James Atkins

James Atkins Poems

Women walking in the park
'neath branches drenched in light
summer dresses, low cut tops
and smiles that invite
...

Surge through the black,
like a ragged flood of wind
The past is at your back,
You don't notice it begin.
...

If destiny is manifest
and fate is set in stone
then nothing that you'll ever do
is down to you alone
...

Dragging a ragged cloud of changed addresses and broken trust
Stumbling away from forgettable months
Defensively clinging to the name of a ghost
That stares accusingly from mirrors -
...

Don't go out again tonight,
to walk the streets alone.
Don't follow train-tracks til dawn's light,
That will not lead you home.
...

The first touch of the morning,
diesel fumes turning the frost-smell blunt.
last night's storm diluted
in the muted roar of the garbage truck in the next street
...

She steps onto a packed train
the epicentre of a shockwave of faceless humanity
rippling out and away, shuffling back
from the mischievous flash of her eyes
...

Beneath the pale glow of a sky choked with clouds
where moonlight seemed merely suggestion,
Three of us walked through the wind’s muted rush
Under branches we’d climbed long ago.
...

I have to work in 4 hours and
its 2am but
I'm not really awake just
steeped in apathy
...

The fires of the sun will die,
draining heaven's light.
Stars will stretch across the sky,
in cold eternal night.
...

With every moment passing,
I die a little more.
I'm deader now today,
than I've ever been before.
...

How many times have I given up
How many times have I lied
How many times have I hurt you
I bet not as much as I've tried
...

Waking to find you're Jack again,
with the same old missing hours of sleep and
disjointed gaps in-
...

One day they'll be lost to me
the summers below the dying hills
gently fading into a forgotten youth
recalled in black-and-white photos
...

Creatures of habit, they choose the same carriage,
making a journey that punctuates their shortening lives
like a space between paragraphs at the end of each day,
lost in a soulless addiciton to routine
...

The hot afternoons of childhood holidays
when the sky stretched pale blue
and hills were swathed in knee high grass
tinder dry, drought-brown,
...

Shapes on the horizon, black before the sky,
Rising against daybreak, taking form beneath the light.
Lurching through the silence, in patterns out of step,
Along forever's edge, where the sun pulls forth from night.
...

James Atkins Biography

Most of the time, I enjoy writing. My problem is that I get frustrated easily, especially if I can't articulate what I'm feeling. I guess that's the way I write - not really to deliver a specific message, but to try to convey the feeling or the image that was with me at the time. Why do I write that way? Well, I guess I believe that we're all islands - I've never been sure that our eyes all see the same things, that apples taste the same to everyone, or if blue doesn't look orange to the rest of the population. Emotions, feelings, thoughts, beliefs - all that sort of stuff is on another magnitude of complexity altogether, so what are the odds that anyone truly understands anyone else? The way I see it, if what I write makes you feel something, then I'm truly starting to communicate. And if by some fluke you manage to share the exact frame of mind I was in at the time I was writing, well, that's just about as close to real communication that two people can get. And that seems worthwhile to me.)

The Best Poem Of James Atkins

Misogyny

Women walking in the park
'neath branches drenched in light
summer dresses, low cut tops
and smiles that invite

Women with their depthless eyes
and bodies built for sin
lips through which they mouth their lies
to draw the weaklings in

Watching women on the train
and wishing they were mine
maybe I will take me one
and keep her for a time

Drowning in their depthless eyes
choking on their spite
I will change things in the park
'neath branches drenched in light

James Atkins Comments

James Atkins Popularity

James Atkins Popularity

Close
Error Success