My wife is currently doing a year-long writing challenge that she is blogging about and seeking people to join in with her, which you can read about here (www.leighkeating.me). The latest diary challenge (http://www.leighkeating.me/?p=21) for this week has that today’s task is to write a “Teenage Emo Poem”, an agnsty piece of purple prose of the type we all write when our skills are fresh but untrained. I decided to join her today and to write as fluidly as possible (so in one sitting and without much re-editing to keep that essence of teenage outpouring of inner turbulence), and what follows is my effort. (Note that the use of metaphor, mixed and muddled, is on purpose!)
The strangers in our bed
(An Emo Poem for Leigh)
Lying like a wave upon the shore.
Motionless, a fly within your amber,
we’re deep within the grasp
of an eternal fleeting moment.
Waiting for the day the sun will set
to leave us blinded by the dark,
as we no longer feel,
it’s taste upon our skin.
We walked together, but my heart walked alone,
lonely tears hidden in rain-soaked face.
I smiled, to hide the ache inside
as you wondered if we’d lost ourselves.
My flesh once cut kept bleeding,
I am a an open wound,
in which the cancers of our love grow
spreading their aches deep into empty bones.
The silence that we held together,
now screams a lenghty path into my soul,
waiting for the gorge to rise
and flood our gentle sleep
with the nightmares of the dawn.
We wait, arms outstretched to grasp the darkness
that sits like a goblin in our bed,
a beacon to our former ectasy.
We heard the words once left unsaid,
And listened to the echoes of their madness,
Speaking like a baby’s cries
to the wilderness of our hearts.
My eyes shadowed with the grief of a child born
to the joy that we once shared,
I let the sudden moment lengthen
like a shadow in the dark.
