FOLLOW

So this is it,

You're standing

Upright and staring into the sharp silver glow

Of your future.

The jaws of the abyss pulling you

From behind like a gaping maw,

While you struggle to follow the light.

This is it.

Forward or back?

Falling would be so easy,

But standing feels hard,

And gaining any traction or forward momentum,

Up until now, has been exhausting,

Impossible, exasperating.

So you spin on your heels,

And you teeter on the edge.

Right now, it's so hard for you

To get your head around the fact

That your silver lining has finally begun

To cover your cloud.

Doubts creep in,

Am I worthy?

Can I do it?

Am I capable?

Do I deserve it?

You look down and realise that there's a gap forming,

And ever growing space

Between the burgeoning silver

And that damned gaping maw at your back.

You realise now it’s time to jump.

So you push yourself back on your heels,

You force yourself to stop spinning.

You step back,

You focus on the glint that's in front of you

And you leap,

You launch yourself into the blue,

Without ever looking back.

 You decide that this is your time.

You feel the savage  grasp

of the murky past loose its grip on you,

As you soar across the space between your ‘then’

And your ‘soon to be’.

You land, flat footed in the dusty present,

A road set out before you,

With twists and turns and hills and sign posts,

All laid out at your feet, right there in the glare.

You look back to see the ghost of the past

Still clawing after you,

Left smaller in the wake of you.

You think, 'he's not so scary from way over here'.

So you face forward, head high, chest out, feet itching,

You set your sights on the end of this road you've landed on,

And you set off, trudging into the dusky grey,

And you begin to follow the light.

CITY OF LIGHT

I love this city,

And I have been a part of others.

I have been an affiliate of more successful corporations,

Some teeming urban jungles

Some merely hushed down townships.

I have been a part of the blood that fuels them,

But none have ever added structure to my veins

The way my city does.

My home, my pulse.

This is where my own story has been paced into the pavements,

With my own history bleeding into its concrete cracks.

This city is as much a part of me as my own heart is.

I inhale a mouthful of thick city air

And I cough it back into day,

Where the light bounces off streets filled with metal blood cells,

While the people inside like platelets,

Beep their horns and curse their neighbours.

But still I love this city.

I tip toe through the remnants of the nights’ revelries,

And the bric-a-brac of the forgotten people

Living in the shadows of buildings

That house the more successful.

I negotiate my way through the bump and grind of the mean streets.

The screeching of gulls circling in wait

To pick the bones of someone’s discarded lunch,

Filling the air,

While the wailing of some poor soul

Whose bones are being picked apart

By their own scavengers,

Joins the gull’s savage song 

In a choral fugue, that's carried on the breeze.

But still I love this city.

I love the pulse, and the reverberation.

The rhythm and throb of it.

The warmth and humour.

I love the soul of this city,

The kindness,

The heat of the city lights.

The calm temperament of a people

Who have seen more hardship than most

But would still offer up their last morsel as an act of charity.

I love the fire in the blood of the Irish

And the ferocity of spirit

Contained within this city,

I am smitten by its people 

Who burn with intelligence and wit,

And are fortified by valor and a toughness of spirit. 

There is a palpable tenderness

In the air of this city,

Despite a natural cynicism

And a lean toward begrudgery. 

So I do love this city,

With its bad weather and its bad moods.

With its resilience and its beauty.

With its long and bloody history

And its glistening future. 

Because this is my city, 

And it is where I belong.