Alarm

Alarm

Each morning

The monster awakes me

Sympathetic jangling

Nerve network bells

With a start I greet the day

Alarms

Such an odd way

Of greeting a day

Jolted consciousness

Startled awake

A curious cattle prod play

Parasympathetic

Quickly soothes me

Ears reach for birdsong

Blinking eyes struggle

Protesting dull grey

Alarm stands down

Elaborate peripheral energies

Stretch me to the four corners

Concluded in a still moment

Of what feels like fulfilment

Shocking awake

Current affairs theme continues

Sub conscious ripples carry

This daily morning jolt

Outwards creating my day

My presence

Though seemingly peaceful Inwardly is startled

A gazelle

Perpetually aware

It is intrinsic to this illusion

I have checked

There are no monsters there

I make them in me

Baked fresh daily

By alarm

Heartfelt

I would like to pour my heart out to you

Often I do

As you know only too well

I would like to put into words

Feelings of fullness

Intoxication

Suffocation

Intimation of hell

As it swells to bursting with feeling

Leaving me gasping for air

Unable not to care

With its intense life grip

Encased in an iron glove

Longing

Oh agonised longing to love

I would love to let you in

To sacred places

Where long I have not been

To share these hallowed spaces

With faces unseen

But I have lost my way

Turned left

When it was obvious to everyone

That a right turn was required

Enmired as I am in me

I must have missed it

Pointless even to turn around

When you’re lost

Every way is right and wrong

Guidance song grown distant

Long lost too

To faraway time

A remembered moment of clarity

Where once my heart was mine

And I knew this intimately

And so the words have become fuzzy

Out of focus

Like I need glasses to read my own life

All I can hear enshrouded

In this park of darkness

Is a lone wolf howl

A low growl

Panting breath

My heart calling

From deep inside my breast

Outlined against a still full moon

It utters its presence

Its closeness

We are past words now

My heart and me

We must run in a pack of one

And see if this leads to me

Or further falseness

Do not summon me now

For I am sleeping

Nikolai Rozhonova

Thinking

Thinking: it wanders,

I cannot get a hold of it,

cannot firmly grip thinking to examine it,

like shifting tidal sands,

like early morning mist,

like scudding clouds in a windswept sky.

Thinking moves, shifts,

alters shape, form and function,

it is a phantom, a ghost,

it is like trying to grab a fistful of water from a running stream.

Every time I try to clothe it in words,

it has already moved

and I find the thought I am typing

is already a memory.

It seems, to begin talking about thinking

is to be forever lost in a world of clouds.

Nikolai Rozhonova

Shoreline

Do you want to turn the tide ?

Then stand alone on a shoreline,

your own shoreline,

where worlds meet without witness.

Face the enormity of it all.

All your own dark places,

all that is beyond control,

this shore where sea meets sand

is where we are human,

in meeting places,

the Vesica Piscis of two beings.

Don't drown, move slowly, easily,

safely in tidal motion.

Stay on the shore of yourself,

simply in awareness, idly watch the tide turn,

there's nothing to do,

tidal movement happens on its own,

it’s easily missed.

Nikolai Rozhonova

Softly

Softly this morning

It brushed my cheek

So compelling

I must needs speak

Momentary awakening

I am shaken from sleep

By tragedy, by beauty

I cannot laugh nor weep.

Its magnitude astounds

I am encircled by its bounds.

Love – it has no name,

Upon original creation

Who dares to stake a claim ?

Living Words

A living breathing story is just that,

it is carried on the breath,

born in the heart which resurrects the tale,

carried on living words to waiting ears

who share the experience.

Stories, like people, unfold,

this is a most important point, because,

although it has been,

it cannot be mechanised,

stories do not belong to studios,

under copyright, to be sold in plastic boxes

and endlessly re-prayed.

They are the property

of an individual human heart,

each telling is never the same,

it is exactly like a human being,

healing, self-renewing.

Nikolai Rozhonova

Choice

A thousand restless poets

Spitting bile, froth and spew

Malodorous sulphur springs

Churning foaming new

Emotionally discarded

Stewing over true

Driven by discord

Formed by fury

Nails cleaving at flesh

Existential storm concealing

All that started fresh

Gratitude the guide

It’s perfume fills the bold

Choosing gratitude

Revealing

One’s dark and hidden gold

Courage is called for

Choice is always there

Choose not to furnish

The hold of your despair

Writing makes a ladder

Each line

A rung

Climb until you can climb no more

One poem at a time

No guarantees

Only cursed choice of two

Condemned

Or indeed delighted

To express

One creator shining through.

Nikolai Rozhonova

Balance

Balance is a very personal thing,

it is sort of a positive positive,

as it refers only to itself,

it has no opposition, no negative.

There are not many things that do not have

their corresponding opposition,

this to me seems like one.

I may be in balance, I may be out of balance,

the field of play is self-referential.

It is always about balance,

balance remains the context whether in or out.

Healing is a balance.

This physical organism is an intrinsic balance.

Like electricity, it is a balance of positive forces:

creating, building up, of negative forces:

a destroying, a breaking down,

and a neutral space of both and neither,

where stillness abides.

Nikolai Rozhonova