Secrets Lost In The Graveyard Poem by Leah Ayliffe

Secrets Lost In The Graveyard

Rating: 5.0


Wake up every morning
Not sure about today
Does the sun rise outside your window
Or is your sky the last to see shades of gray?
I don't know much about time
Though I follow the ticking of hands
I shake my head at the promise ahead
Of being misguided moving in circular motion
Of dreams better than any boys touch
Left in my mind to simmer
On the back left stovetop
Well, actually, it's boiling over inside
Nobody notices
Maybe because I stretch my arms lazily
The birds song is being drowned out by a dog barking
Sharp and piercing like anxiety
While the sun keeps going up
A steady elevator not stopping at the floor I want
Stay calm, tie my hair up with colourful ribbons
Black mascara and paint my lips strawberry red
Not as ripe as in spring,
What I wish upon a star
Since winter is getting too cold here
Back to my hair and the pretty coloured ribbons
Cause I think I belong to another era in the past
That's a lie, being as every moment of contemporary ideas
Shows me that all of us are dying in delusion
Broken winged creatures, stale and unsatisfied
Somehow never feeling so alive
How we love being dead in a foreign land
Where I don't plan to understand why I'm depressed
So sad
Yet when I speak out loud I speak with a smile
I watch you swinging when the sun falls as always behind the swingset
And your childish like silhouette
While I jump on the trampoline
Wondering how the hell did I get here
Who are those people from before?
The noise of children laughing makes me mad
I still feel like I'm waiting for something
I suppose sadness is a luxury
Getting to lay around and soak in lonely hours
Realizing everything ends
Like cinemas and shopping malls
A false memory of who we were

I miss you.
I miss you in all your secrets.
And now they're all gone.

Thursday, February 12, 2015
Topic(s) of this poem: lost
COMMENTS OF THE POEM
Daniel Brick 27 February 2015

Those last three lines after the ellipsis are devastating. I felt their impact viscerally, WHAM! The grief of loss could not be more powerfully expressed than this rambling, self-indulgent monologue suddenly shut down by the sheer FACT OF LOSS, irrevocable loss. The monologue is a catalogue of complaints, that just about any middle or upper middle class person could make. That's the nature of modern society: we experience our lives as unique whereas they are commonplace. Everybody does it, everybody knows it, everybody feels it - just as everything flattens out, that very personal pain of loss strikes and you know you have to carry that weight all by yourself. (This poem spoke tome in a new way upon rereading it.) .

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Daniel Brick 13 February 2015

At first I thought your poem would create a mental drowse in me as the images piled up before my watching eyes, but suddenly the energy of this imagery stirred me, shook me really and I was wide awake! This is not a passively delivered list of observations ANYONE could make, but a list which display your unique point of view with a passion. And the emotional tone goes through changes in degree of intensity. Some of it quiet and sad, other passages full of clenched passion. For example, this passage hit me: ALL OF US DYING IN DELUSION/BROKEN WINGED CREATURES, STALE AND UNSATISFIED. This powerful expression contains at least a partial solution to the very crisis it announces. That is, you are summoning others to join you in a spirit of reawakening.This may be only a small step forward in your mind, a provisional change, but as poetry it speaks eloquently to the reader.

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Daniel Brick 13 February 2015

At first I thought your poem would create a mental drowse in me as the images piled up before my watching eyes, but suddenly the energy of this imagery stirred me, shook me really and I was wide awake! This is not a passively delivered list of observations ANYONE could make, but a list which display your unique point of view with a passion. And the emotional tone goes through changes in degree of intensity. Some of it quiet and sad, other passages full of clenched passion. For example, this passage hit me: ALL OF US DYING IN DELUSION/BROKEN WINGED CREATURES, STALE AND UNSATISFIED. This powerful expression contains at least a partial solution to the very crisis it announces. That is, you are summoning others to join you in a spirit of reawakening.This may be only a small step forward in your mind, a provisional change, but as poetry it speaks eloquently to the reader.

0 0 Reply
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