Double Decker Grave

It’s easy to say I want to kiss you,

Who wouldn’t

You’re a garden overflowing with sweetness

Your lips the secret gate.

It’s easy to say

I want to share a bed or a whole life with you.

Like anyone I desire

Love and acceptance and pleasure.

But I want to go beyond

Set apart from the rest,

I want to share a grave.

Together in time

We’ll enrich the soil

And our last children together

Will be trees growing side by side.

– Vagabond Prophet

Bad Part of Town

They call this

The ‘bad’ part of town

The part with the foodbank

And the building for supervised visits.

Families separated

Estranged by circumstance,

Needy, not bad

Desperate not volatile.

I’ll tell you about

The bad part of town,

It’s up on the hill

It’s all chrome and glass.

Throwing food away

Every single day

Ignoring their children

Who just want to play.

– Vagabond Prophet

Sorrowproof

Melancholy pounds away

At the edges of myself.

Finding all the weak seems.

It seeps into my tissue

Swirling around tempestuously

Like cream poured into ice coffee.

Please give me strength

To stitch up my side

Painful as it will be

To push the needle in

Just to pull it back out.

It’s the only way to keep myself

Sorrowproof.

– Vagabond Prophet

Joe


Old brick buildings

New little cafes,

If walls had eyes

Would they remember

What used to be there?

Barista calls out,

“Black coffee for Joe”

And the walls reminisce

About when it was a barbershop.

And Joe was in

Every week for a shave,

Maybe Joe remembers too

And it keeps him coming back.

– Vagabond Prophet