CATCH THE COLOUR

20/04/2019 / deuxiemepeau / 23 Comments

Sun sets and then rises and in between
we kiss, catch the kisses that come
upon the current, catch the kiss,
the continent is not always ours
to conquer. Tides come and tides
retreat, touch is temporary, flesh
is polished pink below the sensuous sky
but falls from fold like sands in the
glass that hoards the hours, like clouds
that can never be caged. Sun sets
and we blaze our orange blossoms
into passing nights, the night’s gale
calls of connections in the passing,
passion is precious until it too passes.
Sun rises and then falls, catch light;
catch the fire before it drowns
on the water, catch the colours to paint
the coming of the grey, to keep afloat
until the next kiss. Catch colour,
catch kisses before the sun sets,
let worry waste upon the wave,
tomorrow’s light will be blue enough.

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

20th poem for National Poetry Writing Month

RED INK

18/04/201917/04/2019 / deuxiemepeau / 11 Comments

I love and lose in circles, scratching
at skin tipped in ink, trying to find
the truth beneath the colours
I’ve let others colour in, hiding
the paler flesh I held from view,
we always need to hold on to something.

I am not comfortable over quiet dinners;
too much stilled air coursing
through the courses as I question
the seconds ticking by, in silence;
will you find me failure and flee?
But I’ll always be the first to fly
since that first flight I had no hand in.

I stir the stilled air with performances;
shy boy in the spotlight singing songs
he can’t quite find the notes for
or find the right to call his own.

I love and lie in circles that spiral
back on themselves, that cast further
reflections, not quite clear, on the boy
now faced as man in the mirror,
that flood more ink into that fading flesh.
‘Chromolume No. 9, Georges?’ she asked,
once, in a play, how many more?

Variations grow stale, thought becomes
tension, creation becomes controlled,
breath becomes bearer, bleaker. My chest
beats too quickly to let in fresh air,
fresh flesh, compressed, repressed.

I cannot lie in these circles,
these spirals that seem to linger,
longer, no longer. I am looking
to find a new shape; turning back,
returning, recalling that first mark,
to measure how far from it I ran,
to see what was left behind,
to lay it to rest and find the rest,
the rest of me beneath the red ink
tipped into this fragile flesh.

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

18th poem for National Poetry Writing Month

ORIGAMI

14/03/201916/08/2021 / deuxiemepeau / 10 Comments

I found you once
like a raindrop on a window
that can only caress the extremities,
not the truth,
not the folds we fabricate
between our own fact and fiction.

I found you once and was folded
for a time

like origami…

fingers running lines along skin,
folded into form unknown,
pressed into position
with little resistance,
pleats to bridge the gaps
between the unfamiliar
and more favourable.

I was paper

being played with
for a while, like the rain
running down the window;
falling, forming, falling into fragility,
reforming, falling, leaving lines already fading,
folding into another, other…

for a time,
for a time to pass the time
between the fact and the fiction,

between the transparency
of the glass
and an inability to hold the rain.

All words and photographs and mini shirt and tie origami by Damien B. Donnelly

Audio version available on Soundcloud

FOR A WHILE, TO DREAM

28/02/201916/08/2021 / deuxiemepeau / 10 Comments

I of soft nights dream
above a sea of harpsichords,
where clouds are cooling caramel
and the stars set alight with the scent
of a pristine perfume deemed delectable.

I of soft nights dream
neath a curve of cloistered courtyards,
drunk on desires dawn will deliver
as dusk dressed Diana sets to slip
my careless catastrophes far upriver.

I of soft nights dream
on a bed of chamomile seats
where leaves lean in to comfort from cold
and fine floret rays of petals white
dance around the apple scented hearts of gold.

I of soft night dream
through this climate’s current chaos
of laughter lines beneath sweet thy smile,
of caress, kiss and chorus of choir
and the comfort that comes to call for a while.

I, of soft nights, dream…

—

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

Inspiration for today’s poem must be given to Nigel Cowburn from Growplan; https://growplan.wordpress.com/. His wife Liz from Exploring Colour; https://exploringcolour.wordpress.com/ told me last week that his response to my poem Solo Sail was that it reminded him of harpsichords, chamomile seats and cloistered courtyards! I couldn’t let those images be passed up on. Thank you Nigel.

FALLING THROUGH SPACE

04/02/201916/08/2021 / deuxiemepeau / 7 Comments

Ghost clouds gather

over an ice-cold ocean of marble

we cannot break through.

Maybe there is something deeper

within its depths

that we have missed.

All breath is naked.

Movement has been muffed.

The air rigid.

Nothing left to cover up.

I blush under your absence

or do I blush

before the cold truth;

this is it, we are alone,

we will end one day.

All we have failed to learn

will fall through space

like stars,

burnt out

before they’d even begun.

All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly

BROKEN BUT NOT BITTER

20/12/201816/08/2021 / deuxiemepeau / 5 Comments

I beat back the blues
by licking fingers
on this honeyed language
we spread over the dawn
of each dark day.
We can be drunk on symphonies
of sentences
that slip shadows into sleep,
I whisper of rain
and you twist another truth
through its tendrils
to tell of something drier,
warmer, more lasting
than a droplet of despair
dissolving in the air.
We can be drunk on the words
we sip slowly in the storms,
we take torrent thoughts
of thunderous terror
and turn them
into diaphanous diamonds;
everything is an experiment,
a reaction,
a chemical coming to terms
with its contemporary,
a dictionary is a sentence
awaiting a structure,
the moon is a callous clump of coal
until your eyes spark it
with suggestions of significance.
So much can be broken
and the rest appear so bitter
but I come willingly
to lick the dark chocolate
of these words
and see what structures we can build
together between all this
broken bitterness.

All words by Damien B. Donnelly

THE THAW

01/11/201816/08/2021 / deuxiemepeau / 12 Comments

Blue is the breath,
blue is the earth,
morning, early,
the sky a clean canvas
of white and the earth; blue,
a bed of frozen blues
born from dawn’s breath,
a blanket of freshly fallen
slow snow, trembling
along the hairs of the land, caught
in the calm before the crunch,
before the footprints
mould into mud
all that is now a myriad of mystery.

There is beauty in blue,
there can be beauty in being broken,
in time being frozen,
in the breath baying.

I twist and tremble
between these sheets
still fresh upon these old shadows,
still crisp over this drying skin.
I twist and tremble
through this season to be unsure,
falling into blue,
into time, time is frozen
along with all that is born in this bed,
a blanket of fallen findings;
some things I thought to be more,
some things I hoped to mean less,
like loss, less loss,
less time, less breath, more blue,
the mystery is already moulding into mud.

Blue is the breath and slow,
soft as the early morning snow
so slow, awaiting nothing more
than the affirmation
of an approaching melt.

All words and drawings by Damien B. Donnelly

Audio version available on Soundcloud:

DARK LIGHT, PART 2; THE FALL

26/10/201816/08/2021 / deuxiemepeau / 5 Comments

I whisper into wakefulness,
the body stirs before the brain,
the blood before belief,
I curl into colder corners of the covers
to encourage skin to come round
as sound slips in just before the sight,
light pours into eyelids slowly opening,
toes slip out to inspect the season
but the soul knows the truth;
I bear every season in a single day,
a snowstorm in the stench of summer,
in moments overlapping;
burning flesh on ice cold streets
(Paris can perish you
behind its postcard perfection),
springs of hopeful holds
that fall to less likely,
there is an unbreakable blossom
in this heart that covers
the precious particles
like once perfect snowflakes
that have since been shattered,
strings that have been strung;
strung out, strung up,
turned to taunt,
I recall the harmony
but am a stranger to the words
we wound into songs,
stretched into surrenders.
Your calls now drown us both
from the far end of another ocean
I thought to be tempered with tepid time,
phone floods forage
where even distance cannot dissipate
the despair that settles
on the floor beside me,
a shallow pool of strangulation
after the hang-up that always feels
somehow lighter at your end.
So much falls away,
so much falls to the ground;
shattered shards no longer capturing
its distant promise.
I watch the snowflakes
catch the wind carefully,
glisten for a moment
before it’s beauty losses breath
on the trodden tracks
of these treadmills
that take us to nowhere
and back again
as the bluebird sings her song
and the moon, even in the bright sky,
still retains its shadow,
ever watchful, ever wondering
when we too will find our time
in this fall, to fall.

All words and photography by Damien B. Donnelly

Audio version available at Soundcloud:

I WISH…

12/09/201816/08/2021 / deuxiemepeau / 5 Comments

—

Our lives were lived in London then,

2 boys at play on shades

and stages,

in 4 bedrooms

that couldn’t bind us

forever.

In arms we sobbed

from 1 of our 2

3 seater sofas

in our 4 bedroomed house,

watching dreams disappearing

beneath the ashes of the Apple.

Eden had ended for the West.

No one knew who they were anymore,

the afternoon dawned into darkness,

arrogance had eaten the eagle’s feathers

and I only saw shadows in reflections

of myself in mirrors

that couldn’t capture the truth

of who I was or who

the 2 of us had become.

There was confusion, everywhere,

on all sides of the world, on all

the streets in shock, the television

a mirror to the madness

we couldn’t move from.

We were voyeurs to the violence

and already traumatized

by the thoughts of revenge

as Bush read books in the back row

of a preschool of potential

pacifiers or partisans.

And now, today…

—

We’d stood once, together,

years earlier, before the 2 sofas

and the 4 bedrooms

and the discontentment

and then this word called terror,

2 boys in awe

on the top of the world

with Broadway just a bellow below,

not realizing that life was but to Rent,

that No Day But Today meant this day,

not some day, somewhere.

It was now, here.

Jonathan never got to see his story,

hear his one song, his glory,

rising like Mimi from death.

A musical is but a muse on life,

plots are not planned in the spotlight.

A house is not always a home.

Towers cannot always support

the grayness that chokes between

dream and destiny.

We all have our stories,

our songs and our sorrows.

Love is love is love.

Love is…

I dream I see the planes

fly over and not into,

I dream…

we are there in London, still laughing,

still in the bedroom, still loving,

still on that rooftop, still standing

and all is still possible.

—

I dream

the towers in every territory

are rising from the ashes.

—

But we are no longer 2 boys

playing home in 4 bedrooms

in SE26, on September 11, 2001.

We have stopped counting

what we’ve lost, we have run out

of numbers and can never

go back to before.

—

But still,

I wish…

—

All words by Damien B. Donnelly

We saw the musical Rent on Broadway, New York, at the Nederlander Theatre on June 24th 1999, Jonathan Larson, its writer and composer, died the morning his show opened for off-broadway previews. He received a posthumous Pulitzer prize for Drama and Tony awards for best musical, best book of a musical and best score. It is still running in cities all over the world today. We stood on top of the World Trade Center on the 23rd of June, at 2.20 in the afternoon. But we can never go back.