I wanted to say.

But silence holds my tongue now.

So my heart screams it.

© M.H.

These are not my words.
Hollow gaps where truth should be.
The rest is just noise.

© M.H.

Life is not filed away and redigested for market consumption, not filtered, not edited for suitable broadcast watershed time slots, not watered down or diluted for mass appeal. We do not receive it in little perfect podcasts of pertinent fact, tailored to a particular audience, not screened and rehashed and reconstituted and reshaped. It is not a comfortable size or shape, not adjusted for optimal letterbox conformity, not gift-wrapped in foil and glittery bows, neatly packed and packaged for that ultimate and intimate holiday surprise. It instead comes to us through no sanitising gauze, no sterilising treatment to make it fit for purpose. No. It is thrown at us in a haphazard and sticky mess. We edit it and digest it ourselves. We filter out impurities in here, inside, in our heads and hearts and make all our decisions based on gut feeling and on inherent traits and the understanding of good and bad, right and wrong, black and white, sweet and sour, sugar and spice. We have to disemble and disinfect. It’s not a shrink-wrapped, pre-packed, aesthetically pleasing, plastic-coated, ultra heat-treated food parcel. Homogenised. Pasteurised skimmed or semi-skimmed. Full fat. Half fat. No fat low fat. No added sugar. Sugar free. It is none of these and all of them. It’s a smorgasbord of infinitely different tastes, textures and sounds. Sometimes it makes us laugh. Sometimes it makes us cry. But always. It. Makes. Us. Live.

© M.H.

Straining my brain-training
To its Red Bull-fuelled limit.

Matchsticks prop open my bleary,
teary ever-so-nearly awake eyes.

The words on the pages crawl, like slug trails
dragged onto a dancefloor by bow-legged spiders.

They mean less-than little to me.
They must mean something to someone here,
But their meaning is just a bowl full of buzzing flies,
Masquerading as my skull.

My fingers hold the pen,
It writes of its own accord,
Auto-piloted across a page that spans continents,
And my hand ran out of fuel miles ago.

Anchored to this desk and chair,
Absently pulling at my hair.

Thoughts running blindly around outside my head,
I can see their vapour trails painted blood-red.

Examining the questions that I can find no answers to,
Anywhere I look…………..in class.

© M.H.

i used to follow the day unto its end,
saw past the river bend
to the elbow in the sand,
and
the pennies in my hand.

i could have been someone
if i had in fact been someone.

But i am the latest in a long line of Noone’s

(Misplaced Hyphen)

© M.H.

They drifted in from other towns,
Those painted girls who can’t go home.
Willingly ingesting poison,
To fuel their bravado.

The trains and the neon lights,
Spilling the boys to the streets.
Splashed with pheromones,
To attract the dead.

The music from the hit parade,
Deafens them all as they dance.
How can they love this life,
How will they know?

Cheap and filling food vendors,
End the night/begin the day.
No love was lost tonight
No love was found.

All the actors return to mourn,
The lost connections they made.
The kisses still moist on their lips,
That will not fade.

And Sunday comes, and passes in haze,
A waste of wealthy days.
The painted girls went home,
And the boys washed off their scents.

The trains full of lager and smoke,
The taxis outside in fog.
All run the stranded angels home,
To sleep until next week.

When Saturday Night re-runs.

© M.H.

We sat in the sun,
On hard back chairs.
Saying nothing with our stares,
Saying everything.

There were tears on our pages,
Making blurs of all our words.
Above us, only birds
Who forgot how to sing.

We picked the bones,
From our bitter souls.
And in those holes,
We grew our wings.

We reached the same horizon,
On different roads.
Trod in our own footprints,
Played chess with our shadows.

And lost.

© M. H.

This is my latest poem. Started over Christmas and completed only last night, l wanted a particular feel of something that is ending, a marriage, a relationship or a life. But in essence it could also be about a beginning. The only constant in life is dust. We journey with it and produce it every day of our lives. This is simply me sitting down with my dust companion – bunny perhaps? – and acknowledging its place in the world.

I shall be resurrecting some older and some would say better ones in the coming days. Keep a vigil.

I have never suffered from any kind of mental health issues, but l know plenty who have, and still do. My brother and Mother both had issues with depression, my 2nd ex-wife does too. It is a common thing to come across in life and l am lucky to be in the minority who do not suffer from some form of this illness.

I attribute my fine mental health to one thing: The catharsis of creative writing, and in particular; poetry.

I have always written. Since school at the age of 14 when l picked a word (musculature if you must know) from a list on a blackboard from which my classmates and l had to compose a poem or some other form of creative text, which included or was specifically about the subject. I vaguely knew the meaning of the word l chose, and some would say l chose possibly the most difficult off the list, but somehow l managed to compose a funny and quite well formed poetic ditty for a 14 year old, who had only ever before written stupid alien abduction stories or silly lyrics about love up to that point. My poetry of late has been dark. But it was even darker during the time of my second divorce. But the fact that l had an outlet for those confusing and sometimes quite toxic feelings, saved my sanity and kept me on a mental even keel, for both my sake and the sake of my daughter and our relationship. We still have a good rapport, some 13 years later, and even though she is approaching 17 and at college with an ever-widening and diverse set of friends, we seem more like contemporaries than father and daughter. We have some similar tastes in music and movies, some mutual appreciation of some books and other written media. We both spend an inordinate amount of time on youtube, sometimes in her case to the detriment of her amount of needed sleep on a school night. But l digress, as l am often apt to do. Just you wait until later. I shall digress your socks off!

But for now, introductions completed, and a little of what l am about saved to these pages, l shall leave you and come back again tomorrow and the day after with more musings and occasional poems for your perusal.

Laters peeps!

Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.

— Oscar Wilde.

This is the first post on my new blog. I’m just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.