We walked into your apartment today
and found you lying in a bed of snow
We touched you with the care of a mother
We washed away the stains of youth
You have that smile
oh, that contented smile
that is bursting with love
and lonely nights
Your hair is long and softly golden
your curls swirl around the broken mirror
that tried to cut your wrists
and that careless lock of hair
We watch you silently
your static face
fanned by the swirling light
and a breeze that chills the room
Nightmare
We fell about each other
laughing as our bodies rolled
and touched
and smelt of familiar perfume
of simple pleasure
and life
jugs full of wine
and cigarettes burning in ashtrays
and on Persian carpets
jugs of foaming beer
and joy
of Africa
and circus tents
elephants dancing for coins in our pockets
and lamps in French markets
graceful antiques
empty cauldrons and witch’s brew
and fire and snow and spirits
and marauders
and suffocation and rape
and fallen angels and prophecy
Lost Maps and Books and Scribbled Notes
We lost each other in Père Lachaise cemetery.
We were looking for you. We were looking for him.
We will find an unstoppable reality.
the maze there
where pilgrims are lost
dancing in ghost like circles
We found each other
like you might claim a locker
in a railway station
filled with mementos, hair clips
empty wrappers
lost maps and books and scribbled notes
of love and lust and fortitude
Our torments were seen on toilet walls and streetscapes
where angry artists flogged their trade
We wrote scandalous poetry and smashed the boundaries
in shattered angry drunken nights
that left us homeless but not afraid
Art galleries and libraries were our shelters
our homes of panic and release
We travelled together penniless and free
We rolled in the mud in the Bois de Boulogne
We lit each other’s Gauloise cigarettes
We read the same books at railway stations
Passing one to the other as the last word was read
Railway libraries were our sustenance
Camus Flaubert Beauvoir, Collette Genet Sartre
You still whisper the beat of his lethal wish
He still searches for you in unpublished books
Counts the pages to retrace his life
His poetry shakes like a frightened child
while time flees its hourglass
He will find the riders on the storm
You will see the terror in his eyes
Material Possessions
material
…….
the fabric of my dress my life my art
possession
…….
the thing that I own need want lust for
i don’t want the shiny house
the shiny car
the diamond ring
the shiny life
the shiny poem
if they fell into my lap
i would reject them
if you fall into my lap
i will not reject you
you are not the shiny one
your material is flawed patchy
ripped
starving
you have no possessions
except maybe your dirty laundry
your lullaby
your mind
your art
your struggle
your lonesome heart
If you fell into my lap
i would probably kiss you
make love to you
The Sweet Sadness of Sanctuary
My body feels rough today
Like a tired old grape vine
Leaves, browning at the edges
Lifetimes of neglect
I’m hiding away in the sweet hills of melancholia
The terrain is
Serendipitously calm
There is
A sharp smell
Of the coming of the rain
Mould gathers at my feet
Waterlogged
In a childhood memory
A body always open to sadness
Fuels the lengthy line of despair
Joy in sadness sours the grapes
The terroir fights for growth and harvest
She grows and harvests her melancholia
She presses the dead fruit against her breast
The hopeful child prepares the pyre
I resist, then head toward the storm
Tree
The sun plays a melody for the steadfast gum
The frets, the threats of a blackened sky are gone
The troubled breeze swings to the perpetual melody
The branches respond to a slow heavy beat
Meandering roots spread their wings
Like strong women stretching after heavy sleep
Slithering serpents searching for sustenance
Swimming languorously through resistant mud
Lovers wander aimlessly beneath the tree
Climb its mangled twists and turns
They sense the tangle of its creeping desire
They remember the craving for silent rain
All poetry @jsimpsonartJay Maria Simpson was born in Sydney, Australia. She worked as an English, Drama and Music Teacher for many years in schools, TAFE and the University of Newcastle. Jay has been a writer all her life. She moved to Perth, Western Australia in 2011 following a personal tragedy. It was then that her poetry exploded.
In her poetry she explores reality, change, sorrow, sex, anger, death, love, escape and memory. Jay pushes the boundaries in her writing. She often writes from a dangerous, fearful place where you will find raw honesty. Her poems might also dance in a happy sexual fairy garden. There is no pretension.
She is recently published in ‘Voices from the Fire’ Anthology Vol 9, Dumpster Fire Press, The Writer’s Club, Horror Sleaze Trash, Fevers of the Mind Showcase, ‘Ukraine: The Night and the Fire’ Anthology and ‘Bedroom Anatomy Lessons’ Anthology, Dumpster Fire Press.
Her new manuscript, a book length anthology, is being reworked with new poems, themes and ideas. She is also putting together a chapbook of selected poems dedicated to her daughter, Kate.
Jay loves poetry, art, music, satire and black comedy. She also loves recording and reading poetry publicly.
She is the Creative Director and Author at ‘Living Dangerously’.
Some salesmen smokes in the market. The chickens are still alive. The shops
release the stretching cats from their shrouds.
Rigor mortis has set in some mice, some writhing.
Megaphones slur. Words travel in paddle-carts.
Work has been cancelled by the union demanding
more works. Our favourite mad man turns, yawns, farts.
The flight of the pigeons thunderclaps
the complex quantum of the magnetic fields into the sky.
An Address Bleeds On The Door
Once more I've come to the door,
scored a photo, asked the mystery behind-
"What is it that keeps pulling me in?"
The numbers on the woodwork, hand-painted,
bleed a lot, and I wait
as if its wound would heal, the address would
instill a jiffy etched in the air like a capricious feather.
Knock on the skull; if I have ever here
as a resident, as the one behind,
that I had been unlocked into infinity.
My father, all gone, whispers
to my mother, all gone, that I have grown to be
nothing they imagine, but it matters no longer.
Apparition
A single see-through crow in the morning meadow,
I feel the sugar drainage, sway a bit, hallucinate.
One crow multiply; the crow inside the crow comes out.
The town uncrates its memory boxes around us.
This is the oldest part, made of superego.
My teacher walks towards the river. His suicide note
floats like a duck feather in the mote.
I can eat a candy and stable my vision, but why!
Thousands thoughts fly and unfold summer.
Sky is only beginning to gather itself.
Almost
Sometimes, for example: while
letting my eyes bleed over the sunshine
the roof and railing of our house sketch,
I fall in love with Almost.
Otherwise, at night, I rush to awakening
and visit the room I have sent Almost to sleep.
I stare at the window-framed nighttime meadow.
Wind neighs near the bedpost. It becomes
aware of my presence and shatters into
a million racing towards the darker end.
Almost sleeps. It looks like a letter crumpled
and cast inside the waste basket of the dreams.
The White Fish In the Ceramic Pond
Some say that the fin
is the only thing that breaches
the worlds' semipermeable membrane,
and that the fish is a ghost.
I train my daughter to balance on her toes
and to throw a fistful of fish-food.
I say, "Here none fishes. We feed
the echoes of the land." We see
the white shadow ricochets midst
the ceramic pond. Almost winter
plays our chords. Here comes the fish.
There it disappears.
We utter the words we designed to send
to my mother. The alphabet swirls and sinks.
A few bubbles break near the bank of reality.
The Climate
A handcart collects empty egg cartons
from the shops in the serpentine lanes.
The summer sun lies on the zigzag of the boxes.
The tracks look chalked as if it has snowed.
Nothing, not even the tropical trees cast any shadow.
Perhaps we all died as one,
and our apparition has no reflection.
The unnecessity of Setting Any Ideal
Shadows on the margins,
reading the book on your life
has hit a bar of lull in
this afternoon.
I don't mark the books as if I
am a holder of the volume in
a circle of 'Pass me the pages'.
If I had to scriven a footnote
I would have written the clouds
and the panes perfecting
those flipped reflections of the lone reed
surviving your vermin's garden.
I would add, "I often think,
if we worship Meaninglessness as God,
as necessity, and as the Sundays in our lives
our rituals might be similar to
tending a zen garden.
The perfection of our method
has the aim no greater than to perfect
ourselves during this brief and random stay
on earth.
Imagine what you would have said to that!
I lower my eyes; the book has hit the floor;
my fingers still on it, inside its bosom
are callous about the detachment.
Bio: An author, journalist, and a father, Kushal Poddar, editor of 'Words Surfacing’, authored eight books, the latest being 'Postmarked Quarantine'. His works have been translated into eleven languages.
Twitter- https://twitter.com/Kushalpoe
These 3 sonnets were previously published in the now defunct Mojave Heart.
A Feral Girl Belongs Between The Trees
You trespass, sodden footprints in your wake,
into a kitchen for purloined cake, crumbs,
a dollop, butter cream. Clean pewter plate
while an entire household dreams. You succumb,
to ritual, sneak upstairs, nimble toes,
where they sleep unaware. Exchange soiled dress
until your armoire’s bare, grosgrain ribbons, stowed
in pockets, for your feral hair, still wet
a little from the lake, your evening bath
before your stomach ached for cake, clothes stuff —
you’ll find, again, through the servant’s entrance at half
past ten. This house was never quite enough
even when it contained your family —
a feral girl belongs between the trees.
Nipple
Pulls you to his chest, after all the rest
to fall asleep the way that he desires.
you suckling his right nipple like a breast.
“Like you are starving, and it can make milk.”
Its slight erection tight between your lips
because you know it’s true. He does feed you,
something more than the mimicked milk this tit,
diminutive, cannot express. A coup
to keep it in until he’s snoring but
if you do it makes you, in fact, his child,
a babydoll undressed then nursed. It’s what
makes it okay that he hurts you — defiles
then feeds. Both father, mother, he can be.
He knows how much you need a family.
Bleach
You didn’t really lie, that Christmas fête
she asks about the dye — a neighbor friend
who wants to judge and preach. You do not get
a golden girl with dye but bleach. So you pretend
it was the sun. You’re not the only one.
They crown the blonde heads quicker than the brown.
Won’t know regret, like you: “I could have won,”
a public smiling shame in evening gown.
A parent wants what’s better for their child:
the waving winner, princess, sashed, that thrives.
A truth civilians will never reconcile.
You bleach away the pain when she is five.
It will not be the last time that you lied
How many days she cried before she died?
Bio: Kristin Garth is a womanchildish Pushcart, Rhysling nominated sonneteer and a Best of the Net 2020 finalist, the author of LOLLYGAGGER and 26 more books of poetry and prose. She is the dollhouse architect of Pink Plastic House a tiny journal.
Twine Years
Ever since I remember as a little boy
my grandmother much younger than I actually thought
She appeared to be lost and looking for the lost sunset all day
Another cloud goes by, and she smiles and says "it is about to become really pretty out here."
She would sit in on a knotted wood framed chair and watch her world disappear as the moon came out to remind her for a moment of who she is. As she twisted some twine together hoping to someday make more blankets and sweaters.
The woman with style at the 1950's ballroom halls.
The men would look and she'd flash her ring.
A quick look back at her military man in a picture frame. Smiling in the dust that buries the room. Her yellow wedding dress sits in the attic.
She remembers the walks in the park with her lost friends.
She remembers the children as they were children.
She remembers the kicking and jumping, the twirls of immortality.
By the beach she would splash for hours with a wagging tail dog.
She remembers the endless fashions that she would help mature a town from rags to class.
She looks blank and cries to a mass of blanket that she has been working on for weeks.
Was that military man remembered for his drunken slams of fists against the walls?
The accusations he'd proclaim as he ran with the mice in packs to the whores and sweating out Sunday mornings. Dripping wet, stained and stinking in a plaid jacket with “Lucky Tiger” in his hair.
I have to calm her down. I play the "The Nutcracker" on a record player, as she masks herself back into a ballet. She begins to sway arms slowly but surely. I feel she is on that endless dancefloor again.
Or was she ever? Was she just imagining a time when she was free again?
About 6 months later I had lost this Angel to the dance away. The sunsets would always come. Even in the darkest of storms.
She'd say on her last days " I want to Remember You, but I can't" " I want to know all children and tell them not to be afraid"
Now I’m in my 40's I see another older woman. Struggling to remember most days. Does she mimic this dance? The mother I
always depend on. Will I finally have to learn to be myself? I wait for the sunset for hours by the river. Always curious if she is also looking for that same spinning sunset that seems endless and impeccable and immovable. Has it moved all these years?
Fidgeting with the jute twine. Where can I go hide?
A Quicksilver Trilling
Once upon a time we met the platinum blonde
- with a letter in hand and a Loro Piana Handbag.
She was quiet and frantic at the same time (the obstacles of running from beautiful to damnit!)
You popped bubbles in the hot flames,
in flamenco streets with bleeding trains that lead you
from the whistles to the cheating rainfalls.
Now, she’s as quiet the storm swept flower.
Now, she’s an atomic bomb in my heart of desire.
She’s as damaged as the ignorant meal to the fiery belly of a carnivore.
"Meeting the vagrants are as easy as meeting you" she’d laugh to herself.
Maybe, she’s just a little deaf when this city shakes in a quicksilver trilling.
A little blind when the joy with from a celebration to a thronging.
So you missed the thrills of the small crowd now.
That city took your bravery and your crown.
It’s hard to be superficial in your walk.
The thrills of a million helicopters circling down.
Your heartbeats a quilted bundle of wires.
In the Hollywood hideaways the public does watch.
Hurry up to snap a picture of her durable nucleus falling apart.
Behind the bars, to the many
alcohols and elixirs falling straight down the cold rocks.
Her beautiful monuments show some cracks
and the drinking of the sweet fruit tree has become a little thick in the dust cloud social ball.
Maybe she’s just a little deaf when this city shakes in a quicksilver trilling.
Maybe she’s a little thirsty when the water is sealed from the dams to a willing thirst.
This blessing is just a disguised curse when she’s dressed up for another Judy Garland downward spiral.
I’m starting to rethink this shadow looking at his shoes, playing little Mr. Socialite wearing a poor man’s Bruno Maglis blues.
I’m standing here holding your golden cup.
The feathers of your golden goose,
and a shriveled-up ticket to the sacrifices you make at Tiffanys.
My culture lies behind the ropes holding the inside of my head.
To play lover and not to play dead.
So you can play elegant and hip for the artsy coffeeshops.
They can spell your name in the drink and your heart melts, and you finally feel like a somebody.
So you tip those baristas and joke about the rats.
They don’t know art, don’t have MFA’s and haven’t been bought their gardens to thrive.
I just watch the fakeness leave your timid hazel eyes. And you try to just to the restroom and cry, I hear you in there weeping like a saturnine coyote.
There are a couple of genuine fools, walking around pretending to be the rules of cool.
They folded under the pressures of rebellion, but they are beginning to wonder my darling.
They are wondering exactly how many canvases you have put your brush to. Since you tell them all you’re so smart and like a branch.
I’m just this poetic clown stuck with oversized t-shirts and the smile of
a stripped screw.
Don’t worry he’ll pay for this free meal at this simpering Italian Restaurant. Then he’ll be on his way back to the job of being a wonderful muse when the art professors aren’t calling you.
Never to share a true linen of a sunrise together. Tell me exactly what art is when you don’t know the art that is natural weather.
Oh, maybe she’s a little deaf when the city shakes and is shrilling. A little quicksilver trilling.
The sunrise is a little overbearing.
Can’t see the canvas from the golden glare that I’m wearing.
Operation, a colorful tornado on a disco floor. Weak legs are dancing.
Drunk and the quick pills are mixing. And you’re a drunk and grinding against pistons of strangers trying to keep from pissing.
They want to call you up for a night of glistening, and introduce you
to a hypodermic waterbed.
You forgot me behind the trees. A little dirty when you have to sit and
plead. You have nothing you really need, but everything you want is in the halos of that river.
Well, the birds wake up a little earlier than you. And they seem sick without the worms to chew.
There isn’t a masterpiece for them to view. You went right into the darkness with your colors and your strength. Frail bones fail frail forests. Simple supernatural spells bring crumbles to a magic mountain,
the journeys are hard to walk when the valleys and the lakes are droughts and scrawny to swim in.
Oh, maybe she’s a little deaf when the animals stopped howling.
The wind is full of heat and rain is even melting. Around the curves the body is sealing.
The city is shaking to a quicksilver trilling.
From the windows, we used to see the clarity of the glass. Now it’s a little oily and overcast.
It’s a holocaust, razor sharp raindrops with teeth that bite, just like a brand-new disease.
The queen must hide from the flee. Our humanity isn’t built anymore on heartbeats. Sometimes humanity is built from cardboard signs. Hold a little higher and ask for a prayer. Ask for a shave of cool air to save you from a Tinseltown cataclysm.
So what does the wonder girl do, when she goes from the pretender to blue to the shrew?
Does she realize her hair wasn’t always so cute?
Does she realize the geniuses are all crooks?
Does she feel the jazzy palm trees have always
been a little plastic and fake?
Much like the hypnotized starlets in the platinum blonde deconstruction game.
Oh, maybe she’s a little deaf from the chess game that keeps yelling checkmate!
Maybe she’s been blinded by the hysterical cut-throat authority waifs. Maybe she’s just part of this jealousy, a vanish haze they thrown on you to make you a product.
A little pill sick when the city keeps shaking tiny slits of cracks in this quicksilver trilling.
Now, she’s as naked as a blurry mirror. Now she’s feeling as pitiful as a stuttering preacher.
Now her art is less of a picture that hangs above bountiful nouveau vanity mirrors.
Her art is the magnetism that pulls the moon through her evening veins.
Her art is when the clouds move in and pulls the curtains of stars over her delicate frame.
Maybe she grew tired of her ears constantly ringing. Loud masochisms and feminine leeches luring and lingering.
A city shook to pieces in a quicksilver trilling.
September is my Blind GirlUnto thee I lift up mine eyes, O thou that dwellest in the heavens. Psalm 123
I haven't been following your eyes that I see in your faded footprints.
During a clever Summer, endless heat
Your skin stuck to the melting of everything around.
And I’d watch you leave, and watch you go.
From contempt to a new journey in the cold.
From July to September it was months that bathed me in a forever drowning. They bounced by too fast because I was trying to breathe in your every breath, and drink in your every thought.
Putting beauty to the mistress
when the maidens were all dying with the lambs.
Love was a walk around the town,
Love was stuck in spoken tongues that I couldn’t understand.
Searching for your scent in the dirt of this aging frail town.
I watch from my jail, the town is up in flames from my bending windows
and my loud neighbors are too silent,
or I am too tame in my lonely hands?
Just laying in sheets, wounded from heart to heart, the world’s heart doesn’t beat anymore.
Turning and turning, or did the world become still and pause with the pills?
I want to grow with the trees, bathe in the rain, I want the muscles emotionally and physically
to secure this warmth and comfort if I were to ever feel the need to succumb to the gusts.
To dream as the birds do. To kiss as the wires do that hang overhead.
To be peaceful as the lightening
that frightens our eyes when the thunder threatens us into endless shakes.
Watch God 1-2-3 lift up my eyes. I’ve the need to escape the heartaches and the straps.
My Brother (Lays Dead Under the Hickory Tree)
There he is
I see him under pelts of hailstones
A riddled mind and diseased by doctors
the icy rain pulsing little cuts
All over and over again.
I'm still in a quiet thought
We always felt the ending.
Or at least I have seen this ending.
In nightmares every night
The men festive from the jail.
Mother, a stereotype. Needing an exorcism.
There he is
My brother, a little hushed baby of 25.
Shoes as split as a peeled banana.
His coloring of blue, like the river nearby.
Like the breeze that blows through his long haired, daredevil boy.
He was hideous in his battle
Popping firework amphetamine pills, dragons watch the alleys.
The abusive and abused in corners and in jars.
Oh, lonesome traveler
a blood kissed jewel.
Some crows sing in their broken voices, they sit atop the bells.
They fly in the air; they congregate in the tree above. The sick hickory
I watch with no blink as they rescue him from the cold ground.
For only a few long hours and then they just return him back
to give him a comfortable dirty sack.
Underground, where they'll whisper out your sins to each other.
We can't escape the gossip.
Gossip clumsily falls like a slinky missing a step along the way.
The steps that are missed however, are remembered for coming up with the best stories.
Your best demise.
The Water Lilies in Claude Monet's Mind as I Feel Grave
A whole, a dump, I worship in my sadness.
To be a flower that is not dead in this dark room where my mind has shed.
I feel like I cannot break any further as my body hits the water.
Caution: the water is too cool. But it looks warm enough to me.
A blue day reflects through the trees and my eyes obey the power of the water lilies.
The fears begin to fade,
although I have not moved from my internal shade.
I have dreamt myself into a Garden, I have begun to feel Giverny.
You hear the echoed voices from outside from the unruly.
Tune them out and swim in my friend! Your only true friend right now is the imagination and escape.
I have deleted out the traumas of my past, my current,
my midnight tremors.
I have held the water lily in my hand and worshiped to the gods of art, of beauty.
Repaired. In a sweet dream. Kidnapped away to the Water Gardens.
A blink out of the trance. Neglected. The dream vanishes. I want back my Paradise. Another dream some other night....hopefully Monet will haunt me again.
10 Years "We Are Hummingbirds in the South Wind"
Take my wings as we fly...
through every one of these electric fences.
Our record skips and we just want to love.
In gorgeous unison we’ve prayed to our savior.
We’ve battled the lingering evils, and danced
through our endless pain and exorcise urges.
Through Winter roses and the bleeding Spring flowers,
the Summer storms and the Autumn leaves rustling
Each with a threatening torch in our blessed hearts.
Our hearts for one another.
When we are silent
we are sifting through the floodwaters of a haunting family past.
Submerging us down to breathe the holiness of a family future.
Even the hummingbirds have to outfly the vultures to avoid the bleeding idiots –
who chant for torture. And we have to learn to laugh and hide in the clouds even when –
the south winds are blowing by so fast.
Materialize our threading seeds and grow purely in this soil for the healthiest of worms to swim through.
Eliminate our anger and learn to generate new beats in the music that haunts you.
A decade in and we are still learning how hard it is to shed our skin.
With love in our eyes and holding each other closer we can begin flight and avoid another vulture.
The elimination of the wretched wagons full of dark nights with rose colored glasses.
Sip the power of the magnolia as it blows by our yearning hunger to feel as one.
The Lukewarm Train
There are days you remember the rambles of Chattanooga Misty.
Not quite bright, not quite dumb.
She was a lost girl living in the Kentucky woods.
She, maybe was just born into ignorance,
to perfume all the smoke from her cigarettes before she comes back.
She didn’t know that her ass tore through the seam of her jeans.
She was looking to scoot away from the rabbit holes to the rabbit cage.
And so she learned to be a smooth talker, hide that shy, act that brave.
She was not too fond of all those presents...
That you’d present to her to win her heart.
She’d rather be glum, take in the latest drug,
and drink until heart cannot beat.
Well that’s a wild one for you,
feeding the bikers their barbecue and their beers.
Sets you up for a Ponzi scheme,
and then disappears into the arms of a deadbeat.
His politics have become something of a joke.
His hair that was precious and begins to croak.
And now she’s wondering why her tan is no longer a cloak to hide her real self.
She thinks you can’t read her,
everyone who sees her becomes a mystic and can see
the flowing ego that won’t let her doves free.
She’d rather spend time as a thrush digging up worms.
Well when she’s going insane, I won’t be anywhere nearby.
I’ll be riding high in musical notes.
I’ll be chattering with the jealousies she hid in her bones.
I’ll be the water, the nature, the trees...
where her nest fell from long ago.
When they ask, oh, where is she at?
Maybe, I’ll be truthful or state a fact.
She’s been running away for about a thousand days from herself, her mind, and her beauty.
She’s been a little glum, brainwashed, trilling in the mud, and unaware of the twilight sorrow.
Well the crows all ask, for a quick boarding pass to see if she’d like to bring her fruits and berries into their decoy jungled home.
I’m sure she’ll just pretend to be a new disguise, as always.
Maybe from brown to blonde today.
Maybe I’ll go from celebrations to breaking in the snake.
Maybe I will be the one that’ll finally break.,.
break him and just leave him a nervous rattling drum.
Rippled streams, leave him hanging and never to
call him back when he needed you most.
So who is really the lost one here?
The stones throw will just shatter those crows.
Because he just sits there year after year refusing the find new homes.
When he’s going insane, just sitting in pity and haggard,
stuck in his eternal humdrum woes.
She’ll be stepping aboard, from East to West,
seeing the world in an everchanging brain.
She’ll go from palm trees to maple leaves
and drink the margaritas and drink in a summer rain.
She’ll be the one, living on steppingstones and
hitching into the soundwaves of a lukewarm train.
The Feast
I can hear nature immersing with the breeze
I awake from the wonderful dream of you and I together
and the real seeming real again.
3 doe standing together sipping the dew off the flowers
while you hear the howling fade, and the fires turning the trees to ash.
The wildlife swept up like yesterday’s trash.
Like the avalanches are coming to crush our Islands to the wash.
I just want to escape myself and rewind a dream.
Beginning to walk away from the blackness, a sunlight sits achingly in a field.
I bend down to take a drink to the waters,
and I breathe in the cuts of the primrose
while I’m just a sinner, feeling homeless and the water tasting of grease.
It’s not that I can forgive, it’s not that I haven’t, it’s not what I can do to try and ease you back in –
if I even were able to.
You are just somewhere silent and the screams of memory is still in motion in my decay.
I just want to escape myself and rewind a dream.
When flawless and hands were nervous and sweaty.
And we could look in each other’s eyes and cry for joy
and not the death of a tranquil peace.
Listening to the thunder, the cattle scurry to the barns
and the rains begin pounding on my bruised arms
The Spring has a kick, and the mudpuddles are thicker
and the flooding causes even the strongest to flee.
And I will just live this day like a prayer.
And live this day like a soldier calling for another-
after being shot down in streams of ammunition.
Getting familiar with my blood and understanding all my scars.
I just want to escape myself and rewind a dream.
I just want to see myself the day you first saw me.
Before I was not damaged, and the benzos hadn’t reshaped my mind
to be a feast to the doctors and be worshiped in by fiends.
They wanted me in their claws and
pull me into their mirrors.
While posing for some invisible cameras and hoping to be seen.
And you strayed from affection.
And you had to keep yourself from the edges yourself.
There are trains calling...and windowpanes shaking.
A sacrifice I take and the sunlight, infertile and dire
wants to go in for the night and just dream itself cold.
To escape myself hoping to rewind a dream.
Bio: David L O'Nan is a poet, short story writer, editor living in Southern Indiana. He is the editor for the Poetry & Art Anthologies "Fevers of the Mind Poetry and Art. and has also edited & curated other Anthologies including 2 inspired by Leonard Cohen (Avalanches in Poetry & Before I Turn Into Gold) and Hard Rain Poetry: Forever Dylan Inspired by Bob Dylan. He runs the www.feversofthemind.com website. A wordpress site that helps promote many poets, musicians, actors/actresses, other writers. He has self-published works under the Fevers of the Mind Press "The Famous Poetry Outlaws are Painting Walls and Whispers" "The Cartoon Diaries" & "New Disease Streets" (2020).”Taking Pictures in the Dark” “Our Fears in Tunnels” (2021) a collection of poetry called "Bending Rivers" a micro poem collection "Lost Reflections" and new book "Before the Bridges Fell" & "His Poetic Last Whispers" (2022) His latest book is "Cursed Houses" David has had work published in Icefloe Press, Dark Marrow, Truly U, 3 Moon Magazine, Elephants Never, Royal Rose Magazine, Spillwords, Anti-Heroin Chic, Cajun Mutt Press, Punk Noir Magazine, Voices From the Fire among several other litmags. He doesn’t enjoy the process of submitting constantly, however. Twitter is @davidLONan1 @feversof for all things Fevers of the Mind. Join Facebook Group: Fevers of the Mind Poetry & Arts Group .
All of March. Send poetry and other writings/art influenced by Tom Waits for the Online Anthology “The Whiskey Mule Diner” to be posted here on Fevers of the Mind. Send to feversofthemind@gmail.com include bio and poems on a word doc or e-mail body.
Fevers of the Mind 