David L O’Nan is a Midwest poet, editor and founder of Fevers of the Mind (www.feversofthemind.com) he has been nominated for Best of the Net numerous times.
He’s had several books and revised books. He has edited and curated Fevers of the Mind Anthologies including Fevers of the Mind Poetry, Art & Music Digest, Bare Bones Writing,
On the Highways with Many Miles…to Go! (inspired by Kerouac, Miles Davis, Townes Van Zandt), Waltzin’ Through Rusty Cages (inspired by Elliott Smith & Chris Cornell), The Whiskey Mule
Diner (inspired by Tom Waits), Hard Rain Poetry (inspired by Bob Dylan), 3 Leonard Cohen anthologies (soon)(Before I Turn Into Gold & Avalanches in Poetry), The Poetica Sisterhood of Sylvia & Anne (inspired By Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton), Truth, Lies, Blasphemy & Disorder (inspired by Joy Division, New Order & Depeche Mode), The Chelsea Underground (inspired by Andy Warhol & the Factory, The Starman Oddity (inspired by David Bowie) He has been published in Poetry Life & Times, The IceFloe Press, Headline Poetry & Press, Spillwords, Cajun Mutt, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Ghost City Press, Grains of Sand, Punk Noir Magazine, Rhythm n Bones, The Poetry Question, The Wombwell Rainbow and more. He will be reading this Summer in Louisville’s Insomniacathon. He has also edited the debut novel from New York City Poet Lennon Stravato “The Inner Dialect” and the poetry/prose collection “Werifesteria” from co-editor HilLesha O’Nan
These revised poems are included in Issue 11 of Fevers of the Mind Poetry, Art & Music: The Lone Road
Now Out: Fevers of the Mind Poetry, Art & Music Issue 11: the Lone Road ft. Taking Pictures in the Dark (revised)
Taking Pictures in Dark Laundromats
He’s always spinning, spinning in dim lights.
Eyes following the floor.
The circling of the karmic wheel teeters
A window shaking, the peering out.
Foreshadows laughter.
Winking eyes and love we’re after
Doubt licks through
The mind is juice and fragments.
Comical ears hear nothing but sadness
…and winter months are cold and bent
The wind will blow under the clutching arms of snow
And still the comfort is broken into bits of matter.
What is this filth we’re bathing in?
Lint, heat, wet claustrophobic skin!
Smiles that look over the ocean’s shore.
Where another smile emits from nothing before
Then we rumble, crumbled into aisles of dust.
Those who try to save,
Their need for lust.
Praying hands unite in burning churches.
They hope, they grieve, they live for the spin.
…all the while predicting the evolution of God.
Then there are the moments,
In which love was spit out of you;
The adoring one
Who has been shot with the thoughts of the heart.
The heart, left bruised, beaten,
No longer caressing the bleeding,
As coarse as sackcloth.
Those eyes lift a little
Another light bulb fades
Exit signs flicker!
You remember those rented sighs.
Whispers crying “don’t pay for lust”
Midnight’s bonfire became this morning’s generic toil, dribbled flame.
And you’re exhausted, no patience.
The cycle has to be ending.
You’re a tired feather for the unconscious.
And that once bright hammer over your skull,
Is now fading.
A true carbon copy of the mundane, ill sunlight
Once you step outside, cheers can now erupt, pause
You can be the hero today
But you still have one sock left missing
Until the next person walks in
And discovers your ghost.
Reciprocate a Lost Hello
Blooming up as the sun tortures a mind.
Your hello,
An echo deafening in dust,
A traveling spittle of rain,
And subsiding into a crevice of mistakes.
Wishing you were the juxtaposition
Between beauty,
And the sorrow of a burning flower.
Raindrops mimic the sprinkles of sound
Against the tin of a lost hello!!!
Crowded inside voices, are my normal calm in their chaos.
When they are the power.
power was built by energy, sight,
And the holding of truth.
Deep in a heart, the gut of the gods.
Life is crisp, like a milk around the glow.
Death is moistened by a crooked blown mind.
A parting with those memories from years meant for impressions.
All lost hellos were reciprocated into the thunder, the deluge, unknown.
We stammer in the wind, as the mind dreams up an eternal shade.
I sit there in the grip and trip in the circles around my feet.
Nor can a dance be,
Nor can a bruise heal,
Nor can a hello be returned,
Once it has been broken, by
What was heard, initially.
Today we are sold into the friendship of quaking nerves.
They tangle the lines of my supposed soul, melting and frightened.
They, like all seeds, grow once they are breathed into existence.
Then the stems sewn into the heavens as historical
As lost hellos.
Caskets and Libraries
How does my garden grow this Spring, so far?
After another blind girl’s Winter Solstice.
This wedding feels like a line of caskets.
We are cold, freezing to new phobias. Brittle bridge wedding gowns.
Walking away, shaky. The park looks senile and lined with mobsters.
And these libraries, we read all the sonnets, grandpa’s haikus,
Breathe in the wealth of romantic era poetry. The room just smells like toes.
In old socks that can’t fit on these old spirits.
They just creep their heads from behind the books of leather, exotic and moldy.
I can’t stand the everlasting after everlasting.
Unite and then depart.
This one is on the beach. Walking giddy in the sand and the glass.
With my Brixton Hooligan falling into the sand.
You were taken before me.
That seems like a penalizing breath to take.
The sand is fucking translucent and burns in the boredom.
I’m trying to hold onto my new dysfunctional gravity.
While I swim indigested in the stomach of the Earth.
Because that is what I’ve been told to do.
I’d much rather see if I could fly.
To see if I can reimagine all the colours we once owned,
And kiss every line of your face.
Physically, my mouth has to be the blade and disform us as we both fall.
The Skeleton of the Hawthorn
Hungry highways began to eat the stars.
Driving fastly past the Hawthorn trees.
We made a wish off the bones.
Of the dainty skeletons as it bit the breeze.
Watching the mass of blades,
Parade in the dark of the night.
As it were to close in for a kiss of death.
I push away from the fire’s warm breath.
Shaking branches off and letting love become savage.
As the shuffle of the road, rips the heavens from the ground.
Whip-in a little wind and then the creation of the ladder.
Climb up, laborers.
And bend down the sky and impel your eyes to the ground.
To take a teasing peek at the blinding God.
Funeral Jacket
My body began to break in the wreck to the funeral parlor.
I guess we may have had the drugs in our eyes.
We pulled out our wallets from our tucked in dirty slacks.
The bells clank and we watch the women cry for criminals.
They left dirt all over these tracks, from hearse to the course.
Lines of people greet the family and the family friends,
And the fiendish enemies, and the pretending sociopaths smile on.
With dollar signs in their eyes. Exotic in champagne aftertaste.
God rest this old gigolo.
Raised on nose candy and tranquilizing lipstick flavors.
Assailants bump into the crowd and I feel a little claustrophobic.
The room becomes a foggy night, as I smell perfume drip from wigs to stains on the floor.
I stumble, attracted to my dying high to a flowery patterned sofa.
Curled up in fetal and about to barf.
I sweat through the aluminum, past the clearance shirt, and my funeral jacket is mop water.
Midnight swimming in my head. To sleep baby, ready to sleep.
And I want my thoughts to be less melodic, and less tragic.
So what emotion am I supposed to have?
When my fever chill passes over my broken body. Can I exist normally?
I’ll sip the 2 hour old coffee from a stained olive green mug, and
Haunt this room like a mime.
Bleeding white paint from the walls over my funeral jacket.
Miscreants look over and ask if I’m really family.
No clubs or bars are open to lay in my brown recluse charm.
I know everyone says at funeral the nice things that the deceased have done,
I just want those at mine to say.
Once in Heaven, once from the circus.
Like always.
Death by Dame
Scowl, it was Sunday afternoon.
I met this old guy flying by the saloon.
In his Cadillac falsies.
He was always a smooth talker.
Out on the town, selling lies.
Like a newspaper made by the town flirt.
Tobacco drips from his mouth and,
He watches Main Street strut to the pounding of all-
The rusty trumpets.
His mind will never be that of something but obscene.
He’s got pills for it all,
And he’s got six divorces.
All the motels know him by name.
The cracks of all the flattery.
The stains of all the boiling howls against his skin.
He loves the fishnets and the blue lipstick the most.
Beads of sweat and pearl necklaces dropping by the vanity mirror.
He thinks he’s got the midnight by the stilettos,
But this night he has a .38 to his womanizing eyes.
Can’t dial another dame.
His death will soon follow.
1001 Days Before the Scream
Thursday began the delusions
By Friday there was a hint of seclusion
The giggles bit like frightened mice.
By the next week
Something was clawing at the vacancy
Left by shadows
Kept growing more and more -
and more beast-like.
A month in the rattling tails
Like a rattlesnake militia
Testing and begging for a scream.
But you...
Still not frightened enough.
Walking up with the breathy tangles on my neck
Sly, slick with many questions
The walking around in the daze
Crawling, then back to walking.
The deep voices of jumbled word priests are taunting,
praying for your scream.
The chipmunk voice dancers are singing,
moistening your lethargic wet dream.
There is a calm grandiose...
A few years in.
Thinking back to normalcy.
The sunlight and the rain and all.
Balance each other out to become -
Your dark and trusting friends.
The grass will grow straight,
Crooked, burnt, and sometimes laced with decay.
Netherworlds overcast cloudy,
pungent waste.
You dissolve into a slight breath,
Catching a shriek! in your lungs...
but pause
before the orgasmic vocal becomes loud.
By 1000, you are a gagging lunacy freak
Pulling petals from your floral heart.
Bleeding here
Bleeding there
Love me once
Love me twice
And finally,
As midnight struck day 1001
A scream passes
Ready to face
Your next scream
You begin the new phase.
Save Me From the Bend
There are some afternoons you find yourself on the bend.
In a fight, for the attentive eyes of night.
Away from sunlight and smothering like mucus stuck to the skin.
Forgetting my gardens, my phaeton drives.
My disease of anger can now rest easy.
Wanting the energy of the moon to massage my mind.
Hum until the monsters leave.
The day feeds all the chewing for fallen angels.
I want to rest in the thoughts of an evening.
When anything visible or invisible can breathe, however puny the light.
At the parties, alone in shadows.
Crying in blankets, maddening lips.
Hushes of the rain.
Oh, just save me from the bend.
The Broken Heart Ramble
My new mission didn’t get very far.
Collisions between the plates of worships.
I fell apart on my first day.
Everyone began to tug at me.
Pull me to your furnace.
Like hungry packs of wolves in the wild.
On an Anemic snowy day.
Not to be fearless like the broken hearts.
The broken hearts that built that bridge, that is now wet and wooden.
Erected to become limp in the driftwood.drownings.
Falling on the first day,
When no one cared to strengthen the arch.
Constant crumbling, ornaments bubbling under.
Rivers strained in tears, puzzles floating unsolved.
They played the favorite, they became the prime.
They gained all the garden jewels and became the most sublime.
An illegitimate sunshine was born to a sky.
Hide the faces of the fallen behind the possessive clouds.
Mumbles, talentless and faint. Elastic and wimpy in these halls.
Hear the straining rope, imagine the roses blur from this ropewalk fall.
I know my dreams, I know my roots.
Planted in the ingenuity of these physical laws. Like a drunken limp.
The greedy laughter steps to my energies. My panic has always been the flaw.
Not one to be married to obedience.
Blessed by the sedition of a mind.
I am nothing more than sacred proteges to lovers who never met.
Over in the meadow is the cordless thieves that thirst for me,
By some time engaged in criminal deeds, I feel like I’m finally about to meet mercy this evening.
When the shadow man meets the faith, and the vanishing begins.
So stubborn when prayer is failing. I can’t meet those demands of a growing seed.
Always looking for that false beauty.
Asking for her to be mine. As she converges into the skin of a new demon to flirt through.
Am I the smoke stench in this air, that everyone smells, but no one sees.
Just a flickering dead old age soul.
Romances that splintered during a broken sonata,
Stinging when cinched, Climbing out the ether of the native druids.
They have the bite, they have the grip, The gnaw like the wolves.
Arctic chills begin to fill up in my blood.
Multiply until the spread is my skin and not just the tingles filling in the pores.
I can’t warm myself, without another’s embrace.
Submitted early to the mask of greed.
Claustrophobia
How can you feel claustrophobic and empty at the same time?
Why is our sex more important than caring, growing, feeling full humanity?
Every time there is a meaningful feeling, we can embrace,
Those stars in the sky want to erase in the haze and now we are spotless.
Just pure dark, suffer and shake. Removing the wedges to break, to break.
With a dim moon sitting inside the sky’s womb still hiding.
What is natural?
God? A Devil? Hate or Love?
Are there any natural friends, or just disconnected pedestrians?
I feel the suckling of momentary leeches.
The shy girl, the loud girl, the energy, the buzz, the quiet
The breath of cool mint whispers. Are they real? What is calling my name?
Another minute of limited time wasted.
How can you protect what is weak?
When you are scared to be protected yourself,
How can you make someone else smile again, or trust again?
They are their own drug.
Drums Tapping, Guns Shouting
The drums pounding.
In a motor breath jungle.
A cigarette burns in a mouth of a wounded moment.
There is a touch from a velvet finger.
Blue eyes staring.
Caressing the ego.
Sensory slime.
Rain boiling up in the nimbostratus.
The spirits wipe the sky clear.
Without beauty for a moment, all erased for a moment.
The blood begins to tangle like vines in my head.
I’m the clear jewel.
The pure soldier.
I’ve fought these nightmares with guns.
I’ve cleansed the wounds of the evil.
I’ve torn apart the wonder of joy.
And dreamt up a splendid cowardice.
While holding shells and making bombs.
The security in these tourniquet castles.
This used to be enough for the fulfillment.
The blood was kept thick and bonded like leather.
Now I look eye to eye with napalm, swatting my eyes like ninjas.
The missile irises launch defeat into the heart. My course is a scar.
Oozing negligence.
Light trips in, leaving me drunkenly.
Thoughts race by in a haste.
The light can’t keep up with the speed of these thoughts.
Sagging in my eye sockets.
Did all the peace burn through my weightless pockets?
Panoramic bloodshed.
In the explosions when freedom sank in this mud.
I hate seeing my shine in your stains. I didn’t ask for this.
Fevers of the Mind 