Poetry…
the sun is shining,
I am waiting for the world to inspire to me…
there is a fire burning inside me…
the air outside is cold,
but it doesn’t bother me…
I am like a bird flying high and free…
I am finding truth in every mythology…
I write what comes to me…
when I write I sometimes like
to go to places I have never been
and live dangerously…
to me, possibility is the lock
and imagination is the key…
I rise my pen to the sky
and I wait for the lightning to strike
like Thor’s hammer and empower me…
what I do was once hard,
but now it comes naturally…
every day is a chapter in my life-long story…
I will be writing and dreaming
until the end of my life and until my last heart-beat…
I am constantly creating new tales in my mind
even when I am sound asleep…
when I can walk the Earth and see its true beauty
I see and I feel things that to others
might seem small and insignificant –
but it is the briefest of moments in a given day
that mean the most to me…
giving people hope in any way
is somewhat of an obsession for me…
I get great joy from creating
and from leaving a legacy of words
for others to follow behind me…
actions and thoughts creates ripples in reality…
believe in whatever makes you happy…
follow my lead and make an offering
to the gods whose tales live on
and have traveled to the sky above,
over land, and even below the sea…
make a toast to the Norse god Odin,
the god of poetry…
take a seat, and help yourself to some poetic mead.
Imagination
My Poem ‘Catching my breath’
The world is a crazy place,
sometimes I wish I could
transport myself high-above
and see the world
as an astronaut in orbit does –
beautiful and glowing green and blue
against the black backdrop of space…
sometimes, especially in a busy city,
it is hard to find an oasis of peace –
somewhere to go to get away
from the constant bombardment of sound,
somewhere wide-open:
like a park, or a forest of trees,
that you can walk through,
where you can smile to yourself
and close your eyes at the miracle
of being able to take your ease…
sometimes you just want to sit back and relax
and let the minutes and the hours stretch out
until you can’t tell them apart…
sometimes just owning a moment,
and swimming out into a metaphorical
subconscious-ocean, is just what you need –
you could simply just get your feet wet
by imagining you are sitting on a wooden boat-dock
and looking down at your own reflection in the rippling water,
or perhaps diving down to see
the coral-reef of your imagination
and then resurfacing with your head above water again
and realizing that you have traveled far.
We all need that place…
we all need that world within our world…
we all need to travel in different ways…
we all need a language that we know and understand:
art, music, sound, touch, a look, a smile –
finding the right words to say at the right time
is like completing a cosmic word-search.
We are all lighthouses guiding the way…
we are all sunrises and sunsets
to significant other people in a myriad of ways…
we are all messages in bottles
riding the world’s waves…
we are all looking at someone
and are being looked back on
by someone with a different face –
we are all both the observer
and the observed, you could say.
Inspiration does not always flow
as easily as water from a tap…
you could sit down and want something
to come to you and there is nothing there…
and then… zap! you get struck by something,
like a bolt of lightning,
and your eyes widen, your heart races,
and you create and you make something
that did not exist before,
and the energy and the art flows,
and you take a journey with it
all the way until it is something to you
that you would think of as if it were a new friend –
that is when you stop and you sit back
and you find and you finally feel
your heart-beats start to slow,
and you smile with joy,
as you put your hand up to your chest,
as you catch your breath.
My Poem ‘Where do you go?’
Where do you go
in a moment of silence?
Where do you go
to find yourself?
Where do you go
when people see you
looking off into space?
Where do you go
to feel safe and sound?
To some people, music is a place –
a world which they visit every day
that makes them happy
and which inspires them to create
a work of art that becomes so real to them
that can no longer be bound
solely within their mind;
to some people, their imagination
is like an ocean of fantastic
and mysterious discoveries
to be found every time they choose to dive;
to some people, everything that they see
is like a strand of inspiration
which they cannot help themselves
from pulling and seeing what follows;
to some people, it is a castle,
it is a kingdom, it is a reality,
it is a place built by them,
but influenced by many different things
that they retreat to –
and sometimes what is going on
on the outside, in someone’s life,
has a dramatic bearing
on the destination and the colour-palette
of the place within where they go.
Some people revisit the past…
some people imagine the future…
some people slow down their life
as the world around them races by too fast…
some people hold-on to hope with all that they have,
while others worry too much
and are incarcerated and paralyzed by their fears.
To day-dream is an amazing thing;
to be preoccupied by something on your mind is natural;
to realize a dream-come-true
sometimes you have to let your guard down
and lower your defenses so that your voice can sing;
to overcome something, which to you at the time
feels impossible, is incredible –
our limitations are ussually those of our own making,
and to truly turn your life around and be content
you have to sometimes drown-out the voices of doubt
and paint the picture that you want to see.
Walking through nature
is a great way to open doors in your mind
to new and undiscovered frontiers
that are just waiting to be created and unveiled;
when your attention is completely focused on something
it is like being on a one-way highway
with no way to go but straight-ahead;
saving some time for what you love
and for what makes you smile,
no matter what other people may say or think,
is more important than you could know;
everybody must have a sanctuary…
everybody must have a place of peace…
doing something, doing nothing in particular…
everybody must take a moment of time,
make it last, and make the most of it –
because time is as unique
and precious as a snowflake…
so, my question to you is:
where do you go?
My Poem ‘When the sun goes down’
When the sun goes down
on Halloween night,
when the werewolves howl
and the vampire take a bite,
when people walk the streets
dressed as clowns,
when trick or treats
are solicited and given out,
when ghosts haunt and the dead walk,
when costumed children
can be seen going door-to-door,
when the sky looks darker
than you ever thought it could,
when it is normal to dress
and express yourself
in a way that you may not
feel comfortable doing
at any other time of the year –
Halloween can be incredibly fun,
as well as the most perfect time
to face your inner-most fears.
When the sun goes down
and the moon is full,
when the stars are bright,
the universe that we are a part of
has never looked more beautiful,
when you see the spectacular
ribbons of energy of the Northern Lights
illuminate the sky,
the sight that you see takes your breath away –
there is no more magical and spellbinding
event to see that you will remember
for the rest of your life.
When the sun goes down
and another world awakens,
secret doors open wide
that lead to other dimensions…
the invisible becomes visible,
the imaginary becomes real,
the mysterious becomes audible,
the seemingly intangible
you can reach out and feel.
When the sun goes down
we are different people,
our faces are the same
as they are in the hours of daylight –
but more often than not
we show a part of ourselves
that no one else sees…
and at times of the year,
like Halloween,
when imagination knows no bounds,
you can always be sure
to see things that you have never seen –
especially when the sun goes down.
My Poem ‘Cherish the Light’
Light is a gift…
light is a beacon…
light is the life that we live…
light is a signal…
light is what paints the colours
and the hues of nature’s seasons…
light is what everything rises towards…
light is what highlights the beautiful…
light is the source
of what is constantly driving
every one of us forwards.
A life without light
is a very dark place indeed;
a night-sky without stars shining in it
is like a life without love – incomplete;
a life spent without artificial illumination
is one that truly understands the importance
of the sun and the moon to all our lives;
a child born in the glow of fire-light
who does not think to take it for granted
knows that light is the most important miracle
known to the entire universe,
and that the greatest repeating spectacle
that anyone can witness in life
with their eyes is the epic, silent,
beautiful, breath-taking,
ascension of the sun
at the moment of a sunrise.
It is almost heart-breaking to watch the sunset
and to see the world around you fall dark;
it is amazing to look up at the sky at night
and see an almost-infinite number of stars
beckoning and telling their silent stories
of space and time, distance and journey, life and death;
it is sad to think that because light and life is so precious
that it can so easily be taken away
as quick as extinguishing the life of a spark;
it is every living-thing on Earth’s right
to have a light to live by and gather-around –
light can be found on the outside,
however within our own mind and heart
there lies a light that is more important
to keep alive and burning bright until your last breath.
Cherish the world…
cherish people…
cherish the magical…
cherish love…
cherish the sun…
cherish life…
cherish imagination…
cherish the light.
My Poem ‘Thoughtform’
Who has not imagined something, or someone,
who is not there, but what, or whom,
appears before them as if they were real?
When they are a child,
everybody has an imaginary-friend –
even if they do not know their name,
or see them as clear as day.
Who has not created a reality
and a world within their minds
when they are going through
a stressful time in their life
as a way for them to deal?
Everybody, every-thing,
requires thought behind it –
and it is the power of thought
and of intention, and of emotion,
like that of a ‘happy thought’
that can be enough to revitalize a person’s hope
and chase the wolves of fear away.
Our thoughts are what make
things real and come to life;
it is our obsessions and our dependency
upon things that make them seem
impossible to live without;
our thoughts can illuminate the world
no matter how dark it may appear –
like a beacon of candle-light;
it is how we worship our own
personal god of the miracles
that blesses our lives
that speaks the loudest about us,
and in-turn puts the words that we say
into our mouths.
People live many incarnations of themselves
from their first step to their last breath;
people wear many faces and they speak in many tongues
depending on where they are,
and what they are doing, and with whom;
people never stop changing –
every day the world remakes us,
even after the moment of our death;
even god himself sometimes has to speak
in different ways and with different voices –
depending upon the knowledge
of how the intended-recipient of their message
or call reacts to certain things;
a change can sometimes be triggered in someone
often by something innocuous –
such as a blooming sunflower,
or being exposed to the light of the moon.
A person’s out-ward, physical, appearance
is nothing but a mask that we all choose to wear
in one way or another;
a person’s actions are manipulated and coerced
and secretly directed from the day that they are born;
a person’s in-ward, inner, ego, and true-identity,
almost stays under some kind of a cover;
a person can be anybody, a person can be anywhere –
sometimes a person can want something
and can imagine something so much
that they can become a distant manifestation of themselves
that evolves naturally from who they see in the mirror
and who they project themselves as
through their ‘thought-form’.
My Poem ‘The God of Sleep’
It’s a shame that I can’t write
while I am dreaming,
just as I dream while I am writing –
because I know that what I imagine at night
would eclipse, and does, any and all
that I put into words in the sunshine
of the day-light…
fragments of my thoughts of the night before
remain in the morning, sometimes,
like the wreckage of a ship
that has run-aground on a beach –
but they are only pieces of a whole
and there are holes now
where unrecoverable dream-moments
used to appear so clear and so real,
but which are now lost
on an ocean of wonder and wishes
being carried out of reach.
Sometimes we have the same dream
over-and-over again,
and each time we imagine them
we remember more about them when we wake up;
why we all dream is still a question
that nobody can give a distinctive
and a correct answer to –
however, I believe the question of why we dream
is on-par with the question:
why do we fall in love?
We love because we must;
we dream because we are unable to stem the tides
of our imagination and our emotional flood;
we wade deep into a dream
when we are doing something in it
that means something to us;
when we dream we are hearing
and we are being pulled-under a spell,
after having been sprinkled by Morpheus’ dream-dust.
I often wonder what I do not remember
about the times that have now returned
to the ether of infinite time, depth, and colour;
like some people who remember their dreams,
I too wonder what they mean;
I often wonder what would happen
if all of our dreams and their content
were to become real and we could share
every detail of our dreams with one-another;
I have always believed that our dreams
are our doorways to a greater world –
a world that knows no bounds
and has no fixed borders,
and I believe that each time we dream,
when and where night and day meet,
we are being given a gift to hold-on to
and do with it what we will
by ‘Hypnos’ himself, the god of sleep.
My Poem ‘The Day-dreamer’
I am a boy in a bath-tub…
now I am a boy in a boat
on the surface of a pond…
within the blink of an eye
I am now a teenager
in the middle of a vast lake
surrounded by mountains…
I blink again and I am now racing
down a river, over rapids,
and all the while I am
a man in a boat without a paddle,
and then I reach the edge of a waterfall…
and when I open my eyes now I am on a sea
in the middle of an ocean of blue,
and overhead there is an unbroken sky
as clear as a new-born baby’s eyes –
and there I am, alone in my boat,
wearing a white t-shirt and a pair of little-blue jeans,
with a notebook and a pen settled in my lap…
and it is then that I drift away
and allow myself to be carried by the waves…
and within seconds there follows the end of the day –
the night surrounds me, the stars shine brightly,
the sea-air floods my lungs and my thoughts
more with every second and intake of breath…
I close my eyes again, and when I open them this time
I am among the stars in outer-space
being drawn to a new shore…
and when I blink once more
now I am clearly on the sea of an alien world –
where the sky is as golden as an Egyptian desert,
and the water beneath me is as red as a ruby…
when I momentarily look down at my notebook
and then I look up the picture before has changed again –
now I am encircling a vortex at unbelievable speed,
and the world becomes a blur…
and then I awaken in my bath-tub,
and I am a man of 35 –
a life-time of imagination returned to me
and took me on a journey of space and time
in the few seconds that I my eyes were closed…
now there is no fear…
now things are clearer…
I am on my way somewhere…
I do not know where life will take me next,
but I know that I will never stop being
a life-long day-dreamer.
My Poem ‘The World of My Stories’
A person’s life is filled with different characters;
a person’s world is filled with many horizons;
a person’s life can be organized and thought of
as like a book of interconnected chapters;
a person’s view of the world changes over time
as they live, experience, and grow older –
and, from my perspective, I am so glad
for the life that I have had and still have,
because my life is a trove of golden-moments
and a limitless garden of inspirational memories
and musings that thrive and infuse
the palette of my writing,
because there is so much in abundance.
Just as every solar-system has a star at its centre,
the world of my poetry and stories too has a sun
that it revolves around and gives it gravity
and keeps it spinning;
just as every planet has a combination of gases
that make up its atmosphere,
the world where my ideas are born from
has all that is needed to keep my internal world
alive and its creations breathing, living, and evolving.
Worlds are built over time
and of many components and ingredients;
over a life-time, and while writing a story,
there is a constant preoccupation
to find truth, sense, and balance;
some worlds can be vast, and some worlds can be small –
expanding and contracting, depending on a person’s
state of mind and their environment;
over time we all collect many things in many ways –
however, it isn’t until you start thinking about
writing a story of your own that you realize
that even the smallest of things
can be among that which is the most important.
Usually, the idea for a new story comes to me like a dream;
for the most part, what a story will be about
when I am writing one all depends and is centered upon
something I have felt or something I have seen;
when I first begin writing a story
it is like I am learning to walk again
and not worrying too much about or counting my steps;
when I get into a story and I have fully found my footing
and I know where my story is going
it is then that I race towards its ending
without fear of losing my breath.
I love writing stories –
however, to me, writing a story
is like running a marathon;
to me writing poetry is like going on a sprint
through the green and blue world of my head –
and it is while writing poetry
that I get to let my imagination go wild,
and I get to sometimes write what I see;
writing a story is like creating and making
something that to you is a labour of time and love;
I am a writer, and more than anything I love to write –
however, I sometimes feel like to describe
what I see when I look within
there could never be enough words,
and it is then that I wish I could find a way
to show people what lies within me
and take them on a tour
around the world of my stories.
My Poem ‘The life of an idea’
Sometimes it comes like water-drops;
sometimes it comes like a flood;
sometimes the idea is born
from that instant when the words
just don’t want to stop;
sometimes creativity takes time
to grow from the seed
that you planted or sowed
before it can be something
that you, or anyone else,
may someday choose to look with love,
and go with it on its journey
wherever it goes.
A writer waits… a writer looks…
a writer listens… a writer finds things
in the outside world
and then takes them inside their mind
and then generates and regenerates
all that they have seen, heard, and know,
and creates something brand new –
they write a story, they make connections…
they assume and they presume,
and then they fill their time
with the fruits of their imagination,
and they give their creations
a piece of their spirit,
and in doing so they give their idea a life.
Some ideas only have the life of an instant of time;
some ideas, no matter how hard you try,
you can’t let go of;
some ideas come into being from a single sign;
some ideas look up at us from below,
and some ideas look down at us
and are just waiting for us to notice them –
like the stars that can only be seen
when the sky is black above.
Ideas are like children –
sometimes you have to keep them
behind a boundary so that they don’t run away;
ideas can sometimes be like rockets –
they take off, but they do not know where they are going;
an idea can be like a loyal dog –
if you feed them, if you give them attention
and if you show them love,
every day they will always come to you when you call them,
and when you tell them to stay they will stay;
to an artist there is no such thing as too many ideas,
because to an artist no matter how many ideas there are
there is never enough.
There are Ideas that evoke and differing and varied reactions
depending on the person who is exposed to them;
for some people, their idea’s come more during the day
than they do at night;
there are ideas that come, and then they go in a flash,
and they are never seen or thought of again;
some people always have ideas every how of the day,
and there are some people who struggle
to come up with anything creative –
however, in my opinion, though at times
for an inspiration-starving artist
it might be hard to pull anything out of the fire,
no artist should ever feel discouraged…
because just as a new days
brings a brand new sunrise,
so does a new moment bring new ideas –
though each and every idea
may have a different time of life.
Mark Hastings 