Year: 2015

My Poem ‘Unforgettable Sixth Avenue’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

They don’t understand;
how could they?
Everything that happened,
everything that I wrote,
happened to me,
and I wrote it in my words
and from my perspective;
how could anyone else understand
what it was like to go through what I went through,
if they were not there at the time,
if they did not feel how I felt in the moment;
people tell that they like what I write,
but I wonder what they actually think,
what they imagine when they read something of mine,
and I wonder if anyone will ever be able
to truly be of the same mind as me.

I remember walking the streets of New York City,
like it was yesterday –
in my mind, and in my heart, I am still there,
and I want to be there:
I can still hear the sounds,
I can still taste the air,
I can still see the lights of Broadway at night,
I can still remember the moment I was found,
I can still go back there anytime of the day
in my imagination and daydream
even the smallest of details
that I still remember and love to this day,
as I will everyday.

I treasure my memories,
and I replay the best and the brightest of my life
as often as I can;
I miss people, places, times,
that will always be special to me,
more than anyone could imagine;
I relive my youth,
because those years I never want to lose;
I listen to the songs that I remember hearing
on the radio as a child, and I understand them
and what they were trying to say to me then,
now more than I ever knew.

My heart has been open wide since the day I was born;
every day of my life,
something unforgettable has happened to me,
and I remember so much
I wonder if there is anyone else
who loves being alive
and remembering their experiences as much as I do;
even now, I can easily flashback
to the most perfect day of my life,
to the night when I wrote my first poem,
or to the moment when I remember
standing on the street corner
on the “Avenue of the Americas”,
on a beautiful September afternoon,
in Manhattan, in New York City,
and being in awe of the entire world
and the gifts of life
that I can still see happening right this second,
on Sixth Avenue.

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My Poem ‘Science’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

As one cover closes,
another cover opens;
as one world freezes,
another continues to never know
the feeling of what it is like to be frozen;
as one story ends,
another adventure begins;
as a stranger becomes a friend,
another friendly acquaintance
is off to see something new
that they will declare when they see you next
that they had never seen such a thing before, or since;
as one road changes,
another connects with the one before
but simply with a change of name;
as one fire rages,
another dies until it is no more
than the after-glow of an extinguished flame.

Starts, and finishes;
beginnings, and ends;
birth, and death;
life’s phases of change and transformation;
thoughts, and wishes;
fresh air, breathing, cleansing;
right, or left;
chaos, order, belief, science;
everything in balance,
and happening for a reason,
like the variable in a perfect equation.

When things recur in nature;
when things are born, twinned with another
instead of singularly and alone;
when the present is also the past and the future,
that is when we all should take notice
with all our senses and instincts –
because it is then that we realize
that it is always better to be a designer
of your own life and style,
instead of simply being the same as someone else
and acting like a clone.

The seasons of Earth,
the names that we have given
the phases of our planet,
are never the same from one year to the next:
some winters are mild,
some winters are unbelievably harsh,
some summers are as golden as those
we always remember having when we were a child,
some summers are like being bitten hard
by a tyrannosaurus rex.
The sun continues to burn, and shine;
the water level of our rivers and lakes rise
and they fall, unexpectedly;
life is what it is,
and can never knowingly be kind, or unkind;
things happen again and again, invariably,
wonderfully, and sometimes surprisingly poetically.

Life is a continuous moment,
that our time existing in which
could be balanced on the tip of a needle;
our voices are but a whisper
in the cosmos of perfect silence,
and it is life’s precious finality
that empowers me the most,
and inspires me to the deepest of depths
and to the greatest of heights –
because once our lives are lived to their entirety,
we expire and then begin again anew,
and with another life to live and slowly reveal –
and that is the great journey,
and that is the great discovery of life,
of the universe, and the answer that follows
the equality sign posed eternally
from time in memorial by a meaning of life,
that is both a religion to believe in,
as well as the refined tried and tested
practice of a science.

My Poem ‘The Silence’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I hear nothing.
Life is as it always is,
but something just doesn’t feel right;
all I can focus on,
and the only sound that breaks the silence
is my breathing;
all that I am certain of
is that I am still alive,
because I can still feel my heart beating.

The stars are in the sky;
the moon is full;
everything looks as it has appeared before –
however, I just have this feeling that I can’t shake:
that there is something lingering in the air,
something building in the darkness of the night,
that makes tonight feel like it is not just any night.

It’s probably my mind playing tricks on me;
it’s probably me thinking too much;
it’s probably something completely logical
and easily explainable, as to why I am feeling “funny”;
it’s probably my emotions running away with themselves –
however, usually when I do so,
my emotions tell me exactly what is happening,
or going to happen –
but my emotions are the thing
that I have learned to trust the most.

I have had feelings like this before –
as if I am watching a huge wave,
while standing in the ocean,
and in-awe of it and unable to move,
because I feel like I can’t look away,
and because I need the wave
to come crashing down on me somehow.
My thoughts race,
my instincts go into overdrive;
I swear in my mouth there is this odd taste;
I try to see past the darkness, and the wave,
but I cannot see beyond what hasn’t happened yet –
these days, the future feels as if
it is an ever-changing cloud.

I feel like I am looking up at the night sky
through a telescope, seeing something bright and blinding
approaching in the lens,
that looks like a meteorite
that is coming straight for me,
that is going to fall right where I am,
and the thought that I might not be touched by the impact
is one that holds no hope;
and, as I watch, as I wait, as I feel, as I listen,
I know that something is coming,
there in the silence.

My Poem ‘I Look Above’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Above my head,
caught in the branches of a tree,
I see a red balloon –
a former gift and token of love
from one person to another on Valentines day –
that had floated away,
so that it could be seen by me,
so that it could inspire me,
so that I could start a new poem,
while looking at it,
as I wonder where it came from,
who it used to belong to,
who bought it, and how long it will be as it is,
as it was always meant to be –
and as with most things that I witness and see,
I know that the red balloon in the tree
will only be a sight to see
that is temporary.

Above my head, I see clouds of white
that look like a frozen blanket of snow hovering in the air;
above my head, I can hear an invisible airplane –
invisible to sight but not sound,
and the unmistakable noise of travelers on their way;
above my head, there is always something
that I can look up at for hours, and simply stare;
above my head, is a dream of an endless, perfect, day.

As I look above, I remember being above –
I remember being among the clouds
and imagining the sensation of flying like a bird;
as I look above, just as when I remember looking below,
I am frequently lost for words
and in full belief and feeling
that I have all that I could ever want,
and there is nothing more to life
that I need to see or know.

I look above a lot;
I look above, because I cannot yet imagine
seeing or knowing enough;
I look above, because I am reminded
every time that there is more
to a small pin-prick of light
than there might at first appear –
just as there would be more to see
for an extraterrestrial astronomer
looking at the Earth from their observatory
and seeing only a faint blue dot.
The sky is just a veil
to many wonderful and magical things
that cannot be seen with the naked eye,
and that is one of the reasons
that I will continue to look above.

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My Poem ‘Sensitive Skin’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I feel every raindrop;
I feel in awe after every burst and touch of the sun;
I feel so much strength of spirit and drive of life,
I could never give up;
I feel like my story and who I am
is written all over my skin.

I have always been sensitive to the thoughts,
the feelings, and the emotions, of those around me,
and those who are connected to me;
I would be there for my true friends until the very end,
even if doing so were to push me to life’s edge;
I live and feel every experience deeply,
as if they were my last,
and I often immortalize my memories in as much depth
as possible in a poem, or three;
I will keep going until I no longer can –
and that is my eternal pledge.

My skin is fair, and when the sun is as hot as can be
I burn to the colour of a lobster;
you would think that after everything I have seen
and been through, my skin would have become thicker
and as hard-wearing and as smooth as leather;
my skin still has impressions made on it
from when I was a child –
that have not worn away, and never will be worn away;
I still have the impressions of kisses,
and scars from times gone by,
that remind me of things and people,
every single day.

Every mark made on me is indelible,
and if seen under ultraviolet light
my skin would be like a piece of parchment,
or a creased manuscript,
that has been screwed up, thrown away,
rewritten, amended, over and over again,
that no matter what is done to it
can still be read and understood;
it is comforting for me to always remember
and see where I have come from,
and who was influential in making me Me.
Empathy, sensitivity, caring, creativity,
and an extraordinary memory,
is something that is in my blood;
the wear and the why of something,
and how something appears years after
it first originally came to be,
tells its own wonderful story.

Our skin is a map of where we have been;
our skin is touched and sculpted by our environment:
by nature, by the wind, by the rain, by the sun,
by the moon, just as the grand and great canyons,
valleys, mountains, of Earth, have been;
our skin is like the front cover
and the back cover of a living book,
in which an amazing, phenomenal, unique,
and individual story of a person’s life lies within;
there is no greater question than that of a person’s skin,
especially if you are like me, and you have sensitive skin.

My Poem ‘Dramarama’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

At school I wasn’t a born actor,
however I didn’t mind a bit of drama;
in drama class, I was always shy to take part at first –
however when I did have to act and play
a quickly improvised part
it didn’t take me long
to make the part I was playing my own,
have fun, and revel in the exposure of the stage I was on –
and thinking back I think I actually liked
creating a character, talking in a different accent,
because it always gave the creative side of me
a much-needed burst.

I can still remember my drama classes now,
and my drama teacher Mr. Brooks;
I can still remember Mr. Brooks telling me
how “natural” I was as an actor,
and if I wanted he could potentially
get me an audition somewhere –
I remember him telling me that:
“you have something a lot of great actors have,
something that is natural,
which can’t be learned from reading a book.”

In another life, right now, who knows,
I could be an actor, a performer, a film-star,
a television personality, perhaps a soap opera regular?
If I had not picked art as the subject
in my final years at school that I wanted to focus on,
who knows which path my life might have taken,
and who I would be?
In another life, I could be on stage somewhere
performing Shakespeare, in a film,
acting opposite my favourite acting hero,
or even living in America,
on the verge of having my own Walk of Fame gold star?
If I had been bitten hard by the acting bug,
I wonder if my life would have been
radically different than it is now?
I wonder if I would have ever written
any sort of poem, or a single line of poetry?

Choices, especially life-changing choices,
don’t always appear as they are, as they seem,
when we are faced with them;
whether to go in one way or another
is a choice that you sometimes just have to make
in the moment and hope that everything turns out for the best.
Every performer, or actor,
at the beginning of their performance life
gets stage-fright – and some still do
before every time they walk out on a stage,
and meet their audience –
and that to me is always an indication, at least in part,
that whoever they are and whatever they are doing
means something to them;
and finding your way and your confidence
to be comfortable in moments of exposure,
in one way or another, for most people,
especially actors, is the big test.

Life, theatre, connection, caring, drama,
creativity, motivation, the feeling of butterflies in your stomach,
can seem scary at first, but after a while you love it,
you want it, you need it, you thrive on it;
and what comes after: the response, the applause,
the smiles, the joy, and if you are lucky the love and respect
that you are lavished with, for putting yourself out there
for other people to see and critique;
because, to me, no matter what kind of actor you are,
and in which form your acting takes place,
you are making art for somebody,
and it is the same if you are any kind of performer;
and, as William Shakespeare himself said:
“All the world’s a stage…”;
and as long as there is life,
there will always be drama.

My Poem ‘Numbers’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Numbers surround us;
numbers connect us;
numbers help us remember things –
from the home where we live,
to the age that we are;
numbers define some people;
numbers are important to some people;
numbers are how some people
judge whether someone has something or nothing;
numbers have grown in importance and in prominence
since there invention –
from the moment that somebody started declaring
that one added to one is two,
and that the greater the number of something you have the better,
the more power you have,
and with your numbers you can do anything.

Numbers are more important to our daily lives than we realize;
certain numbers are more significant to us than others;
numbers are all that some people see in and with their eyes;
certain numbers: dates, times, addresses, “lucky numbers”,
can make people feel better;
numbers are our key to places, to our finances;
numbers can also be a sign of understanding and knowledge;
numbers are how we know the worth of something,
according to their prices;
numbers can be a way to encourage.

Numbers are fearsome, numbers are cruel,
numbers are tiresome, some numbers: not cool.
Numbers are stressful,
send you wild with rage;
numbers are frightening,
dictating your age.
Numbers keep you up revising,
deep into the night;
numbers make you shed a tear,
but persist and they’ll cause you delight.

Numbers are everywhere you look,
and sometimes they are more populous than words;
some numbers are constantly changing;
some numbers always remain the same;
numbers exist in their own, and they connect,
every kind of world;
numbers connect lots of things:
from follow counts on websites,
to balances in bank accounts;
from pin numbers, to lottery numbers;
from years of birth,
to the number that we see of a particular bird.
Everybody in the world secretly
has an inbuilt obsession with numbers.

With thanks to Katie Hewer for the third verse! 😉

My Poem ‘Memory Box’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I thought about giving up writing once,
I even put all my books and notebooks together
and packed them away in a cardboard box;
I thought about giving up what I loved
and what had always given me profound happiness,
and I even thought I could change who I was
and forget about everyone I had met,
and everything I had written –
but that thought honestly only lasted for a day,
and in no time at all, I was seeing things,
being inspired by things, hearing things,
and wanting desperately to write in my notebook
a poem about them;
I didn’t lose my love for writing,
but I did have my writer’s identity taken away from me
and stripped from me, you could say;
and it broke my heart putting all my cherished poems
and memories away, and putting them under my bed,
and I thought that the only time
that they would see the light of day
would be when I was reminiscing to a friend
that I used to be a poet, at some time in the future
when I was old and grey.
However, do you know what happened?
Do you know what I did?
I did something, that at the time was not planned:
I started again, I allowed myself to feel shame and pain,
and then I took my notebooks
from the box I had packed them away in,
I went to the next blank page of my latest notebook,
and I started to write a new poem
with my favourite silver pen –
I wrote one of my favourite poems, “The Phoenix”,
and I kept writing and writing and writing,
and only occasionally stopping to look back
before carrying on in the direction I had been walking,
I took pride in my gift again,
and I felt like myself again,
because I was writing again.
The moral of my story, if any,
is that if you love something so much
do not run away from it,
do not put it in a box and say “Fine, forget it!”,
because by doing so you are hurting yourself,
you are committing a mistake,
you are doing something that is hard to come back from
before it is too late;
take it from me:
nobody is perfect,
everybody makes mistakes,
the people who try to bring you to your knees
can only do so if you allow your entire world
to descend into a flux;
so, if you ever doubt yourself,
if you ever question what you are doing,
if you ever think that you would be better off
without the one thing that you most adore and love,
put that thought out of your mind
the second that your fear delivers it to you.
If you are an artist, keep making art;
if you are a singer or a musician,
keep making you music;
and if you are a writer, keep writing
and don’t ever believe that all of what makes you so special
could ever easily just be put away,
and forgotten about for a rainy day,
in any kind of memory box.

My Poem ‘Heart of a Poet’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The heart of a poet
is one of the most beautiful, amazing,
wonderful, things in the universe;
the heart of a poet is one of the most pure,
enlightening, electrifying, and special,
miracles of life, that blesses whom it belongs
with a mastery of the most spectacular
and gorgeous of words;
the heart of a poet is always open,
and it feels things and experiences
exceedingly more deeply than usual;
the heart of a poet is like an open wound,
like an open book, and on each page
that the poetry of the poet is written on,
with every word of every verse,
the ink from the poet’s pen
flows like that of the poet’s own blood,
and every drop, or full-stop, is undeniably magical.

The heart of a poet was brought to life,
and beats every day of its life,
because of the the muse, the spark,
that inspired it right from the start;
the heart of a poet has its own distinctive
and individual rhythm, and a signature mark of the poet,
that anybody, no matter when or where,
can feel and see, even in the dark;
the heart of a poet aches to touch the heart of another,
and begs to be touched;
the heart of a poet always bounces back,
even if it has been hurt, or crushed;
the heart of a poet is bigger on the inside,
and even during an entire lifetime
it is impossible for it to completely be filled;
the heart of a poet is at home anywhere –
in space, in the air, under the sea,
breathing in the openness and beauty of a sunny afternoon
looking at the staggering scenery of nature
that surrounds a countryside field.

The heart of a poet is sensitive to sights, sounds,
smells, touch, and emotions;
the heart of a poet is one of life-long love and devotion;
the heart of a poet is better described of as a fire;
the heart of a poet is capable of unbelievable generosity,
and its greatest hope is to be inspired, and to inspire.
The heart of a poet is not given away easily,
and, like trust, you must earn the gift of the bond it forges,
and it should never be taken lightly, or for granted;
the heart of a poet is always scarred,
overactive, unique, and haunted;
the heart of a poet is able to transform
any full-grown adult into a big kid;
there is nothing in the entire world
you will ever encounter, see, read, hear, and touch,
more phenomenal and epic,
than the immortal heart of a poet.

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My Poem ‘Three Little Words’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

When you are looking for a way to say something;
when for some reason, at the most important moment,
words fail you;
when you can say whatever you want,
and you have a lot to say,
but because all the ideas in your head
all seem to come at once,
you can sometimes end up saying nothing;
when it is a day when words and actions
mean more than they usually do,
and you have to make every moment and every word
count and be felt with more depth of feeling;
when on Valentines day you want to write an entire essay
and poem about how much someone means to you,
there are three little words that alone say everything: I love you.

There is a remarkable, noticeable,
and wonderful, look in the eye;
there is a warmth that rises;
there is an indescribable tingle
that you feel all over your body;
there is a flashback that happens
that takes you back to the very first time
that you heard those magic words, one after the other;
there is a slowing down of time;
there is a pull that you feel that grabs you like a rip-tide;
there is a reliving of a memory;
there is a feeling of happiness,
and overwhelming belonging, and love,
that is unlike no other.

Every time I have ever said something meaningful
and heartfelt to someone who means something to me
so profoundly that I have to tell them,
and show them, in some way;
every time I write a poem for someone,
I am giving a part of my heart away;
every time my heart grows in size, my heart races,
my imagination explodes, my feelings eclipse my thoughts,
and I am in my ideal state of mind,
in my beautiful, optimistic, and hopeful, love-filled world;
I think about someone who is unbelievably important to me,
who I love to death, who I love more than words can say,
and I close my eyes, I picture that special person in my mind,
and I say my favourite three little words…