A poetry collection – by Bryony Wharfe

Change

I’m sick of making every choice, fed up of all this change, all I ever hear is my own voice, it’s been so long it’s starting to sound strange.

Lately nothing feels right, everything is blurred together, like wearing someone else’s glasses, and trying to see through this rainy weather.

I just want to stay in one place, with one life and one face. But everything changes, everything molds into something worse, and no matter how little I move in the sinking mud, I drown faster and faster every time.

Please just stop changing. Stop taunting me of the lives I no longer lead.

I carry myself with hesitation that with one word my life can change, one movement and my stuff is packed into the same dirty boxes they’ve only just come out of.

My life is starting to sound strange now.

Just please stop changing.

I Have To

I’ve always been shit at explaining myself

And i can never get my feelings across

And so I’d write it down

Everything I wish I could say

But you wouldn’t even look

You wouldn’t give it the time or day

And so I’d cry myself to sleep

Wishing I could delete

Everything I did for you and did for us because now it’s hard for me to trust when all I do is get crushed so I just have to

 

Live

 

Without your hand on mine

Without you in my mind

 

I just have to live

 

Smile

I used to look at some people,

And just see ugliness.

I wondered how anyone could love them, or make love with them.

I wish I didn’t think this, but I only ever saw my perception of beauty.

But last week,

I made a joke,

and one of these people, smiled and laughed

and it was at that very moment,

I saw their most beautiful part.

When they stopped, I no longer saw the ugliness I did before,

I saw a beautiful human being,

happy and smiling,

And that was all they needed to be beautiful in my eyes.

To smile.

Whiteness Of War

She raises her sword high towards the virulent storm,

bodies plunging from every cliff around her,

deep deep into the wreckage below

of a smothered town once white as snow.

Where does the whiteness go?

Buried far under the death and blood of war.

One house, once elegant and grand,

is now ravaged with darkness,

with the smell of burning wood still floating up the unscathed chimney,

it swirls within the fur of a fox

through the unblemished antlers of a stag

and across the ears of a haggard bear.

Do the heads always smell of smouldering wood?

Does it fade like perfume on a wrist?

Or vanilla on a collar?

Well now the aroma of burning bodies,

floats around their idle nostrils

cursing their icy skin of the terror of war,

and they can only dangle and watch,

as their new obscure home,

is destroyed again with fire and greed.

Greed?

A craving unfamiliar to them,

but intimate and habitual to their killers,

and to the audacious woman,

who now falls also from the ill-fated rocks.

Such a shame,

to see these beautiful creatures,

with their lifeless heads stuck on flaking walls,

and angelic bodies long decomposed,

stuck within another fire,

a fire they can’t flee.

But what is also a shame,

is that I’m more publicly concerned,

with dead animals on the wall,

than human carcasses that fall,

that I’m more mournful

that they’ll never smell the likes of vanilla again

and how they are always,

always,

surrounded by fire,

than the solidity of chronic homicide.

 

A Lone Wolf

I howl at the moon

I’m not supposed to

but I’m alone

I beg it to hear me

they’re all gone

I went for food

and came back to coldness and silence

 

My pups lay still

I tried to wake them

I nudged their paws

I whimpered in their ears

I licked their fur

but there is only redness

dark evil red from their skin

 

I try to find a new pack

but all that are left are greys

they don’t like my red fur

they bark till I leave

I am the only one left

I am alone

with no home

 

I try to find a new home

but all the trees are now in half

and the greenness is gone

now big brown rocks lay

with pink furless things that walk on 2 legs

the small pink furless things like me

the tall pink furless things don’t

 

I roam till my eyes turn dark

when the one big light turns to many small little ones

every darkness gets colder

it’s getting colder inside the tall pointy rocks

and even colder near the small trees

and when the sky cries and wets me

I get even colder

 

I don’t mark my scent anymore

I’ve forgotten what I smell like

I’ve forgotten what other reds smell like

I can only smell the greys

and I know they don’t want me

I am alone

all alone

 

I try to catch the hoofed animals

but it’s hard on my own

I try to catch flying food

but it’s hard on my own

I try to catch swimming food

but it’s hard on my own

everything is hard on my own

 

I won’t get to see the pinkness on the greenness

or the redness in the trees that taste so nice

the warm blueness that rushes over my paws

the many yellow flying things that make noises when they go by

I won’t get to see the whiteness when it falls

but I’ll get to see my pups

because I can’t survive on my own

 

A graduate of Philosophy and Creative Writing from Hertfordshire University now living in Plymouth, England. Bryony has been writing poetry since she was 16, tracking her pathway through homelessness, love, heartache, university, mental health and the pressures of being female, LGBT+ and human. Now at 23 she’s finally found the courage to share her work in hopes that they will touch and help people like their poetry did for her.