Lost In A Sleeping Garden

By Mark DK Berry

Poetry collection 1997 to 2001. I was going to include this collection in The Black Book collection that covers the same period, but this set has its own theme and felt better kept separate. They are presented here in the order they appeared in the printed book, though it was not the order in which they were originally written.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark DK Berry
• Release date: Mar 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224991228

Mark DK Berry

Mark DK Berry's written works include fiction, non-fiction, poetry books, and audiobooks. He also writes and produces music. For further information visit www.MarkDKBerry.com

Book preview

Lost In A

Sleeping Garden

Poetry Collection

1997 - 2001

Mark DK Berry

Introduction

I wrote this collection between 1997 and 2001 when I picked them out and bound them together as a printed book. I was coming to a crossroads in my life. Part of that change would see my years of incessant midnight poetry writing diminish. This collection really drew a running theme to a close for me and I didn’t return to it. Between 1987 and 2001, I had been writing most nights by candlelight, as if fuelled by a need to exorcise something. By 2004, I had mostly stopped writing poetry, after which I gradually shifted toward prose and story. Most of my poetry from that earlier time survives to this day in notebooks that live in a big black box that has followed me around the world. I will probably never publish most of them, but so be it.

I was going to include this collection in The Black Book collection that covers the same period, but this set has its own theme and felt better kept separate. They are presented here in the order they appeared in the printed book, though it was not the order in which they were originally written.

For anyone who has walked here and wondered,

been lost, or been found again,

bitten bad apples, or tasted strange fruits,

or woken up just long enough to know that it is not all that it seems.

For anyone who cares, but is past caring, is scared, but is past scaring.

For anyone who is struggling to wake up, but knows they are lost in a sleeping garden.

I hope to find a way

I hope to find a way to let the words lead me out of this sleeping garden.

I see the difficulty of the task, but this palace is destined to crumble.

I don’t hear your prophets of doom.

I don’t believe in your fears of the end of the world.

Everyone must end their world one day.

You go alone, not holding hands.

Why are we so very afraid to die?

Huddled together against the door of the chamber,

scrabble over children, women, men,

as you desperately scratch and wrestle anyone to escape,

the gas hisses in.

That is how they found them when they opened the doors in Auschwitz.

Always the same.

The crime isn’t the man.

These men are just instruments for the force that controls all our destinies.

These men are not our enemies.

We focus our hate on them, and we mirror them.

They are just the personification of our darkest thoughts.

Turn around

Turn around.

Look down the tube of your mind.

What will you find there at the source?

Unnameable, other than to say -

impersonal, cold, ruthless, unalterable force.

We are probes on the end of weird sticks.

Our fellow men are not our enemies;

our creator is our tormentor, our teacher.

We have been missing the point for a long