When Hope Can Kill & the Midnight Sun Poems

By John Hughes

When Hope Can Kill & the Midnight Sun Poems is about how relationships form and dissolve in the most unlikely of places, how the old wars of the heart bemuse and confound. In the twilight world where nothing fails to sink below the horizon and everything depends on a fragile peace, people loose and find themselves after the fact. Love rescinded demands brutal answers to complicated questions, and hate diminishes and returns with renewed vigor. Combining a restless brew of honesty, anger and irony, Hughes has created a stark world with frightening and beautiful writing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Hughes
• Release date: Oct 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466171473

John Hughes

John Hughes was born in Colwyn Bay, North Wales, Great Britain in 1970.He has worked as a milkman, landscape gardener, newspaper photographer,occasional proof reader and a fish terminal goods inspector. He currentlylives in Oslo, Norway. His other works are listed as follows: POETRYAphelion (1992),Recuillément (1993)Black Tin Deed Box (1996)PrestonZeitgeist (1994) Money & Make-Believe (1994)Room Twelve (1995)The Fiend that He Became (1995) Poetry from Beyond the Dashboard(1996) Touché (1997) The Night is Young (1997) 58th Parallel (1998)The Plant Collector (1998) O Livro das Letras Casa (1999) Replica (1999)Passports for the Journey to the Mad Dam (2000) Flowering Off the Chrome(2000) Rolling Over the Bones & the Running Through Poems (2002) WhenHope Can Kill & the Midnight Sun Poems (2005) Orpheus’ Loot (2007) Death Rattle (2009)Skin of Teeth (2010) Singeing of Beard (2012)FICTION Aphrodisiacs’ Spaghetti (2001) The Wondrous Adventures of Dip& Dab (2002) Deeper Tangled Grass (2005)The Bloody Shoots Burst Out of Uswith Love & Bullets at their Roots (2010)

Book preview

When Hope Can Kill & the Midnight Sun Poems is about how relationships form and dissolve in the most unlikely of places, how the old wars of the heart bemuse and confound. In the twilight world where nothing fails to sink below the horizon and everything depends on a fragile peace, people loose and find themselves after the fact. Love rescinded demands brutal answers to complicated questions, and hate diminishes and returns with renewed vigor. Combining a restless brew of honesty, anger and irony, Hughes has created a stark world with frightening and beautiful writing.

When Hope Can Kill & the Midnight Sun Poems

John Hughes

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2005 John Hughes

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Cover photograph by John Hughes

Table of Contents

Simple Complications

The Silence of the Storage Units

Back and Forth

Kafka and Marquez

Chateau de Germigney

Vintage

Hold the Middle Ground

Parents

If I Lay Down and Weep

Earthed

A Swamp Thing

Instrumental

Chateau de Rigny

The Transcendental Love Machine

If You See Her

Red Stilettos

Premonition of 64

Toast to Klaufbakken

Answers

Driving the Dam Mad Car

Soaked

Love Supergrass

Journey of the Beatitudes

Captain of the You Know What You Know You Know

Relationship

When the Deputy Deputy Boss Called

Pine Like a Crazy

Deeper

Out of Date I Want to Touch Somebody

Last Man

Oil and Water

Fragment

Drinking

It Is Not What You Feel It Is What You Cannot

Nails

Backwards Forwards

Child Man

The Psalms Songs of Peter and I (A Modern Take on Leonardo)

Love and Air

Simple Complications

I give you this because nobody seems to listen.

I give you this because I do not listen to myself.

I give you this because I am honest and nobody is that honest.

I can see you listening.

I try to see you lying in your bed or sat at a table

Or sitting in your familiar place.

The streets are still with constant movement,

The air alive woven with silence.

I give you this because nobody seems to listen.

I give this you because I do not listen to myself.

I give you this because I am honest and nobody is that honest.

I can hear you breathing.

I know you are listening.

There is love in your heart but you don’t know what love means.

There is love in your soul but you don’t know what soul means,

The air dead swollen with violence .

I give you this because nobody seems to listen.

I give this you because I do not listen to myself.

I give you this because I am honest and nobody is that honest.

I come from innocence.

I navigate through bitterness.

I show you whores and wastrels and charlatans and fools.

I show you how the heart is squandered in its search for peace

And the only witness is you.

I give you this because nobody seems to listen.

I give this because I do not