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.
note to self: it could be argued that celebrating another completed assignment with a bottle of cheap plonk, a slightly over-cooked steak and chips swimming in pepper sauce could by some be seen as predicting the marks: the never-ending tinkering of the poem drained it of all the juices; your evident struggle to explain how the poem came to be, with bits of it floating atop the battled sea of dreams
one hundred and fifty-two words scattered
across thirteen lines,
four stanzas of near-rhyme chimes,
poetry subjected
poetry objected
poetry unmarked;
thus far
seduce me now / merge our menacing streams / let our tattered thoughts scatter / beneath the oblique sky / seduce me now / make me scream the words you long for / make us dream of futures past / and our search for belonging
You tell me to rhyme,
full-rhyme / half-rhyme / near-rhyme,
r-h-y-m-e
You tell me to squeeze another
inbetween, within my cleverly
constructed theme: internally
You tell me to echo, bounce the
words I cannot see, echo them
vowels; the consonants infrequently
You tell me much but I stress much
too, my stanzas crumble into words,
unrelating / frightening words
You tell me, I listen
to the visions emitted,
expecting the next hurdle
will brand me word murderer
allergic to words written in anger / written in pain allergic to words I am : allergic to my words allergic to my words allergic to my words : allergic at the sight of them allergic by the smell of them allergic to the shape of them allergic to their … absence
