Category: Original

You Never Knew Me: A poem by Mike Cole

You never knew me, nor I you.

Two strangers, passing through.

The wind whispered as we walked,

No words uttered, no words talked.

So strangers we remained, only ever passing.

For in love, nothing is ever truly lasting.

A poem I’m sure many can find themselves acquainted with. Unrequited love. The brief, fleeting thought of acting on attraction, but letting a moment pass. It’s beautiful but ultimately tragic.

With this poem, I tried to capture an idea, a moment. It emphasizes what is unsaid and plays with the idea of saying more, without explicitly stating it.

The lines are coupled, following a simple AABB rhyme scheme. I like to weave tints of tragedy into love poems to make them more human and with the end of the poem, you get a sinking feeling. The flow is thrown slightly off rhythm and lacks much of the excitement of the earlier lines. It is abrupt and signifies that this is truly an end, not a beginning.

In The Meadow: A Haiku by Mike Cole

In the still meadow

A bird sat to sing a song

A tune unheard of.

It is national poetry month. A month of poetry starting with a Haiku. As part of the fun for this month, I thought I’d harken back to when I first started blogging and analyzed poems by famous poets, except this time, the poetry is written by me!

For Haiku’s, I typically start with a simple idea, an image I create in my head. The poetry itself is meant to tell a story since the word count and syllable count is so low. Rhyming becomes much more difficult, so typically I opt out of including it in the poem.

For this poem, it is meant to relax, a simple tale of a bird in a meadow. That is it. It is simply stating where the bird is, what it is doing, and the novelty of the experience. It has a hint that perhaps this is a remote part of the world, where man has rarely set foot or notes the beauty of the song itself.

If I had stayed: A poem by Mike Cole

If I had stayed, where would I be?

Would my life have been an Ocean, my joy from the sea?

Or would flowered meadows have grown dark?

Devoid of life, lost of spark?

If I had stayed, would you have cared?

Or would I have been left, forgotten, to the creeping night?

Entombed, exhausted, succumbed to your inescapable blight.

New Horizon: The Tower

Previous Chapters:

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Henry wandered through the forest, the leaves a gentle brown, dry and brittle to the touch. He had ditched his shoes and was now walking among the rocks of the creek. The wind began to pick up, reaching speeds of 128 kilometers per hour. The Earth had become a dangerous place.

Along the creek were remnants of what once was. Henry occasionally come across a cinderblock and rotten wood of houses that escaped the population explosions of the late 2050s. Scientists had expected the population to stabilize after hit 10 billion in 2030 but instead much of the old ways were still being practiced. Animal cloning had become a way to replace the natural and where farms should have been reduced, instead they only grew. Vertical farms were built in the late 2050s but by then it was already too late. What parts of the Amazon hadn’t been swallowed by the Ocean had turned kindling and our once breathable air became a little less breathable. 2040 saw the first carbon recapture unit and while novel at the time, it only encouraged companies to pollute more. Any benefit it might have had was lost to corporate greed.

Henry tripped. Muddy and damp, he picked himself up and looked down. He saw a large vine, no a tree trunk. Moss covered, old. Henry decided to follow. He walked a few steps, bent down and brushed the trunk off. It was black. It wasn’t a trunk, it was a wire. As it turned out, the wire led to an abandoned radio tower some ways off into the forest. Henry thought if he could climb it, he would have a chance to find his bearings. He could here the metal creak in the wind, it was a surprise the tower hadn’t toppled over by now. As he approached the tower he noticed the chipped red paint and heard a faint beeping. Why was the tower on? Wind turbines had all but been destroyed with the Mega Storms that came in the late 2060s and he could see a few busted at the base of the tower, an effort surely made to avoid the burden of high winds. The sun was beginning to set and Henry decided to climb.

At the base of the tower he found the dilapidated ladder that went straight up the some 609 meters it would take to climb. Henry reached for a rung and watched the metal splinter in his hand, the other rung held and he began to climb. Carefully and one rung at a time. The howling grew louder and the tower shook with the force. At times, it felt as though the wind was being sucked right out of him. About 500 meters up, Henry reached a point of the ladder a section had eroded and was missing. Pieces were strewn on a nearby structural beam. Henry swung with all his weight and landed with his upper torso on the beam. The ladder collapsed just as he made it across. “guess no going back now”, Henry thought.

Henry looked around and found some scaffolding. Makeshift and most likely done after shit had hit the fan. Henry went beam from beam, until finally he reached the top. The length of two football fields and he was finally at a small station at the top of the tower. In olden times, these stations would have been separate; a fire watchtower and a radio tower. As resources became scarcer and scarcer and cities larger, it made more sense to combine the two. As night fell, he saw the read blinking light and noticed the solar panels at the top of the structure. All these years and the structure held. Too dark to see, Henry made his way into the cabin and flipped on the lights. A gentle hum and then, light. Henry checked the cupboards and found some tea along with some canned food. “Coq Au Vin” or better known as cock with wine. There might have been a time when people cooked this dish, but in the convenience brought by mass production and globalization why bother? Henry always liked to cook but it was never considered a necessity. He turned on the stove boiled some water and made himself a cup of tea. “Winter’s Nap”, how delicious. He fried the canned chicken and ate a meal, a nice chance to catch his breath before he looked for the main debris field of the New Horizon.

He started a fire in the hearth, and settled into the bed. The sheets, still soft, reminded him of simpler times. Life was never really all that simple when he was born, but he always loved the process of settling down after a long day and feeling safe in his bed. As Henry looked up, he noticed the four skylight panels. These could be tinted off and on but Henry decided to leave them as they were as the fire crackled in the background. The sky was a gentle blue, speckled by red fireballs as the New Horizon continued to rain down upon the land. Henry gently closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep.

Another Chapter written! I’m having a blast writing this series! It’s great to finally be on schedule with my blog and producing content on a semi regular basis. How far I’ll go, I don’t know, but the story arch is starting to develop and I just hope I can stick the landing for my first go around. So stay tuned and get ready for chapter five as I begin to draft out the concepts for what’ll happen next! As always, thanks for reading!