Poetry Collaboration: Backwards Until When (5) with R.M. Engelhardt (from Dead Man’s Press)

part of the “The Empath Dies in the End” series

Backwards Until When (5)

1 (David L O’Nan)

I keep dreaming of a backwards red balloon floating in a bleeding sky, a paper sky

I keep envisioning a backwards red balloon floating by, telepathically I know it is you.

5 years before, 5 years before that, 5 years before that and the years are crumbled pebbles.

Many men have come and put a forever ring on your finger, they stare at you with narcotic eyes.

They have stared in your eyes with wandering eyes, they have seen you float away into the darkness.

By yourself, spinning in your head.

By yourself, the dreams of children.  The children only helped before the yelling killed the heart.

And left you remembering you were on that road,  that you have been travelling away in your head for years

And left you remembering the bumps on your skin, frozen like that entrapment of an iceberg.

And you just want to float because you’re scared, in that emptiness. 

I am out there watching you in a dream, in a vision, in a feeling, and you want to leave. 

Bring me with you.  Cast that spell on me.   If you weren’t backwards, I could grab that string and rewind-

Your heart.

I see 5 flashing in and out from the beads of sweat burrowing down my head.

What does this 5 mean?  I crossed paths with a woman holding a pack of tarot cards.

Reading fortunes, reading pictures I’m holding of a backwards red balloon,  I ask this woman of insight, of foresight, of belief or just a scammer with a bucket of gold weighing her back down.  I just lay my head down on the sidewalk and absorb in the earth as she begins to read my fate.

2 (R.M. Engelhardt)

The fortune teller
Says you have “5”

Five what?

Days?
Weeks?
Months?

Years?

She read my palm
Said my lifeline was
Long but she never
Quite gave me a specific
Answer, her accent
Making it all the more
Devastating

She just stared at me
With her dark eyes looking

Serious & concerned

So afterwards
I wandered

Started drinking
Started getting nervous
Started getting paranoid
About what she had said

3 (David L O’Nan)

I’m in a dizzy spell, I feel like I continue letting you down, although I’m unsure that you’re even around. 

Am I somewhere up there?  As a memory in your brain?   Do you remember the days when I didn’t weird you out.

Or is it just  fuck these roads that we keep travelling?

Or is it just fuck this iceberg entrapment that I’m still being kept in?

Or is it let me keep floating don’t try to catch my string?  I’m backwards and in my inner space?

Or are just not ready to be blown into a new eternity?   Now how long will we wait.  5 minutes, 5 days,

5 years, 5 decades, 5 nevers.    My paranoia is just a ringing phone from a god to a well.

I’m callin’  I’m callin’  I’m callin’ I’m callin’     haven’t fell.    Just keeping my eyes open as long as I can see you in that sky.  That bleeding sky, that paper sky.  

Current bio for Fevers of the Mind’s David L O’Nan editor/writing contributor to blog.

New poems from R.M. Engelhardt