ANTHONY WARD - POEMS

Anthony Ward tries not to write but he just can’t help himself. He writes to get rid of himself and lay his thoughts to rest. He has recently been published in Streetcake, Bluepepper, Shot Glass Journal, Mad Swirl, Flash Fiction North and The Cabinet of Heed.

 

Manifest
​

​The presence of man’s manifest
Is in the simmering and smouldering trails of light
Where he’s marked his territory.
Until the whole world’s as radiant as a star
Blinding anyone attempting to look into it.
 
Though it’s not until you look closer
That you see the festering anoplura
Expanding at such an exponential rate
Like a carcinogenic plague
Eating away its host
Until it’s no longer sustainable.

Star-struck
​

​Should we strive for immortality at the expense of our lives?
Wanting to be in the minority
Before we end up the majority
Looking towards the heavens
While we trample our yield?
 
Should we aspire to the stars
As we sit in the dark
Hoping to escape our earthly problems
While forgetting about those closest
Sharing our space with awe?

Exhausting
​

​Our natural resources exhausted
We’re left lethargic
Motivated by engines
Fuelled by fossilised trees
Releasing carbon dioxide
They once retained
To smooth the industry that took a mere couple of centuries
To consume what had taken millions of years to produce.
 

Living with Death
​

​One day death will dawn upon me
And relieve me of uncertainty,
Of that I am certain.
For certainty brings about demise
Where understanding seals the soul.
 
Though I don’t want to think of dying,
To think of what it’s like to die.
The more I wish death wasn’t real,
The more real it becomes.
Making it harder for me to live.
Mortified by my mortality.
 
From the moment we’re born we begin to die.
Closing in on death the further we live.
Each day we add becoming subtracted.
Each year we gain another lost.
Each step we take taken from us.
Cancelling each other out,
Confining us to the present.
 
Every day we’re alive we could die,
That’s a hard thing to live with.
But would life without death be worth living at all?
Is life not merely a shrine to death-
Death a shrine to life?
Would we not wish to die if we had to live indefinitely?
 
 

Naivety
​

​I no longer have anything in common with myself.
I used to get along just fine,
Before I caught myself out,
Discovered I’d being cheating,
Having fallen in with myself
Much too deep.
Not seeing anyone else
Beside myself.