JOURNEYS, PART 9; ONCE, UPON A SUMMER

28/08/201827/08/2018 / deuxiemepeau / 2 Comments

It was summer stock
and season of blondes;
darker tones bleached
to an inch of white,
at first so fair and fragile,
translucent tracks
tethered to nothing more than
temporary teases, interval acts
pitching and playing and parting
before the important performers
took their permanent positions.

I was high on a hiccup
of happiness that had long eluded me,
basking beneath the blinding spotlight,
a swing without a line on stale streets
whose stories I envied
as you slipped in between
the numbing neon distractors
and saw the blinkers that floundered me.

I was bound and breathless
before we’d even bent our bodies
into a bed that never quite fitted
the pair of us and yet still I stayed,
as you crept along the curb of the couch
not quite sure if you wanted to catch a star
or just court a curiosity.

We were players of unequal parts,
me too light on lines
and you too too busy
following those fragile white lines
that took you away from me
while I lay there next to you, waiting
to see if you might come back.

We lost each other
on another side street
after sunset, when the light
no longer blinded me
to those darker tones you tried to dye.

It had been my season of blondes;
buffed bodies that blurred lines
but your costume caught on reality
before the curtain made its final call.

We were separate journeys
caught up in the changing of the tracks,
too temporary to be truthful,
too tempting to not to taste.

Memory has not moulded us
into anything more meaningful
than a moment that was never really meant.

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

JOURNEYS, PART 8; DISTANT DESIRES

27/08/201816/08/2021 / deuxiemepeau / 8 Comments

—

Time is a delicious desire
to embrace eternity,
an impossibility-
a glass cloud in a steel sky,
a shivering snowflake
on the surface of the sun
and we are all single sailors
on a vast ocean,
trying to catch a kiss
on the other side of the universe.

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

JOURNEYS, PART 7; METAMORPHOSIS

26/08/201816/08/2021 / deuxiemepeau / 7 Comments

—

How still it is, silent
beneath the somber shade
of night, beyond the light
already departed. Alone in thoughts
that twist and turn and dig deep
amid the this and that,
the important and the redundant,
the stillness builds, oblivious
to the restlessness beneath my skin,
between my toes, a sense of something
unseen, somewhere a future
already on the move, shaken
into substance, substantially self-sufficient,
while I sit in silence, in stillness, in waiting,
wrapped up cocoon like beneath
the hibernating blanket of this interim,
this condition of considered change.

I will soon slip into a sleep
born of the metamorphosis
of the moment,

aware of who I was,
in the knowledge of who I am
and accepting of what I will,
in time, become.

Tomorrow awaits the memory
of who I was while today exists
only the dream of what will come.
This stillness is as teasing
as the unknown route ahead,
the trail my feet have yet to thread,
to carve out a crater
that smacks of existence
long after I have journeyed on
and found fresher, unexplored lands
I shall, one day, for a time call home.
Somewhere, just out of sight,
on the edge of this stillness a night owl
toots a tale of transition
above the silent slumber of a world
with eyes closed, unconscious
to the weighty wisdom of tomorrow’s light.

The erudite Owl,
once perched in another land,
in another time, on the shoulders of Athena,
witnesses the world through eyes
that see beyond the darkness
of all that has been and has yet to unfold
and carries, in his very presence,
on this very night, in this very stillness,
while all else surrenders to the silence,
a confirmation of the transition felt within me,
sensed around me and promising
to take hold of me as sure as he will
spread his well-worn wings,
find his flight and take to the shadows
before morning finds it’s light

while all through time
a metamorphosis is made of me.

—

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

JOURNEYS, PART 6; DAFFODIL DREAMS

25/08/201816/08/2021 / deuxiemepeau / 10 Comments

I climb clouds
between the night’s blanketed sleep,
a billowing blossom of smoke
that never chokes the mountain moon,
where the world is a warm walk
through a blue breeze
and the only plight
is to find your path
within a forest of daffodils
on a prairie of peace.

On a prairie of peace
within a forest of daffodils,
beyond the billowing blossom of smoke
that never chokes the mountain moon,
I climb clouds
as a blue breeze uncloaks
the confusion of consciousness
and the sky glistens
with a golden glimpse of tomorrow
tipped in a topaz tempered truth.

I climb clouds
to sleep in a dream of daffodils

too distant for daylight to deliver.

Photograph taken in Holland Park, London, in an earlier lifetime

JOURNEYS, PART 3; THE CLIMB

21/08/201816/08/2021 / deuxiemepeau / 4 Comments

For every cracked climb,
unconsidered but compulsory,
that catastrophic clamber
over chaos and confusion,

there also comes the
slide into smoothness;

that paved path,
pure and polished,
an offer of an anchor
before the next convulsion of the course.

All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly

Photograph taken at the National Park of the Calanque, Marseille

JOURNEYS, PART 2; A FERRY FROM THE FUTURE

20/08/201816/08/2021 / deuxiemepeau / 3 Comments

I took the ferry, once again, that morning, after a long repose,
to the other side, the one formerly ‘his side’, the side I used,
so often, to cross to, to eat, to sleep, to kiss, to share,
the same ferry that took me from the real world to his world,
which became my world until it was our world, for a while.
That small stretch of water that separated one from the other,
so small and insignificant and yet deeper than we ever imagined.
I cycled on and as morning met the afternoon, I passed that farm
we’d stopped at in the middle of nowhere, in that time long ago,
to buy eggs and milk for no other reason than because we could
but not with him, the other one, the one who’d distracted me
after we’d stopped ferrying back and forth when the water got colder
and proved less penetrable. That other man, the native man
and newly separated too, who’d kiss and cuddle and hold and stop
and break and kiss and stop and kiss and kiss and smile sometimes.
He’s happier now, I see it in photographs, but he stopped for me
for that time after we’d stopped, like I said, and I’ll always be grateful.
It wasn’t long after I cycled over the bridge at Ijburg and slipped back
into the city from the east and passed his house and smiled
at the thought of him, the one that had stopped, another one, not the kisser
or the one across the water, but the one who’d come before them both,
the blonde, after I’d been lost in a sea of darks or so she said
in that play, Suddenly Last Summer, and it never left my mind.
No, the first one who’d found me in that foreign land, who’d spotted me
in cap and boots, drinking whiskeys and beers on a Sunday afternoon,
my first Sunday afternoon, raining outside, of course, was it really always
raining? He wasn’t home that day, but he was somewhere close to me,
within, still teaching me scraps of his native tongue
that would later kiss me all over and cover me in its scent.
He used to watch me from the corner of his eye, wondering
if I was shocked and surprised at his life and smiling, sometimes,
at how I stayed around. But I wasn’t, not at all, not even once
in all that short life we shared together that swiftly passed into the past
just like yesterday and the day before, just like today will do tomorrow
and yet, for some sweet reason it all returned to me that day,
not so long ago, before I left the flatlands for the French ones,
that almost ordinary summer Sunday, in August that graced me
with warmth as it gently kissed me on the cheek before distance,
inevitably, carried it off on a subtle breeze as I cycled on home,
a home that is no more in reality, but that remains so close
to the heart as this journey continues along its route.

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

JOURNEYS, PART 1: ON THE ROUTE OF THE ROAD

17/08/201816/08/2021 / deuxiemepeau / 2 Comments

—

The sun burns the shadows
as fields fall into forgetful,
speed is not my subject
nor a confusion I can peacefully pedal.

We are tethered to tracks;
all these pick ups and their set downs
that perish after purpose while we rattle
toward the repercussions and rebounds.

The sun burns the shadows,
I am senseless to why I strayed,
distance no more distinct like those faces
that had the fortune to fade,

baggage is back breaking,
space not as infinite as vowed,
I cluttered conscience in cupboards
but now cast countless confusions onto a cloud.

The sun burns the shadows
in fields of former exertion
now sullen at the sight of its descendants
and their detached desertion,

Tattered ties sag on trees,
forefathers flounder in a darkness
no longer indulgent to either
a hopeful herd or healthy harvest

(I have clippings of ribbons in boxes
but no recollection of what I tied them to).

The sun burns the shadows,
I watch from crowded compartments
all crammed with connections that deceives
with its distractions and derailments,

I am no more surprised
to set down on the wrong platform
than to drive in the right lane, so long
have I turned from the left of this sojourn,

remembering is rough,
memory meanders like tracks
that turn twists into truths, that take
their tales far from the foundation of facts,

(creativity is carte blanche to recreate,
the truth was too dull to disclose
and so it burns in the shadows
of these fields I am flying past)

The sun burns the shadows,
sets by a sea I’ve never seen,
where breakers are beached as if tired trunks
might tempt time to sweep more serene.

The morning sun is slow
as my feet sweep across salt sands,
I reach towards the crisp air that has crept
to a calmness to caress my hands

but in all this stillness,
before the day yet yawns awake,
its still as elusive as time itself
that never stops for you to catch a break;

We are not the fishermen,
but the fish viewing the hook
as something to hang onto.
We are not the sea
but the sand being swept into shapes
we cannot always smooth out.
We are not the tracks
but the train being taken
to places we never thought to touch.

The sun burns the shadows
and I watch from behind the glass,
my reflection cast upon
things I will never touch
while, in my eyes, I still see
the things that time has still to take.