Category: Featured poets, photographers, artists

Suicide 2020: A Basket of Fruit by David L O’Nan

Let us all, stand by our baskets of fruit
That the rain and sunlight bathed out for us to dine.
I want to leave aside the sidewalks that burn
I want to wash away the pain that lives in my wrinkles.

I want the depressants to live behind the veils
And watch the birds fly from North to South and back again.
I want the suicide to climb back over the fence
While I think about the comfort of skin
While I blanket my mind with the thoughts of sweet breath.

Leave a war-cry
Echo back in the canyons
That I shall never want to see again
Leave the glass bottles on the edge,
To never feel the wind tip them over the ridges.

I want to remain by this fruit basket
To close my eyes
And reunite me with the loves that hold me
In tenderness, they have passed
I feel them again, my tears must obey
I must obey to put those bottles away.

And live for the saccharine.

from “New Disease Streets” and also was published online on Icefloe Press

photo by Karolina Kolodziejczak


A Walk in Whistler’s Woods by David L O’Nan

A Walk in Whistler’s Woods
I can feel the fog on my tongue
Eyes watching me from distorted trees The feet crippling in mud-sips Cutting glassy gravel.
I can breathe in phantom’s dances
While the unknown is whistling in the woods.

The chill bites my skin.
Feeling as thin as death allows. My prayers are endless, as the path – Continues to squeeze me in.
Closer to the lake
My reflection float
Without my body, just flowing clothing. Clogged in ripples.
Whistles like radar
Lead to paper cups of wine
Sitting still for the wind
A waterfall of poisons for me to drown in.

The whistler gorges in spirits
And leaves the woods bare, the bells of rapture toll.
In the mute silence
The art of Earth, are crumbled sticks
Whistler’s freedom revoked.

photo by John Silliman (unsplash)

Prudence of Anguish by David L O’Nan

Prudence of Anguish

I want you in my arms
To hold you stronger than all anguish
You became Prudence,
The dancer in circles
The impiety in hidden ballet flats.

You leave me in vertigo,
And you leave me screaming
You break all my bottles
And you broke my swampy heart – When I was laying in the bed wailing
With wiry blankets of heart shooting into my arms.

You left me in this Mahogany depression
From all that is seen, the paradox of your possessions And I feel that poltergeist living inside me.

My Prudence of anguish
My flushing beats in my blood
And they whisper me sweet curses Into the tiny hairs of my ears.

Will I wilt, will I dance with I Will I flip, will I twirl, will I die?

A Bent Photo With a Red Moon Featured by David L O’Nan (from New Disease Streets)

I want the eclipsing sky
To polaroid my demise
On the suicide beach
Where they buried the slithering waves
Full of secrets,
They are lost

We failed and became only lust
Not love
As we promised ourselves
Flew kites in the storms
And ran like hyperactive children
Fondling through the sands
As the devil watches with rapture

We built bonfires with the driftwood
Smoked grass and watched the seagulls collapse into –
An evening snore
We ate and drank and joked about unknown mysteries You tried to lift my drunken body
And tickled my sides ‘til I was sick.

It was only a night
That depression tries erasing
All the false love promises
That the red moon sweeps in and erases
With its scarlet filled tease

And you know I travel there every year
And a bipolar night,
He can swim through all the tides
All alone
Years of confusion
Women and wine
As my death awaits
The photo is bending
The romantic moon drowned
With a floating bottle
With meaningless hearts drawn on the seashells.

photo by Kelly Sikkema (unsplash)