Poetry

Buzzin’

You’ll hear me coming before you see me.

That noise, that sound, it travels,

Like the drone of a distant plane on a hot summer’s day.

It’s definitely buzzin’.

But then, there I am, larger than life and twice as unlikely.

Dressed for a party that never ends

In bands of contrast, banded together,

With no care for subtlety.

Those bright stripes of warning,

Black and yellow, like the pillars at Fac51,

They’re telling you danger, I’ll ‘ave you,

Don’t you look at me funny, or I might get all up in your face.

But you know what?

You’d actually have to push me so far, so very fuckin’ far,

That it’d kill me

To sting you.

Turns out, I’m here to pollinate your flowers, mate.

And I’ve brought you honey.

(Artwork via @lauriepink. She’s my wife. She’s brill)

“My father’s house has many rooms…”

Well, mine has few, but they all echo with him,

In an endless cycle of lost expectation.

Everything here is soaked in it;

Every scent, every sound, every speck of dust.

And I, still listening in the dark

for the distant ebb and flow of his breathing,

Lie shipwrecked by the wash of the waves,

Caught in the tides called by the gravity of his loss,

The massive pull of the place where he used to be,

Endlessly empty, endlessly filled with his absence.

Everywhere here is full of him.

Everywhere here is where he used to be.

Everywhere echoes with the lost whispers

Of one last story, before I sleep.