Category: New Disease Streets

The Severance of Your Genius (in Little Papercuts) by David L O’Nan

The Severance of Your Genius (In Little Papercuts)
We were cut from the Jerusalem sun.
The pile of rags in the oils of the sand
The Quaking ground lifts up our prisons
And your genius is questioned.
Then cut with precision.
You laid there in a paper trail

We call you the symbol of love
We live in the greed that you spread
The blood from all our hearts
On this poisonous haunted land
Because you fear now –
That maybe your freedom is tainted.

Watching from an exploded mind
The freeways full of a new rage blinding –
From metastatic stars on American car plates
Still swallowing back the aftertaste
The countless years of hate.

An embolism on a prairie field An effigy of supposed heroes peel
We are afraid of an apocalyptic drowning
The sweat pours like the killing clouds
Under the wires, we fall to the pop.

After a soul vaporizes they –
dream up a puppet and call him the new chosen one.
The devil lives inside the passing tornado
In the winds of change, our blood shall run in.


Cutting from the liar’s kiss

photo by Ruedi Haberli-JKlip (unsplash)

Lipstick Sunset by David L O’Nan (Poetry)

Lipstick Sunset
The acoustics of the guns pop
Against the Ivy and the prayers.
A breath frozen emotionless
Stinging to the skyline.

We love like mannequins
Staring at the sunset
And we watch the red rouge jetline
Across the domineering solar shivers.

We are the weeping fools
All of our memories clutched –
In the lines of our held hands.
All the knots in our bruising –
Begins to bleed the hurt away
As we sleep and wish away –
The hurt from past demons
The lingering spit of revitalized demons.

Beautiful and madly, babe
We fell madly into the flowers
The itching, biting blades of grass
The apples begin to fall
The white clouds are imprisoned
Sing the song of release
To the freedom of night

The guns don’t even phase us anymore

2 Social Justice poems by David L O’Nan (Archaic Motorcycle Breath and Like Bullets From the Cowboys)

Archaic Motorcycle Breath
The whistles of brakes
Now here comes the burning oil
The grinding petals to the street
Polluted with archaic motorcycle breath.
Across the bridges
They spread disease in the ripples of the river
The script flips
Over that mountaintop
When freedom is disrobed of crimson dress.
Let’s believe in the burning of the privileges
To the disease of a racism mentality
Blowing up the baby boomer birthday party
Around the curve,
The flames eat through the winds of malice.
How to become one? When?
When reduced to living behind the fence
Cannot see, cannot breathe
In the flesh that should feel free
But the enemies are loud
And they assassinate without hesitation
Living in fears –
That feeds the dictator’s stomach.
No one is here for your entertainment purposes only
And no one under this sky
Was put here to feel less than human
So hard to fly within the radar

When the sunlight dies –
You cannot tame the bird to go hide in the nest.
Never a prisoner
Never a suit
Never a believer (in the power of the badge)
Mixed in the blood of your boots (in your fairytale dream)
The skeletons show from the closets –
When you think all your bones are hidden.
Will it all come out in the wash?
With help from black robes on blue-lit streets
The skyline begins to burn like paper
A new revolution bubbles out from the crisping seas.
The chariot to heaven –
Doesn’t include stops to hide in the tunnels.
When your name is called
Remember those whom you’ve made suffer
When your name is called
Your lips won’t rest in the quakes and quiver.
But love will come from the ashes
But equality will come from the ashes
But the truth will come from the ashes
Honor will be
Humanity will be
And the American eagle coins meltdown like rain
And monetary status becomes irrelevant

Like Bullets From the Cowboys
I’m burning inside
I’m caving in
The laughter heard as they stole my mind
You want the skin to be the demons
I can’t escape the hills of your bones
I’ve lain in the flood, in all of the blood
Like bullets from the cowboys.
The angels want more resistance
The breath they want,
And the breath they will take.
That speed through the body faster than the viruses.
Hidden in the badges, the hood, or the graveyards
Like bullets from the cowboys.
In the rapture, they trap in and capture – the Christ
In cave walls or tiny mansions
They white-out biblical passages
Replaced with Americana ink
The idolatry gospel spouts –
From the mouths of the wicked
And they still like to play cowboys.
The outlaws in Mercedes
Papas in rough trucks
Mamas painting hate over the tracks
Loose trails that lead to the next shell casing
Bullets from the cowboys
Or infantile swimmers stuck in the mind of a Civil War Newspaper.

The Plague never left.

Photo by BP Miller (unsplash)

The Helix Nebula by David L O’Nan (from New Disease Streets)

The Helix Nebula
We were magnetized to the Helix Nebula,
As the sadness drank us in the waves
On our endless walk down Mulberry Street
Where I’d learned of your stoning,
Where I trusted you with your magic
Under the poetry of the slick moon –
Washed over the river
For a moment it was beautiful again
Ridden itself of overheated catfish vapors,
And you were beautiful,
Although destroyed
All that I could help you with was blind ignorance –
Of what love was.
And I can bash away at the lullabies that would haunt us –
And crawl through our skin.
Tripping over the biting mosquitoes,
As I learned you would depart back
And new suicides would breathe in each of my heartbeats.
The tears of all the galaxies bled out majestically with colours –
I never imagined before
I traced the lines of my own hand
Hoping to find the constellation in
Which the lines of your hands lay

Photo by Bryan Goff (unpslash)

New Disease Streets by David L O’Nan (poetry from New Disease Streets)

I cut a record in the trance of snaps
On a new disease street.
Watching them worship the homeless man’s defeat
They stole our dancing jewels,
And from that fame
The sandwich bag Madonnas grew.
The appetite for the bleak and the new.


Music breathes out of dead-end windows
Cockroach apartments smell better than –
The flesh that is sticky from these sweat bleeding streets.
Oh, the wet blades shine more when they’re silver.
An appetite for the starved and the view.


The alcoholics are stretching for a new fight.
Those dirty pigeons that sleep in the grass instead of the trees.
I bravely found a quarter in the storm drain,
It appears the acid has eaten away at George Washington’s face.


Nevertheless, I can ride in the rusted pink taxis –
That drives faster than quicksand.
It is lonely then sickly.
Huffing in graffiti paint fumes through the holes of a brown sack.

I’ve surmised that I’ve digested the whole city, and my stomach is –
Starting to rumble and splash in its own rivers.
Now, my existence has been debated for years.
But for now, you can call me Galileo –
Because I’m punching down the stars to the land.


We are just trying to give the dying one last light show.
With all the roses’ souls, I’ve ripped from the soil.
Before we all slip back into a coma
And dress back down to our dusty selves.

photo by Denis Agati