I could not decipher the reality of you:
For you were once, the impossible dream.
In the city with no time and the shadows
Of past lives, melded into walls that
Couldn’t talk of your history.
Ibsen said,
Temptations are manifold in this word.
In the city of grime and Inclement weather
That may or may not wash away uncertainty
Before the night takes hold of
Your morality; before the morning rises
And burns away the poets moon
And workers scramble from their beds,
To go to a job that comes before their dreams. Dollar-baby-generation, with all those poems
By Sylvia Plath, unread on the shelf.
Yearning for learning, musing about losing /
Chains & shackles that sink a soul like
A stone to the bottom of nothingness.
In the words of Jim Morrison;
This is the strangest life I have ever known.A Poetry Showcase from Robin McNamara
A Lone Road on the Island of Moloka’i by Maggs Vibo
Our plane putters over patchwork pillows of rusty clay
Celebrating the day's first rays at a coffee plantation
Top down, and around the bend the breeze kicks dust into our locks
We visit spaces of ancient mysteries and forgotten history
Not far from a phallic rock and a peninsula of exiled patients
Where jagged cliffs leap to kiss the sea
Towards desolate paths that stretch and smile at roosters crowing
as if echoing the road sign:
Aloha
Slow Down
This is Moloka'iUntitled from Jacqueline Dempsey Cohen
Here the earth glows,
breathes from its molten core
laying bare its soil
reborn with radiant heat
This iron-rich clay beckons
hands to touch and feet to scuff
staining fingers, soothing toes
caressing knots of need.
Untouchable limbs frame the path
relentlessly muted
urging travelers ever onward
to mountains birthing fire.
@boscoedempsey
A JOURNEY by Petar Penda
He took a fiery road
towards distant hills,
with wild shrubs on its sides
not to let him turn off the path.
This solitary journey led to
his self-knowledge of
the lack of something central
which permeated.
Copper Dust Road by Robin McNamara
I’m on a dust road
unburdened by winds /
unshackled by conformity.
Humbolt of a cloud;
wispy in the sky
where the land lies
with dust and rust
and rock and ruin.
I saw a desert man he
was wearing wisdom of
an Indian spirit / I crave
the aqua of his knowledge.
My face copper-rust from
the swirling dust of the road
to nowhere /
rattlesnakes and coyotes on
each side watching /
waiting patiently for hope to die.
ABOUT TO ACHIEVE by Spriha Kant
Crossed many long tortuous paths
beaded with many thorns
showering under the sun’s anger
Every time, found me
a bird flying
to touch the horizon.
Now
Cooler sun
Roaming clouds
Swaying thickets on both sides of the path
as if about to welcome me
to my destination
by showering me in water
from the skies.
(c) Spriha Kant
The Red Road by Elizabeth Cusack
Why is this road so red
And what makes it real?
Why is perception a tunnel?
Who decided our destination
And what do they know?
What is a bramble
And why is it dark?
Why are hedges bare
And why do thorns stick up in air?
Why do rabbits fall into lairs?
Everyone knows these skies will part
And our lives will not end here.
Beguiled by Lesley Curwen
Rust bloodroad flares to brightest crux
its russet track armed by hedges' dark
overed by long mynd and sailing cloud
the eye swept back and back to fiery light
its centred throb, perplexing Delphic shape.
Witch trio aflame, altar to neon gods
or haloed mothers keening at a grave?
She is on fire by Constance Bacchus
not going anywhere she is rambling on to the lake she stops off at one of two gas stations won’t eat anything but licorice candy extreme pop she spins out of control across so many hills the vultures at the top pay attention she has passed the other one watches the fire blend in arrives at the launch hardens her heart in the water you could say it fossilized you can say you miss it you can say anything you want it is cold doesn’t care breaks apart amongst milfoil
Inspired by Leonard Cohen lyric visual piece from Maggs ViboCongrats! To Fevers of the Mind contributor Maggs ViboA Fevers of the Mind Quick-9 Interview with Margaret Viboolsittiseri aka Maggs ViboVisual Poetry by Maggs Vibo: Drinking the Ash Pt 1 & 2Poem from Constance Bacchus : Memories from a party last 4th of JulyPoetry based on photography Challenge from Ankh Spice pt. 1Poetry based on Photography challenge from Ankh Spice pt. 32 poems by Spriha Kant from Hard Rain Poetry Forever Dylan AnthologyA Sylvia Plath inspired poetry showcase by Robin McNamaraA Poetry Showcase from Robin McNamaraAugust 2022 Poetry Showcase from Elizabeth CusackPoetry by Petar Penda : Tiresias
Robin McNamara is an Irish poet. Hisdebut chapbook Under a Mind’s Staircasewas published in June 2021 (Hedgehog Poetry Press UK). His forthcoming full collection, Monochrome Heart is being published in late 2022. He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize for ‘Apple Picking Season’from Under a Mind’s Staircase.
Postcard From an Exiled Heart
I watched a documentary on North Korea
the day after you said,
My heart is unwatered.
I learnt about a different culture
in another world with another perspective
on life. It reminded me of you.
When my iPhone trills with your
good morning text. I can’t help but think
of Janus, the god of beginnings and endings.
We’ve lived lives of regrets and if we could
do it all again. I don’t think we would
have done anything different,
while at fifty we still react to half a heart.
One part eaten by men of her past the other
half, seedless and barren.
The Waste of Minds
When the light is softer in the morning
A gasp of an autumn day appears
Awoken from slumber and summer heat
Which cools to early dark evenings again.
A bed of leaves at my feet a promise
Of living room fire and books of poetry.
The seasons are changing but my words;
They do no such thing to the minds that
Refuse to flow. I could die today and perhaps
People will say he was a fine man but alas
The smartphone is more powerful than death
and has domain over lives lived / unloved
Our demise passes no resemblance to fast lives
Unthinking past the absent scrolling.
A semblance of hope remains in our poetry
In defiance of the age of the waste of minds.
Auguries in the Water
you
are an old-aged rained river
submerged in susurration of
a memory lucent
with hope
that lasted until winter
you
are a sliver of light emerging
from summer water
the jumping salmon just an augury
long gone the body is water
the flow of skin and the submerged heart
like driftwood the river floods
memories into mud silt coarse
with bone the ebb of an autumn
tide slowly tugs at the moorings
holding the reminiscences of
you
can you describe this beautiful photo taken by (c)Ankh Spice better than Ankh?
“a thousand miles of grey wind-calved mountains on a veil-world, material for a sorcerer’s armour, fallen bits of storm-sky, shoals of glass sharks” -Ankh Spice
” a seascape – choppy, restless pewter sea in endless unbroken waterpeaks. Long dark hills brood sleeping-dragonry alon gthe horizon, a split of orange dawn/dusk firing down the spine. The rest of the sky is exhaled smoke, beginning to tint around the ember” – Ankh Spice
Waveforms by Lesley Curwen
wavelets / chins tipped / hold sun’s embrace
squirrel grey in livid rays/ their ranks of open lips
mouth sweetness/ at the eye of dusk
no swimmers here/ to rip their harlequin silk
to shreds/ of light
ashore/ sole-prints are shadowed/ by day’s ebbing
gold/ to be immersed in crosshatched expanse
of tide/ whose basketwork
convexities/ suck land’s mauve loom
below/ a quilt of cumulus
a haiga description from Mo Schoenfeld
light slips, struggling,
night laps at the mountain top,
darker depths settle.
I framed a portrait for an absentee by Sam Hickford
Here is a cranny for you to seize, my love,
among the volcanic strait of smoke-stung cloud..
will you take it, as the wagtail claps
this wreath of Autumn, makes this land its vow?
As each trilled wavelet furnishes a mountain
for a chalk-board dreadnought to a droughtless word,
come. I watch the ocean’s opiate
break mirrors in the champion of its lens
and picture you cradled in these hues
of fire and lazuli and scarlet shards.
Shores of Safe Distance by Robin McNamara
When we divide our words between
a stanza with image-filled meanings
and one with an abstraction of reality
not easily deciphered/
do we need anything more than the
acceptance of our verses read by the judgmental or do we find our oars and paddle out a bit further; into deep waters
of thoughts, without a compass.
With only the stars to navigate a way
to your account of my words.
What if I drowned, what if the storms of uncertainty was too much,
what would
wash up upon the shores?
A body of work beautifully polished by the waves or a piece of driftwood?
Would you tread water to find our existence, or would the stones under your feet compel you to go back and stare at the ocean from
a distance and say; maybe another time.That's All Folks by Elizabeth Cusack
The sky is burning—
It’s not exactly news—
It’s been this way since I was born.
There was an egg before akasha,
If you care about language,
And there was the ein sof,
If you care to read that tongue,
And there was an egg before the chicken—
This is very hard to grasp,
It has ruined paradise,
This inability to understand,
The great unknown was once one,
And all multiplicities someday will blow apart.
A prophet comes along once in a while
And says, this is what it’s all about— all is one,
Call it love or whatever makes you smile,
But the fact is we are killing every one,
And as we come and go,
And as we kill our mother,
And read our revelations,
The steel-grey cable under the sea
Is recording every absurdity,
And as we remember the essential dead poets—
Remember what, exactly?
That everybody who ever lived is now here!
James Joyce got it in the Wake,
And they mocked him
As they do every damned prophet—
All the condemned are on this ride
As we read up on Aleister Crowley,
As we are on this burning earth,
As we read revelations from the dead
And martyred who died for clarity—
And don’t forget Stalin, Mao, and old Paul—
And as we drink the soma and submit when we are called,
We remember the ones who saved our lives—
Thank you to the poets, that we have a mind at all!
That is the final thing they will try to take from us all.
STRUGGLING by Spriha Kant
Kaleidoscopic dreams
float like amorphous clouds
and the hopes shine like the sun
in her psyche.
Stuck amidst
the turbulent eddies
trying to drown her
in the stygian abyss
she keeps the
waves of her
mind, heart, and actions
synchronously tranquil
for she is as vulnerable as a fire in the water
who can’t dare to rebel against her inner voice
ordering her to achieve something that will
raise the eyebrows and open the mouth wide
of the pessimistic commentators.
Links to some work of a few of the poets:
The milky white mist rolls
across the Klang River
in April morning in shrouds
of silence with the shrill of
the eared nightjar breaking night
to early light across the still sleeping city.
A rouge cloud threatens rain
with the rising heat thunder cracks
across the sky near Ketumbar Hill
and soon the lalang grass is covered
in rain moisture that quickly dries
as quickly as the thunder and rain comes
and goes and I’m reminded of how
fleeting beautiful things are if we let
them go too soon.
Gingko in a Tokyo Street
The tree sparrow nestles
upon the wire
and tries to translate into song —
how the ginkgo
lost her yellow dress that day
While
under neon lights —
illuminated mannequins show dresses
she’ll never wear.
There’s a dynasty of lost souls —
I see them. Waiting like Hachiko;
for death to be reversed.
Kintsugi Imperfections
Meadow morning kisses the light,
beckoning me to a two-fold road
with a rust-old generational gate.
Shadows laced across your face /
daughter of grace, with a petal face
fragile, like crystal, almost l ike - kintsugi.
I swallow your imperfections whole /
they devour me.
Swallows fly across the weathervane
uncertain to where, the wind blows /
uncertain to where, the water flows.
The sun an orange blush.
Bio: Robin McNamara is an Irish poet. His debut chapbook Under a Mind’s Staircasewas published in June 2021 (Hedgehog Poetry Press UK). His forthcoming full collection, Monochrome Heart is being published in late 2022. He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize for ‘Apple Picking Season’from Under a Mind’s Staircase
Fevers of the Mind 