That night when you kissed me you left a seed of hope in my mouth

It caught me by surprise that I didn’t spit it out

Now roots have spread straight through my veins

My blood that I have spilt too many times is watering flowers

I have felt them bloom in my heart over the last 168 hours

I have a heart bursting with hope that I haven’t trusted for years

 -

My life is in stasis until you fly home

I am counting down the days at the start of summer

In the dry bark of a tree as it’s leaves bloom above me

It was such a long winter

I am watching my hope cut white lines across the sky

The tails of aeroplanes, as I reach out for your love

Come home

 -

I have never trusted anyone more then I trust you

I am weak and you are strong but I see your muscles pointing as guns in my defence

Your height adds a watchtower to my fortress

Whenever I hear ‘love’ I think of a team game I know well

But I think you would let us tally our points together

 -

Last night I had a dream so real I could feel your lips

I told you that you had brought blue sky back into my life

You pulled me close and told me to repeat ‘ach trí lá níos mó’

So I did, what does that mean? I asked. You said: only three days more

 -

I have never met such a gentle thing that seems chiselled from the sun

Or known a man so moral that he finds it immoral to condone

Nor have I been handled so kindly that it didn’t hurt to come undone

My parts are piles of bruised star dust I am ready to become

 -

So come home, in three days you will be home

With words as soft as the petals you left in me

I will explain how you caused leaves to bud on the

Bare branches of my skeleton

Won’t you stay a while so we know I’ll pull through?

I know a hundred broken beautiful things

Like shards of crystal glittering on the ground

 -

Look at the young pale faced ones

That sniff to the tune of their irregular drum

You will wonder how they can be so reckless

Yes, chalk lines aren’t the only white lines that signal death

The lines we party around might as well be our best friend’s ashes

A macabre elephant in the room

I wonder why my friends can’t see it

 -

I know a hundred broken beautiful things

We lie like a broken crystal ball

The smoke that filled us left to leave emptiness

Emptiness that hurts because we were once lifted so high

We kissed the sun in happiness

Only to be smashed on the ground

 -

I see memories a seventeen year old girl’s eyes that will never go away

She feels them like a shard in her side

She, like me, has tried to claw it from her skin

But couldn’t get a grip, it will always be digging in

I know the look on her face says she doesn’t know why she’s still hurting

But she is

She was too young for this

We used to shine like crystal

She was too young to understand

The consequences

Of free

Falling

The moment you see the opportunity for bliss without heeding the warning

Of the broken souls around us

 -

We all try to ignore the signal smoke

To not see the blank eyed pale faced creatures that fill our desolate streets

I passed the same hangdog men everyday without noticing until it happened to me

Until I realised I was free falling into addiction and mental health instability

It isn’t drugs that fuck you up; it’s the situation that makes you need them

 -

I see how the skin stretched over her beautiful limbs

Is the colour of a corpse and it isn’t the cocaine that caused that pallor

It’s the boy that she loved that used too much and attacked her

She was sunken by guilt that she pitied herself 

When he was deported and tried to free fall from a chapel roof in China

She was fifteen

It sounds unbelievable doesn’t it?

It is

She’s staring at this rebuilt town

Seeing it in slow motion still falling down

She knows that you don’t need to die to commit suicide

She knows everything about hell

 -

I don’t understand why my boyfriend had to take drugs and became deranged

I chose a guy who was ugly but caring, naïve I thought that meant he’d stay with me

That I had found happiness and stability

And a lifestyle that was so much freer then an office job and 2.5 kids

Then he introduced me to the forty year old wrecks of his friends

Whose grins were the cold twists of car crash metal

It was the moment before impact

When he left me mid kiss

With no explanation

To free fall

Towards their

Abyss

I lucid dream and in them I still ask to see him again, not to be held, but for an explanation that I know I will never receive

Even in my dreams he just stands there silently

 -

When we are asked, we can’t find the words to sum up what is wrong

We are still in shock, we can still hear the bomb go off

I find words for a living and I still don’t think I have found the right ones

Its bitterness and guilt for our bitterness

We were given happiness and then they took it and left

We are the leaves on a track after the train has long gone

What we saw would have been worth it for a life of happiness

I’ve seen smoke rise from cracked forty year old lips like smoke from Belson

Stared at the ash tray from which no phoenix will ever rise

But now we were just too young

 -

We try to cram the smoke back into our punctured chests

To fill the hole of what we’ve lost and make us whole

But it never does

The smoke just escapes from our chests and the warmth escapes from us

Building substance back up with substances doesn’t work

But all we can think to do is suck more in and try again or cling

To anyone who will make us feel more substantial then smoke

 -

I have dragged my feet through enough boys’ hearts

Ripping off the wrong boy’s heads like a mantis

In search for one who can entertain, enrapture and love me

I have stayed with boys who I knew wasn’t the one because I smiled more with them

Then I did on my own

I am adding to the pile up of twisted metal and shattered glass

We need rescue

 -

You could give us pills but we wouldn’t wash them down with water of grace

The only church I know in this town is closed but I know a hundred open bars

Everyone ends up broken when drugs blow in as aid to a poor social circle

No one can afford to escape

 -

I know a hundred broken beautiful things

I know there’s probably thousands

Lying like crystal shards or windshield glass of a car that drove too fast

I was staring at the chalk line I had set

When I realised the scariest truth

That we scream in our nightmares through teeth like dungeon gates

We all know that this could kill us

None of us care

Some of us want it to

atonguewithbutsixwords:

Prompt: “I have an awful habit of trying to hold on to things in my life I know won’t last—- people, places, things. Please write me a poem,”

Only children
try 
catching
ocean
waves.

While I save for a camera, you can hear me perform my poetry on my sound cloud here https://soundcloud.com/lee-omar

Love, Lee

Dear God, I have never believed in God.

 -

I am an atheist and the only person who knows that sometimes

In the dark my knees give way and I pray for forgiveness

When I am in the dark and at my most fearful

God has always been the first person I call

 -

It’s my unloving lovers that have left me a contradictory mess of bible verses

I’ve loved lovers that didn’t love me

All there was between us was the echo of our emotions

And the silent scream of my questions

Lovers who said love shone as an aura on my skin

Until they made their way in

A benevolent king of kings would not let men break women’s wings

I turned my bloodied back on the idea of him

I didn’t want to love another man who didn’t love me

 -

Then I met you.

Light glows from your tips to your toes

You placed your fingers on my chest

Healed my vision with your breath

The colour purple is the colour of a bruise

But now I see it’s the colour of violets too

 -

I’ve loved many unloving lovers before

I don’t want to cry anymore

You make me not want to die anymore

 -

But you say I’m not good enough for you

You don’t know how it will affect your soul

To grow old with a lover that might never believe in your God

I don’t know how long these bruises will take to fade away

If they will before my final day

But I was born into white sheets too

You can wash me gently with water of grace

Convert me to what you want me to be

Convert my heart to a different kind of holy

 -

I breathe for word play but I can engage the word pray

I will do, that’s true, I swear it is

And I know you don’t like swearing

But what if I swear to you that’ll I’ll swear less?

That’ll I’ll argue less, fight less, be selfless?

 -

I thought the skies starless until I found you

Either you’re God or an angel I’m not sure yet

You would say that you’ve left me agnostic

You’re so good you can’t run with the idea of being a false idol

You breathe thanks for the light that has always shone on you

But I think perhaps God is where you step because he steps with your feet

You tell me if I step just as carefully he shall shine light onto me

Perhaps you are no false idol, but the upgraded article

The kind of God that believes in me

 -

You would call this a love letter

So I am calling it a prayer

Without you this prayer

Nor I, would have been written

God, I’m so smitten

 -

But you say that I might never be good enough for you

Then you say that you are not God enough for me

We’re going in circles but we’re going like wheels

You have to see the light at the end to know how good this feels

 -

Let us stand in the middle of the cross, like Jesus

Of the roads that would lead us North, East, South, West

We can spend a while in choosing the way

So let us just be happy

Just accept me, and I will try to accept him

Maybe you will convince me you are just one of his creations

 -

Or maybe on the day we marry, I will say

“Any God I ever felt in Church I did bring in with me

But you’ve shown me there is a God and he does love me

So wherever our souls end up is heaven enough for me.

In the name of God; A man.”

Hi,

I post frequently on twitter about what I’m up to, so follow me for regular updates. https://twitter.com/LeeOmarPoetry.

Love, Lee

1981 Brixton, black smog, sky smoked

Petrol bomb thrown

White boy gone blind

Aftershock says uniform right that you’re black or right

 -

1993 white born into black hands in Lewisham

Nationality; ghost, not a citizen

Child, drifting transparent through a family of Asians and Jamaicans

I want to play. You’re only allowed in if you have the right skin

Where do I belong then?

I suppose we’ll let you in

But you don’t really belong, whitey

This is snow; they grit it when it descends

 -

The world got colder as I got older

Golden tickets went out for a grammar school

Identical uniforms to conform; the strictest rule

There are holes in the argument that uniform erases hate

All attention is drawn to your face; your race

Teachers closed eyes let white kids’ uniform slide, not my friends

They never voiced it; but it was because blacks had to work harder to fit in

Non-verbal racism shooed black parents hood bound, confusion in their heads

Causing rifts as their kids argued if you’d seen their eyes; it was clearly said

And pupils learning from pupils of hate breeds new hate

I’d never been more ashamed of my race

Let them grit the snow

Leave the black ice

 -

Blood bubbled, the world got colder I got bold enough

To leak rap through my head phones, cause waves of disdain

To wear trainers like my friends, become a hoody in the rain

I was snowflake, Casper, why the hell does she want to change genes?

Detention, nothing done wrong yet, but we see the black marks, your slate isn’t clean

Who am I? Jay’s been arrested. He stabbed a white boy, fifteen.

He was still my friend. I knew who I was then. I didn’t hate but pitied him.

I remembered how he’d become ‘Scarface’ when he was thirteen

Self loathing, he’d put a razor to his face and tried to drain the colour from his skin

It’s not an excuse for a cold blooded killing

But the people asking why he had a knife in his waist band

Should be asking themselves why he sought acceptance from a gang

I knew who I was, I belonged in Lewisham

It’s colder with bursts of heat on the street but at least I’m allowed to share body heat

The Lewisham breed understand how when the sun disappears and dark impends

I hurry, head down and pray my amends

Because they do aswell

 -

2012, I made it to university

There was no diversity. I revealed my history

Rich and white, they were taught polite

Stared with sympathetic sight at me, the bombsite

Last for a night and then I felt their cold fright

That I would incite a fight, snap with a dog bite

With those conjectures in lectures they’d speak to me with inflection

That suggested I was nothing but an infection in their education

That I wasn’t entitled to because I was raised improperly

It was unfair that they had to feel constantly wary

Their discomfort was just down to their prejudgement

But still they trampled my opinions

Their eyes said I should be spraying my essays onto street cement

 -

I learnt that if people just saw my white

I could shoot for any future, everything’s in range

But how can I be selfish when the world needs change

When people still think you’re either black or right

I’ll fight to break the divide that’s fear tall, ignorance wide

I’ve made it my mission to select words with precision

To explain anyone can have the super power of x-ray vision

Open your minds; you don’t need to cut incisions in your corneas to make a revision

Envision life where you aren’t judged by the colour of your skin

But who you are within

 -

I need blacks, I need Asians, I need whites

Let’s slow dance in the street

Melt the snow

Melt the ice

It is sunrise over London

I’m in my Feng Shui garden

Playing Marley and smoking the herb

Through a bong from Greece

I am so at one with this Earth

I could excrete world peace

It’s been six months, three weeks

Since I realised

I had to stop remembering the dimples in your cheeks

Since I realised

I needed to focus on the Chi’i

I needed to focus on finding me

That was the only way to make my esteem increase

And it’s been two whole nights since I last got drunk

And admitted I was still missing a piece

Since I last stood in my garden and shouted about how you’re obscene

Try as I might I can never see the moonlight as clean

And saliva isn’t healing, you spat venom

Lit by the moon, you spat in my wounds, made them hurt

Screw healing beads; take me to The Dirt Hole please

I need to find somebody who will love me

Twilight only ever looks like a bruise

Sunlight the glowing face of your muse

I’m going to use the time in between

To search for a lover in the sweating club scene

My hearts blue enough it can’t take further bruising

By the concept of love being an illusion so tonight

I will find someone who will treat me right

I need to destroy myself so that I can rebuild

I will look again for peace when I believe that it’s real

Copyright Lee Omar

There are times when I breathe into the blue sky

And thank God for this wonderful life

Like the time when we were soaring down the sun-soaked highway

Singing, so off-key but so in harmony

But then there are days where everything follows sod’s law

When your aching back can’t take further strain and you’re given more

Days when the rain knows its way through your pores

When every cruel twist has an ironic meaning

I have never been so done with God

As last evening

My Lucifer was in the next room, heavy breathing

On the tenderness of her cheek, heart beating

I had to sit and listen to his bed creaking

Soundscape for the aching of my heart breaking

My aerator burst with every thrust in his thirst

All I could do was blurry-eyed stare

At the leaflet for Damned by Despair

His cupid-bow lips sighed ‘Hope’ into the air

As if her name was a word so holy it had to be said in prayer

And I remembered

How I had once been there

Laid bare

His prayer mat

Used to see heaven by a sod

I have never been so done with God.

God, I didn’t commit that sin

Like the wall just supporting the ceiling

Why am I taking the battering?

All Eve ever did was tempt

So God, why are men exempt?

God, do not tell me that I need to repent

I have had it more then rough

Meaning well? Fucking hell God I’m calling your bluff

God, I said sorry to him for not being enough

I hope you can hear me

Like through the wall I hoped he could still feel me

It’s hard to differentiate when you’ve both wronged me

I used to like that name

Was going to call my child that name

I’ve literally had Hope stolen from me

Was going to get that word tattooed onto me

It runs in rivers through me

Like how life is shot with veins of cruel irony

I once claimed Hope was the most

Beautiful thing 

In the

World.

I have said sorry enough.

But then there is love

There is singing on sun-soaked highways

Soaring over the flyover through an expanse of blue

I should put my faith in you

Say that I am just pre-paying my dues

Until the endless days soaring through the sun

With a son that shines so bright

He’ll knock Lucifer from our sky

He will have halos in his eyes

Together our pupils will learn

Why you’ve just got to wait your turn

So right now, however much you are aching

Listening to the drumming of despair

Of your heart breaking

You’ve just got to endure, be patient

For that one day when you can finally say

I saw the fall and this is no Lucifer

This,

Is a shooting star

© Lee Omar

Just had to remove Are you Anywhere? From this site as I had to so that I could enter in into a competition! Which is very exciting but I’m sad to see it go as it was one of my favourite poems on here. I’m working on new material so they’ll be a new poem up shortly!

Lee Omar