Steve Woodward

Oh snatched away in beauty’s bloom
The fallen hero of my upstairs room
Who had travelled the world
Yet saw no sights
...

I dredge with incommunicable folly
Through the silt which fills my mind
Across to the bountiful shores of a melancholy
Wistful as a soft sea breeze.
...

Oh woe they all cried, let more mourners come
Hush each of the winds and put out the sun
Go now, wear black, retire early to bed
There is no hope now that romance is dead.
...

Waiting for you; I am a brand new pencil
Neat in a box amongst my brothers
Standing diligent to attention;
Picked from the pack and at your mercy,
...

If I could know her every motion,
The absences in between
Where it may so cruelly take forever
To seep between the cracks,
...

Life is a series of choices she said
Paths to walk and roads to take
We passed the brook where my ideals lay
Cooling beneath the stream
...

Such beautiful scars,
Forge the most perfect of smiles.
Ah but to be held in its comfort,
Were it not for the miles.
...

You are my child,
And you have everything I own,
I was born of an older seed,
And have left my older home,
...

If I could but love thee as a mountain.
Yet I, not so immovable or so grand
Would crumble
And be stones, swept along the street
...

I asked the skies for rain,
She gave me her tears.

I asked the sands for a lifetime,
...

My spirit fell
In days of goodness spent -
But not sampled.
And echoes now to force a rent
...

I could paint you in all of God’s colours
But not even the hands of the masters
Have the skill indeed
To capture your beauty
...

I often dream of making love. To a love
and not as it were “Just another mistake.”

Oh, Guilt.
...

I’ve more issues than the back catalogue of Vogue.
Vogue, Vague, Uninspiring.
But if you were to read every one
I would hope that you find
...

When I die and am laid to rest
My bones will wait for you.
Will time or the ages ask in curiosity how each one fit alongside yours
On those easy nights where breezes lapped across our forms
...

I write about you
Before I have met you
As if one day when you appear
Our paths align
...

I can feel the weight behind my eyes,
That kills the smiles and though it tries -
To strike me down so numb with sense of folly,
The world shall see the mask.
...

She will out-live me
But not out love me
When I am naught but dust and vapour
A whispered breeze o’er a Sunday dew
...

In my head it feels like a Monday – but it’s Spring
The week ahead is ripe with promise
For the picking – where it not for the toil in the fields
The burr of each passing hour
...

You are the heavens.
And I am a man who watches the stars,
Yet every night
Is too afraid to fly.
...