Author name: Hayden Veil

In an earlier incarnation, Hayden Veil enjoyed a successful career in software engineering, writing late-night poetry in pursuit of sanity. On 2 February 2020, the world of Hayden Veil changed: Ghosts became real and with its soul laid bare there was no turning back from the perpetual path of poetry.

Your lies once conveyed in Truth
now spewed by birds in flight,
a lamb’s chirp in pursuit of recognition;
a legacy of butchers and little men
tally unstable rulers without rules, balls
or chance of ever becoming anyone
of lasting importance; your legacy
is the rotting onion, the doll
within a doll,
without soil
to prosper.
Your lies once conveyed in Truth
now die by day,
die by night
in the fading light
— of lunacy.

There is meaning, and meanings
hidden amongst the glyphs
and white spaces
separating this from that, us
from
them,
and the new lines
and new pages
intrinsic to every separation.
My meanings safely stored
where you fear to go,
behind the veil of the ordinary
a graveyard of the fallen thoughts,
fallen hopes and the glue
that once bound them; truth
is found on the back of a sticky note,
a remnant of a binding gone wrong
where only fluff remain.
There is meaning, and then
— there is not.

Friends and fading friendships,
like sailing through foggy harbours
horns blasting without ears to see
the fleeting thoughts of a captain
steering, staring, starring
in a final voyage across the seas;
hazy dreams and backs slapped
figs imagined and shoulders tapped;
friends and fading friendships
like bracken without snowmen dancing,
like a wave from an armless man
to an armless woman
walking slowly across the frozen ice
in the harbour of inescapability.

Crystals from a sunlit strand
touched by the fiery eye,
the hearth melted such a heart
shaped and stretched towards infinity
it now carries the elixir of love,
a potion brewed and bottled
never to be forgotten,
in rain or shine
the crystal crumbs of an empty vial
by every broken heart
— be found

The moth of madness flew across my sky
Its fluttering became my wishing well
But all the innocence of youth forlorn
Forgotten dreams of love and foolish hopes
Became the beacon never ever sought
To follow there where all of moths be found
To skies unknown we must thus overcome
Our fears to find it all a vanity
Purported by the keepers of the
flame.

You said I was cursed to love in darkness,

but I carry matches, candlesticks, torchlights, high powered LEDs, road legal lasers (and the ones burning truths into the back of your mind); I will love in light one day, one of these days, or part of a day maybe, mornings before 7? For an hour, or less? Can I have a passing thought of love and light, please?

You said I was cursed to love in darkness
— but I refuse.

A life at the end of the road, a gravel path
leading from somewhere to nowhere;
I watch myself watch myself
smiling as the dust settles,
the spring bulbs emerge from the frozen
and the summer meadows bloom.
I would be happy there, in the other world,
in their world …
meandering through the pines
and fir forests, golden berries of clouds
and golden mushrooms hiding;
I would be content there
at the end of a road
— leading nowhere.

Sometimes I just want to stop writing, but I can’t. What’s wrong? Am I addicted to words I will never manage to elevate; cement shoes, concrete boots and Chicago overcoats, all filled with words of imaginations and ambitions far beyond qualifications. There’s no ink to dry out, no graphite needing sharpening, nothing material to run out of; it’s the pit where words will never catch fire.

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