Please send in word doc format and mostly traditional styles for easier translation to the page if possible. If not pdf will work. Google docs don’t always work so well.
Donate to our paypal also at feversofthemind@gmail.com (anything helps to keep the site going)
*WEB SUBMISSIONS ONLY*
We are open for Poetry Showcases for anyone to send 3-5 poems/prose. If not all pieces are accepted. I will post the 1 or 2 poems but will not be considered a showcase.
We are unable to provide compensation at this time contributors. We have to reach out through the year for donations just to keep the site going. This is for the art of poetry, music, art & other creatives.
Some poetry/art published on this site will periodically be taken down if space is running low. You will be guaranteed at least 6-8 months exposure on our website. No promises after that and don’t take it personal.
Themes we are Looking for Poetry/prose/articles/other styles of writing are for Adhd Awareness, Mental Health, Anxiety, Culture, History, Social Justice, LGBTQ Matters/Pride, Love, Poem series, sonnets, physical health, pandemic themes, Trauma, Retro/pop culture, inspired by music/songwriters, artist, inspired by classic & current writers, frustrations.
OnlineSubmissions could include Poetry, Art, submitted Book Reviews, culture pieces, rants, pre-published poetry from self-published materials, defunct lit mags, pieces from other lit mags/books/blogs with permissions. We prefer 3-5 poems sent unless you are sending for a writing prompt. There could be exceptions to this rule of course. If we take 3-5 or more poems from you will we feature you as a poetry showcase on the website.
We prefer submissions with a bio to help promote your work. Please let us know if something has been previously published, we will make a judgment call on whether able to include. I don’t love the idea of sending rejection letters. If you don’t receive acceptance assume we passed up this time and send something else. If you have simultaneous submissions out there, please keep this in mind. If not accepted at first, Just try again…We will not accept pieces that we deem racist, sexist, homophobic, or have pornographic themes, photos, or any type of nudity in submissions.
Out now the Deluxe Edition of “Before the Bridges Fell”
https://amzn.to/3ftkxNX for a copy on paperback or kindle (U.S.) please check availability in your country. Some countries take awhile for the paperback to be released. It could be a few days to a couple months until available.
U.S. Links to paperback & kindle. Please check availability in your Country. Sometimes it takes a few weeks to a couple months to show up in paperback in certain countries. I know in India this is the case. The deluxe edition includes all my poems from the Leonard Cohen anthologies & my poem “Malvina” as well.
*More writing prompts from artwork/photography gathered by Pasithea Chan
*Inspired by Tom Waits poetry will begin
*Inspired by Joni Mitchell poetry will begin
*Inspired by Harlem Renaissance Poetry will begin
*Inspired by Pablo Neruda Poetry will begin
* Inspired by Tom Petty poetry will begin
*I’m going to try and get my book “Cursed Houses” out between mid month and Halloween.
*Working on my wife HilLesha’s book
*Writing new poetry for “The Empath Dies in the End” a themed book collaborated with other writers. When I write something I will send to only the other poet/writer involved. Looking to hopefully put book out in Winter.
*If you still have poetry inspired by any of the following please still send
Bob Dylan
Leonard Cohen
Prince
Nick Cave
Chris Cornell
PJ Harvey
Sylvia Plath
Anne Sexton
Claude Monet (any artwork by him)
Andy Warhol & the Factory including The Velvet Underground & Lou Reed
Instrumental music from Harold Budd
Warren Ellis & the Dirty Three
Audrey Hepburn
Plus on our front page you can find our normal everyday topics to send in for poetry showcases, Quick-9 Interviews for writers/poets/musicians, some book reviews although i’m understaffed on this and can’t take all of them. Fevers of the Mind Poetry & Art Blog
A Divorce in the Gut of the Sun
We used to be drawings of lipstick clouds
And Strawberry hearts
We lived in our diaries
We loved, we bled
Atrophied the stems from the flowers
What memories are left?
Imprinted in my scars
Come read them like a palm reader
Do you see the many awakenings?
Blurred out the moon in this desert heat I’m absorbing
Thru this skin, these bones
I’m still to you, no words for you
We’ve said all that we don’t mean
But now it is enough
Your masculinity is waning
Your bravado is short circuiting
You’ll bring your sour breath to the bar
Bite the lips of a midnight sundress and her vodka strut
While I’m in frozen depression
Children away with my mother
As I burn all our old letters
And I burn all of my wardrobe
The clothes I wore during my “trying to impress” years
I just want to swim in these fires across the floor
Shall the universe eat my soul right now, I’d be fine
Eat away the old regimes of barrels, bourbon, and brutes
Now in a shell I am
A dark closet that my soul is weeping behind
I stare into my imagined reflection and my feet become warm by the heat of my tears
Falling and puddling til my badly polished toenails just stand inside
And I don’t care
I am in fear still though,
You’re no longer here
You have the dessert and no entrée
I see all the medications that I’ve been given
Even more recently than before
More medication, less feeling
But no motivation,
and I know you are more worried about getting a fresh cup of coffee
And I’m going to have to settle on the old black & white photos of our marriage
Light that shit to flames
I have to be pushed into my old body, and cradle my mind, and hold me
Til I can shake away the disease of you
The Ballad of Clay Huntley (profile of ego series)
In the smoky Ale House
Let’s call it Murfreesboro
He’s got the swaying hips of a murder machine
Slick backed hair,
a sex appeal predator
Collecting numbers,
spreading diseases,
I’ve known him to be a birdwatcher,
a greaser witch
Stepping up to women like a movie star
In a masochistic leather jacket
He runs up mountains without the fear of the plunge
A wind-up talking crash of dark caramel ale breath –
to a lost soft cheek
You become his stage
For all his radical jokes
Unnerving smiles
You become his surgery,
For all of his dissecting thought
Or so he thinks
A point from going macho to a drunk
Then he’s your neighborhood brute
A traveling circus riot
Wants you to become his scream queen victim
As he challenges all –
to watch his demise to –
being a bar wrestler,
A real Vaudeville bullfrog
And he wants you to be his dancing daisy
While impersonates a Rudolph Valentino
Now he knows to mimic an operatic wind
A gust of bravado to a riverfront
Stuck in a canvas frame,
from the beating heart of Ambroise Vollard
But soon his oil stick is broken in the engine
And the hood is falling off
From the Ale then the pills
Now he’s turning to the surgeon for good
Baiting you to a show, a one-man cult display
Like swarming buffalo gnats –
to a jar of Wild Maine Blueberry Jam
Clay Huntley,
a vivid swerving waterfall
While under his spell,
a master weaver
An electrician pulling all the wires of our bombs together.
In 5 years
He doesn’t breathe free
When lungs are wooden,
Set afire from all the tobacco digesting tumors
– in the Superior Lobe
Guillotining away at the Pleura,
becomes like Mayonnaise
A sick interception from ego back to man
Now as death awaits
Imagination and nature became the object
– of his lamenting eyes
He likes to stray the fields,
giving each bird a personality
Funny, how he never saw that in the women
on his pinup calendars
Time is a fickle demon
So, can we pray in the arms of what is timeless?
Psalm 46 HazeIn mornings when most kings dine
In a sweat of night, the heat clutched
To the skin
In mighty robes
Yet, like a wet mop
A tide of anger
A misguided dreamer
Of thievery, wanted all the treasures
All the lucid wanderings
Gold coin eyeballs
Designed in statuesque build
Shallow, there will not be any crumbling
in my march through civil breakdowns
One king, death on rapid waters
The rocks like the clouds,
depends on powers of the wind
To move us from the heat
Like a Psalm 46 haze
He breaks the bows and shatters the spears
And cartoon kings start to smear
Paint begins to clump, like a clogged artery
Stains through to the canvas,
Blasphemy blankets purity
And in oceans and rivers
There aren't any fresh fish
Smudges of floating ink, like blood
Ships keep moving in the night
The lighthouse light reflects only former royal shadows
You forget false righteousness
And you brand in the tattooed crimson to sea bottoms.
Stone Walls in Trailer Parks
I can really feel the Geodon today.
And my head is bashed in like a stone wall.
Underneath the sickle of the trailer park.
My heart just wants to crash.
As firm as an old peach.
Leave me alone in this black room.
I've been trying to paint White Angels
while in the mouths of all these dragons.
Although my head is on fire,
It is too cold to paint.
Quivering birdbone hands.
My hands tremble in overdose.
I rest in the mutiny of the day.
I can only wrap myself in a scratchy blanket.
And listen to all the screaming arguments from mothers to children.
And my walls remain the lunatic.
Stressed and cracking the foundation downward.
Your promise to
paint the miserable night phase with a
jovial light phase in your
stump speech took all of us on a flight
and then we all in delight
cast our votes for you
We all are now fumbling in a squint and you
claim publicly that you shined our lives with lights.
We are all now sweating
Our mouths – now barren lands are
exhausted by the
constant begs for water.
Then your beseeching voice again reached out
to all of us for casting our votes for you
on the pretext of bringing back the oasis into our deserted lives.
How many times will we all get a passionless scorching sun in
return for our hope of getting our scintillating sun?
The answer is blowing in the wind.
Bob Dylan - the Glowing Avalanche till eternity
When I thought to pen down a beautiful panegyric about Bob
Dylan,
then all the words firstly became statues in surprise, then
somehow quivered on my constant calling, poking and pinching,
and then flew away in flocks like prey escaping from a predator.
On searching for all of them,
I got none but just a note that read to me,
“We all the words are not enough to describe his
greatness.”
However, I dragged a few greatly magnificent words
but then got a note that read to me,
“We all the inks are not that colorfully beautiful enough to
decorate his greatness by our letter strokes.”
I beseeched all of the inks to come out of their respective refills
but none came out.
Then I repeatedly knocked all of the refills
forcing all the inks to come out
and then I suddenly listened to the explosion and the howls of
all the blank papers burnt severely by hot molten lava. “But how
did this happen all of a sudden?”— whirled my head in the
eddies of wondering till I did not get to see all the refills
emptied with many voids and crevices.
All blank papers burned though,
All refills emptied with many voids and crevices though,
But I saw and felt what Bob Dylan is —
“Bob Dylan” — the “Glowing Avalanche” till eternity…
Bio: Spriha Kant is born in Indore, India, and resides there with her family. She is pursuing M. Tech. in Structural Engineering. She developed an interest in reading and writing poetries at a very tender age. Apart from reading and writing poetries, she is also fond of calligraphy, embroidery, stitching, abstract paintings, acrylic paintings, and crochet. She is also an intense music lover. She has been a part of Stuart Matthew’s Anthology “Sing, Do the birds of Spring” in the fourth series of books from #InstantEternal Poetry prompts.
from Before the Bridges Fell and also in Hard Rain Poetry Anthology
Baby, we can keep running from this city. We can leave all the devils behind. We can watch as our denim leaves our black jackets and become boneless. Bareless, watching our shoes turn to rubber and dust.
We can drip the oil from our hands from broken cars. From hopes of stolen motorcycles that lay dead in the ditch. We can try to escape those devils behind. Once again, baby. Do you remember the words you said to me? You told me to jump from the bridges and just end it in a moment of anger, of sadness? Do you remember the way you felt when I said you were hopeless?
Do we remember the horrid things lovers say to each other when scared? When angry? When feeling like God isn't watching. Do you still want to run away with me? Do you want to throw our silver rings in the river and watch them float under?
Run with me, let's watch the light reflect off the rocks on a partly cloudy day. Find new life wherever that may be.
I know I can feel blind. And I can't hear your scream when they are whispers. I'm Van Gogh. I feel dead like him too. Maybe I can't see past the fields of flowers of imperfections. I need you to run with me. To find new angels that don't fail us and fall to feathers by our cold feet. The angels that failed me, failed you, but first failed God.
Let's run because we can't stay here. This is where the bridges will fall. This is where the witches cook up recipes in the cauldrons. This is where we will never see each other in the way we once saw each other.
Black jackets full and run like a rogue, or boneless and bleached out like the skeletons giving up to be buried in shared dirt.
Hard Rain Poetry Anthology U.S. Link https://tinyurl.com/2p938cy8
International links on this page.
https://feversofthemind.com/2022/06/23/hard-rain-poetry-forever-dylan-anthology-available-today/Current bio for Fevers of the Mind’s David L O’Nan editor/writing contributor to blog.Available Now: Before I Turn Into Gold Inspired by Leonard Cohen Anthology by David L O’Nan & Contributors w/art by Geoffrey WrenPoetry from David L O’Nan in the Famous Poetry Outlaws are Painting Walls and Whispers
Fevers of the Mind 