Scribble And Shout

Read by Jonathan Foster

Credit: Jonathan Foster

I’ve been wanting to read this piece for a while, and this week I’ve grabbed the opportunity. I’ve added the text below, but this one is for the ears. I hope you love it as much as I do.

Once

upon a winter dawn

came a love

as light

was born

came a love

from far flung galaxies

that none had seen

and never will

and never could

through ancient trees

a flame

upon this darkest chill

this coldest wood

saw I, saw she

through half closed eyes

by chance

midst of this

eternal dream

saw I, saw she

That none had ever seen

saw I, saw she

this love supreme

I once wanted to write love poems.

My love poems would hypnotise people, entrance and drug them, like remedies for the broken down hearts beating inside our chests.

My love poems would be a kick in the head, a halo of love would sparkle like a circle of birds. They’d be a Ju-jitsu move, throwing people to the floor in a love-lock from which they’d joyfully tap out, overwhelmed by love.

If I worded them just right, got the cadence just perfect, filled them with the right words they’d rock the world like a delicate butterfly wing setting off a hurricane of love.

All I had to do was write the perfect love poetry.

Who could resist?

No one, that’s who.

But it turns out that I’m not the only poet in town. There are far harder working rhyme masters struggling day and night and night and day through all the hours writing and writing and writing their scrupulous, meticulous poems. And they don’t only use quills. They use crayons and pencils and pens and typewriters and keyboards and tablets and spray cans and small planes that write in the sky. They even create algorithms that do their writing for them after they’re exhausted from all their exertion through the long day. They are the ultramarathoners of poetry.

But these interminable scribblers aren’t writing love poems. Instead they’re plastering the world in monstrous, depraved and barbarous poems. They’re writing poems of division and cruelty. Poems of certainty and rigidity. Poems that look the other way as their words tear the world apart. Unyielding, despotic poems that size and sort and look down their noses in disgust at everything. Cursed, poisonous poems that cling like viruses and inject nefarious rhymes.

And everyone is snorting up these terrible word-slinger’s poems. Rapacious and insatiable, like poem junkies, scouring gadgets and devouring devices and reaching into their pockets every two seconds to pull out and caress their screens, reading and reading and reading these poems of ego and fury and screams.

These hatchet-poets write sonnets and haiku’s and lyrical prose and every combination of word flows, so brilliantly and prudently that my love poems became just another forsaken fool paraded like a victory, like a madness, like hubris. The blood of love is being spilled on the streets and no one seems to care. Instead people inhale poems of resentment and avarice and indulgence. The world has succumbed to these enslaving poets with their ripe cruel doggerel.

And so I tired of writing love poems. I lost faith. Yes, the rains might come, this famine of love might abate. But I had watched the world dry out and I had lost hope in this lovelorn desert of fools. I wrote my love poems in quieter and quieter places and shared them less and less until I shared them no longer for there was no one left to read them. No one could feel in all this din. My love poems were merely whispered in unpeopled places alighting upon the breeze and sailing away unheard. No one cared to listen. No one cared.

And in that empty cold echoless chamber of torture where love poems were not even scrawled on the walls I fell to my knees and cried. When would my epiphany come? When would the pendulum be re-swung? When would the rise outrun the fall? When would the moral kernel grow a mighty canopy to shade us all? And my tears fell like raindrops in an ocean. And my tears fell like raindrops on the desert sand. And my teardrops fell like raptures I can no longer recall. No longer. No more.

But this will not do. This cannot be. These terrible poems so casually flung from a word-slinger gun can not destroy my fleeting life half-spun. I will not capitulate. I will not be exhausted or regret or let go and I will whisper my love poems louder and louder. I will take you by the arms and shake you and shout my love poems into your face and shake you out of your stupor. And if you do not listen I will scribble my love poems and thrust them under your nose and I will scribble and shout and shout and scribble like a madman until you point and laugh and say look at that fool, thank god I am not him. But something in you will wake from hibernation. Something will vibrate through you, deep in your chest, where your broken heart is still beating. Something will raise the alarm in your eternal languor and lethargy and you’ll emerge from this strangeness and search once again for love. Won’t you? Can you not hear the love poems on the breeze? Can you not hear my voice calling in the morning mist? Can you not return my glance as another heart is hankering to be seen? Seen by you? That none other could see but you? Will you not open your eyes and be seen?

I’ve had enough of these other poets with their blood ink and their crazed poems. I’m sorry I let them get to me. It was but a moment. They pass these moments. I shall write my love poems once again and whisper them in your ear and I will hear your lips whispering your love poems and once more we’ll set off a hurricane of love that will spin and spin until all this devastation is put back together again:

Once more

upon this winter dawn

will came back love

where light

was born,

will come back love

from far flung galaxies

that all can see

and always will

and always could

through ancient trees

a flame

upon this darkest chill

this coldest wood

I will see you

through half closed eyes

by chance

Midst of this

eternal dream

I will see you

My Love Supreme