The Empath Dies in the End – Page 2

II Cardinals : A Story & A Poem by Amanda Crum and David L O’Nan

from the series “The Empath Dies in the End”

1 The Cardinal (Amanda Crum)

“She’s never seen a cardinal,” the woman next to me says.

I turn to her but keep my eyes down. We’ve all learned new ways to give each other space as we stand shoulder-to-shoulder, body odors twining like jungle vines across the concrete. I could pick any one of them out of a crowd by the smell of their sweat. The air is so close it feels wrapped in cotton batting.

The woman came in two days after I arrived, carrying a filthy two-year old girl with sweet fawn eyes. Since then we haven’t spoken much. Standing for hours, expending body heat to create a greenhouse behind chain-link; our energy is too precious to use up with words.

She leans against the fence, chin tilted into a regal pose. “We used to see them all the time as kids, in the woods near our farm. But this one, she grew up on the water. She could swim before she could walk.”

I smile and push away thoughts of all the things I’ve never seen: snow, New York City. The first smile of my own child, some future baby whose face has become clearer to me over the past 120 hours. My womb throbs, once, like a reflex.

There is no room for that here. Let your mind wander for a moment and suddenly you’re climbing over the links, flying over the city toward cool, breezy freedom. It projects across your features. The guards can spot it from a yard away.

“I keep thinking of all the things I want her to see when we get out of here,” the woman says. Her bottom lip trembles minutely, as though she’s cold. An impossibility in the swelter. “Do you think they’ll separate us?”

I wish I could say with some measure of certainty what they’ll do.

When they open the cell door I edge closer to the woman, curling my body around the baby. Outside in the heat a dog barks urgently; a time traveler from Home. His voice cuts through the din, a reminder of which one of us is caged. Still, my heart lifts from dry and brittle grasses, as a bird would do.

“Hear the doggy?” I whisper to the baby. My reward is a sleepy smile, fawn-eyes illuminated for the first time with something like joy.

Maybe I’ve found her a cardinal after all, I think.

Cardinal II (Raindrops peck down on a chamomile can) by David L O’Nan

A man, a rich desireless man, stands near the slick bridge

Contemplating that death is a dive, through a flight of thousands of cardinals he has to soar through.

If he wants to live, they’ll let him live.

If he wants to die, they’ll let him thrive.

A wonder if there is a cardinal for everybody?

I can’t find my garden through this armageddon.

I want my freedom, but my freedom is swarming in bullets and passerbys,

My freedom is jealousies and hesitancy.

My freedom is breathing deep and feeling messy.

I’m humbled when I begin to feel the earth again, once my body no longer wants to soar.

Raindrops peck down little pellets of water on a chamomile can.

I opened the door back to you, and you just shut my wings inside.

I tried to escape and you just left me high, fearful, and dry

I have to remember to become fearless and look you in that eye.

If I want to, If I want to, If I want to. Trust my blood to move like it should.

To trust my brain, to trust the spinning Earth to make some sense for once.

To hold my breath and evade the invasion of the addictions and the fumbling demons

Dropping bibles and passages on that slick bridge. Here I am, once again.

Here I wait. Will I have my friends? Will they come and rescue me away.

“What do you think I’d see if I could walk away from me” doo,do,do, wa

Note: last line from Candy Says by the Velvet Underground

Current bio for Fevers of the Mind’s David L O’Nan editor/writing contributor to blog.

Paperback & Kindle version of Cursed Houses is now available from David L O’Nan on this link below

Re-published poems from Amanda Crum

https://amzn.to/3VRp8Kk Where Wild Beasts Grow by Amanda Crum

Poetry: Gilded Peacocks in Coffins (Ant Farm Empath) collaborative poem from Elizabeth Cusack and David L O’Nan

from the series “The Empath Dies in the End”

Gilded Peacocks in Coffins (Ant Farm Empath)

1 (from Elizabeth Cusack)

I am on safari today
Leading around an empath
He is high on feeding ants
Then watching them brawl

We are surrounded now by fire ants
But he is not bothered at all
He loves his ants as much as he loves me
And I’m not bothered at all.

2 (from David L O'Nan)

300 miles away on a crowded boulevard
They are watching peacocks fight in the street
The winner gets the moneybag, the loser gets the feathers and the coffin.
Feathered fans are to be beautiful, Where is the beauty in brutality?

Let’s walk down skid row, and crawl around some suspicious bones.
To get to that half-eaten waffle that looks like it isn’t too disgusting just yet.
They have August prancing in the streets, aids in her blood and –
No blankets on her cold feet. Still, Mr. Jack Daniels wants to throw her –
On the back of a Harley and treat her to his idea of Neverland.

We can’t always believe empathy will lead us to sincerity, it often leads us to depravity.
We wish upon crooked beaten stairs with loos nails, falling from the brittle sky.
Continuously and see if we can wake up from a nightmare or just sweat through another
dream. A murder was caught on videotape and they showed the world in blue lights.
I believed Gandhi was there paralyzed and crawling through the deserts of scorned corn.

They began to walk the peacocks in coffins to bury them in the desert, and all I’m thinking about-
Is you, a love that honesty died in. I never fully met the woman you became after your many scared ideas. Confusion was a common feeling and was the constant weakness. And in your strong heart you felt you could change them. Maybe they were never your appetite and my taste a little too Avant Garde to explore. A little clumsy, a little wanderer that wouldn’t stray too far from your pains that I’ve always felt in my fingers.

We found the man with the ants, fire ants… burning through dirt.
Scarring our asses and chewing at our fruits.
Maybe we shouldn’t all be soldiers after all,
Monarchies, hierarchies, control us to our last debts.
Does the last of humanity have a voice, or does the cannonball
Singe louder than the guitar strings while my pain sings louder than imploding bombs. +

July 2022 Poetry Showcase by Elizabeth Cusack +

Current bio for Fevers of the Mind’s David L O’Nan editor/writing contributor to blog.

Poetry: Spasm Dreams collaborative poem by Ron Whitehead & David L O’Nan

part of the “The Empath Dies in the End” series

Spasm Dreams

part 1 (Ron Whitehead)

Waking up at 1 or 2 or 3am is not unusual
for the storyteller poet who dwells between worlds.
Waking and sleeping are spasm dreams
for one who merges with other forms of life

as naturally as breathing and singing.
The empath is fully present
while simultaneously merging
with birds and rivers and trees and seas.

Part 2 (David L O'Nan)

We were slick and in love or at least my heart felt it.
I’d look into your eyes and see my gritty reflection.
A fire under my eyes that began to jump the floods for you.
You had me cast as the cloud, and we dragged into worship.

We’d sit on your crippled granny’s couch as a loving couple.
On acid we’d hold hands and breathe on each other’s necks.
The Temptations on bandstand dancing and singing their voices raw.
All the while you were on a curvy road driving with the leatherjackets.

They’d offer you the oven, and they’d offer you a night of kneeling stillness.
To shut up the salts from the wounds. You were given the clanging golden.
The wind in the alleys. It was me still searching for you.
You could never feel the crowns in my eyes. Was it only raining when the Eagle flies?

Years I’ve seen and years I’ve died, innocently watching new boots bash in my mind.
Pollutions over gardens, I found Jesus and I found the rat.
I found the tranquil Jill and Jack Kerouac in a Cadillac.
I found the ornaments on Christmas morning, but I’ve never found another you.

Spasms- as if the dreams are telling me something?
Spasms – as if I’ve been lifted over the crashing jets and risen into heaven
Spasms – as if the windows are opening for my old skeletons to creep out
Spasms – as if the drink, the pills, the junk have replaced my need for breath.

Damn it I must be living in a dream. Driving through prose in my maddening seams.
Strained and feeling like a mix of neglect and tears. The juvenile is now cracked bones
And I cannot walk. But I hope my imagination never loses you. And I don’t know why.
I would always waltz to your newest abuse just to keep you from all those that recluse.

You were made to be their rattlesnakes in the newest slit wrist garden.
New scars to present to the pretty and the wicked to all gaze away.
Convert quickly to the chemistry I retain inside. I could lead you to my glance.
Erase these strikes even while I’m old and vanishing. Give me this last dance….
Finally..again
I guess the Empath dies in the end.

A Fevers of the Mind Interview/Promo piece with Ron Whitehead, U.S. National Beat Poet Laureate

Blurbs for my (David L O’Nan) upcoming book “Before the Bridges Fell” from Ron Whitehead

Paperback & Kindle version of Cursed Houses is now available from David L O’Nan on this link below

Current bio for Fevers of the Mind’s David L O’Nan editor/writing contributor to blog.

Collaboration Poem: “Luminol” by Ryan Quinn Flanagan & David L O’Nan

from “the Empath Dies in the End” coming out soon

Luminol

Part 1 by Ryan Quinn Flanagan

There is primrose to your pageantry, I assure you!
That Nureyev of glide-less marionettes,
burial chambers of the once sacrosanct
now looted of moving treasures.
Advancement through the pay scale,
another sort of dance entirely.

part 2 by David L O'Nan

There are ecosystems decaying under your watch, I assure you!
I watch you with fire in my eyes, juggling chainsaws again,
You’re determined to derail the freight train.
You’ve smashed your art to the submission, marbled smashings
Francois Millet’s The Gleaners, in wet trash and curly dandelion bits.
A thought that you could become the next Prophet cursing out orders from the bema.
Screaming out Exodus quotes, Disgracing Peleshet, while you’re scrubbing the floors.

The Milk and sugar are becoming more valuable and expensive down these roads.
These roads, once of gold, now of blood, now of clarity once the luminol is glowing
The sins, the creek snakes seem to have more knowledge than the townsfolk and television hoaxes.
They claimed to meet Jesus during the throwing stones. When the lightning burnt the sick
From the grounds, low and holding the curve of the cane, the rainstorm came alive and began
Walking hot lit water all over our skin. Your skin seemed to light up more than the rest.

Do you have a confession?

The marionettes will not glide, but they do talk.
Yes, they do talk and they aren’t always that wooden smile and programmed like a dream.
There are some that just dance, dance by the endless dying.
I run my arm under the sun, from blood to the skin that reflects in my dancing, dying pupils.
I carved a few rambling sentences into my muscles, soon to become some new bible.
Heaven comes from the dreams of light and comes from ….

Oh, did you say you have a confession?

They never run out of luminol here.

Poetry Showcase for Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Current bio for Fevers of the Mind’s David L O’Nan editor/writing contributor to blog.