs
A powerless crest to hold onto until death
Gossip among flowers
To walk one last time into blurred fantasy

The first taste of poison
Outlives the sweetest milk
Darkness stripped of its color
Drowning in a river of lights

There’s no hill more harsh than that feeling
Windmills of the void
Every yard of darkness
Burnt in midnight oil

Death stalks me
He remembers my name
Time-traveling demons
Untouched by disk or shadow

A carefully crafted hypnosis
In stable winds, I float
The sun bleeding across the hills
Into my closed eyelids

The forest melts under my feet
Red face, blue face, green face
Which face was I going to be today
I’m a pig before slaughter

Shadow, front and back
Numb to revelation
As colour to the bone
Bliss is sold just once

All my life, I’ve been staring at the night
Waiting for it to say something
Waiting and waiting
But tomorrow never comes

Walk towards the noise
To look into her tender eyes once more
Will make my heart beat again
I will die one dream from now.