Writing, Poetry, Short Stories, Reviews, Art Contests
![Bending Rivers: The Poetry & Stories of David L O'Nan by [David L. O'Nan, David O'Nan, Margaret Viboolsittiseri]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51Z1cIguewL.jpg)
Over 500 pages and combining my books “The Famous Poetry Outlaws are Painting Walls and Whispers” “The Cartoon Diaries” “New Disease Streets” “Our Fears in Tunnels” & “Taking Pictures in the Dark” as well as a few from “Lost Reflections”
Check a link on Amazon for your country & also available on Kindle.
Photo from Kunji Parekh (unsplash)
Hey, I can manage! I tried keeping up walking with him but the bigger steps I made the faster he went! I tumbled and fell I even scratched my knees. He didn’t stop or even blink! So I picked myself up patted my pants from the dust held my head high and walked. Okay so you don’t care I get it. Two can play a game! Am doing it my way. You used to make me wait for you to turn hearts around to grow a conscience in some and to make things better. You were able to take things from me because I let you but not anymore. I am not your toy, let’s get that straight! I will take from you what I need. I too won’t blink or look back. Thank you for showing me that. Today we walk side by side on a road enough for more than two! Our shoulders almost touch. He gave me a smirk I tapped him on his back and said, hey Time guess what? I don’t care anymore about keeping up with you. I can manage. Author's Notes: Author’s Notes: This piece is an imaginary scenario between the author and time... who keeps on running and the author keeps on chasing him...but she reaches a point when she realizes it's pointless and decides to do things her way her pace...because the world doesn't stop for sadness or happiness... because hearts don't change over time... because things don't get better in time... because it is what is.... if it's meant to be it'll be. Trouble Me Not Trouble me not with your worries for your shallowness speaks to my darkness a credence that shrieks: evil is faithless. Trouble me not with your fears for a bloody moon of leers lights my night like candlesticks. Trouble me not with your hurts for I couldn’t care less for what happens next, to you or what part of you breaks. Trouble me not with your beliefs for you are a body of lies that belongs to hell with all souls this reckless. Trouble me not with your quarrels for your bullshit trembles under values so shallow entangling you in misfortunes. Trouble me not for you shall feed hell’s appetite for troubled dark souls like yours wait for it, hell’s gonna wring your neck with woes. Trouble me not for as your screams leave your lungs reaching the heavens I shall relish blowing away your ashes. Author's Notes: Inspired by: " From the Mouths of Trouble" by fellow poet RolinSton. Gripe's Pentacle Life is a circle that begins with creation but ends when destruction becomes a mission. Life’s circle is centered in attention with irony and chance for a diameter. Every life has a purposeful circumference enclosing motives and goals with reason and balance. But every life covers an area of interests that can be tangent or parallel to others. Destruction breaks life’s circle with confusion. It strikes down one’s balance by hitting one’s center with attention. Once balance is gone destruction leaks motives and goals with aggression. Then the chain of hurt and blame brings isolation sliding in personal gain’s hook to hang gripe’s pentacle. Gripe is a trivial complaint that disrupts reflection. It has greed on one corner to burn compassion, radicalism on the right corner to end discussion, ignorance on the left corner to begin occlusion, pride on its south east corner to prevent redemption and envy on its south west corner to deny gratification. Wearing destruction’s pentacle of gripe is a decision made by many thinking their life begins with others’ destruction. Life is a circle deformed by destruction’s gripe pentacle showing blame's face with its bloody mouth and envious eyes. Author's Notes: Although gripe was defined in this poem but it is also worth noting that in this poem it is an acronym of destruction's pentacle: Greed, Radicalism, Ignorance, Pride, and Envy. Mind Your Mind Mind your mind and you shall find happiness, a kinder form of life that blows good fortunes like a wind born out of clarity during moments of strife. Lose your mind and you shall find bitterness, a harder form of life that leaves you lost and blind amidst chaos from rage’s hive Train your mind and you shall find excellence, a better way to lead a life of bounties known to humankind in stories where dreams dive! Mind your mind even when opined and you shall never go blind nor know what it is like to hide a heart that’s been declined or a thought that’s been confined. Mind your mind as though a rind that protects you from a jack-knife. A mind that is refined is all that you need in life. Clouds and Castles Welfare is a soul’s castle built up in dreams’ clouds only to be washed away by life’s crashing waves. Dreams are opaque clouds combed by reality’s fingers only to clash with thunders that rain contradictions. As the hail piles forming walls one thinks he is hale behind doors. Then truth’s sun shines tearing our walls with woes. Judgments make clouds condense pouring rains of regrets in chains that drag us with life’s waves. Chances are the ebb and tides that build or destroy our castles. Time destroys us with our castles tearing us down like our walls. We tumble down with failures humble down with lessons mellow down with losses and calm down with haplessness. We build walls of contradictions to erect our castles of welfare. We cement them with arbitrary acts and tile them with sweet nothings. Because we commercialized ourselves; we don’t mind the wear and tear. So we tear down and rebuild today for tomorrow like a yesterday. We forgot that those who live behind walls tend to miss sunshines and meadows. They keep building defenses for wars that never come until they die without living. We pride ourselves with castles in the air or seas but forget that we are prisoners of our devise dancing to our demise. Souls were never made to live in walls. Our bodies are enough walls. Mama Told Me Mama told me don’t tell all cause many are waiting for me to fall just so they can gloat. Turns out she was right after all. But I told them how I stood tall and they were there for me at least that’s what I thought until time sorted them all, money made its call. Mama told me don’t tell all cause no one would understand me when I have nothing to give at all and that’s how I lost them all. I had to see them watch me fall and hear them talk about me calling me unreliable and that hurt, because I never expected this at all. Mama told me don’t tell all but I did and it’s on me. I regret telling but I can’t change things so I accept it all. Nobody visits and I don’t call. I am all alone with what’s left of me Who would’ve thought- money keeps family around after all! Mama told me don’t tell all cause nobody cares for me or how much I fought because honesty doesn’t matter at all. Depression and disappointment are all I have to keep me company. Desertion and neglect clog my throat with hurt from being made to feel so small. Mama told don’t tell all because she knew they could hurt me faking love that left me distraught with a hurt so deep like a bottomless hole. Author's Notes: The narrative in this poem is from my life and it was inspired by the following quote: "Sometimes the people closest to you betray you, and your home isn't a place you can be happy in anymore. It's hard but it's true". P.C. Cast Blurred Clarity If I told you, you need to sail the sea to find thee and be able to see; Would you say yes or disagree? If I told you tragedy begets the clarity to see what’s meant to be would you call me crazy? If I showed you hurt’s family to protect you and me would you still see me? Whoever said live with honesty to find peace and harmony forgot to highlight its tragedy. All you get to say is if only they’d spare me the misery and let me face reality; A reality starving for clarity fed by choices made sincerely starring those once trustworthy. See trust chaps skies with maybe and drenches life’s seas with irony to dawn clarity that leaves both blurry. You may think you sail aptly but choices are tipsy boats swiftly sailing amidst blurred clarity. A clarity blurred by the company you keep casting you in a tragicomedy written by understanding’s bigotry! To let the sea, meet the sky to drop those flying high to drown next to those passing by A Fevers of the Mind Quick-9 Interview with Pasithea Chan
Wreck
Every speeding car is coming to kill. You look and look and look and even then you still can’t change lanes. Your mind a terror of what if, wiring wired like a tripwire. You’re one wrong move, wrong glance, wrong thought from being a screeching wreck of bone and steel. And the cars keep hurtling, speeding, weaving. More projectiles pouring on the highway, and when will the crash coming ever end? Every sequence a siren of nightmares. You get off on the wrong exit and stop. Your hands still gripping the wheel. You’re shaking. Your heart is pounding. This is why your life has gone nowhere you wanted it to go. Diabetes The sunlight outside was brutal, a violent glare I wanted to blot out How dare you? How fucking dare you? “You have diabetes,” the doctor had said. What happened never happened. Blurry vision, chugging water, my blood sugar a lethal 500? Stab myself with needles every day? Denial is a life invisible. What you can’t see can’t hurt you until it’s too late, and your eyes aren’t blurry but blank, blind to the charred-looking foot being cut off. I bought a pack of cigarettes and smoked in the park. Not my proudest moment. An old woman cradled a scraggly dog, a plastic cone ringing its stupid neck. Disease My eyes bulge like popping squid eyes. My head swollen like a pumpkin. My body skinned down to sticks. Skin peeling off in white flakes, molting like a lizard. Fading away inside myself. A ghost changing shape. I’m sinking into a hole of sheets and pneumonia. I don’t know who I am. But I’m alive. I know that. And strangely peaceful. My body beats and claws against nothing, yet desperate to save me, as if it only wants to tear me apart from the inside and start over again. But there is no over again. The window open for flight. A phantom moving outside myself. Sickness like a ghoul. Follow Your Heart Where but the sky to fling our hopeless hearts, red bubbles rising far into the blue until going too high, always too high, a drop of blood that pops without a sound, poof, gone, as if no more, but there is more, the torn red sack, the split skin, maybe a piece of mangled meat falling beyond our sight, landing in the branches of some distant tree, hanging from limbs like splats of dripping blood that don’t drip, red stains that don’t go away, still wanting what happened of letting go. And it’s not the sky we look to anymore but only to the branches we pass under to see some other heart-shreds hanging there. Life You are brittle autumn leaves, broken and crushed into pieces, scattered like confetti on the dead grass, ready for winter’s hand of snow to push you back into the ground, dissolve you away into the life of spring, the life of a flower swallowing the sun, a life you’ll never see. Loser You hide your head in a kaleidoscope hole while the wind shreds your life like a flag in tatters, flapping on a forgotten pole. Thomas has had work appear in Redivider, The Louisville Review, Hawai'i Pacific Review, The Nassua Review, The MacGuffin, and Crack the Spine. Thomas lives in Nashville with their two sons.
photo from Annie Spratt (unsplash)
published previously in detritusonline.blogspot.com
Jamaica Plain Massachusetts Pull on the blue serge sashes; bear witness to Jamaica Plain. The darkest blue much like motifs in the magazines you leaf through. When you're done, you must come in Watch the sugar cubes melt where flies settle. Spying through vessels, or an unlocked window; trying them on for size. You might want to recal those Hell's Kitchen visits. When genes sang in series, from that psychotic candy. Another time it was fed to your downtown flock. Take a look friend! How we've grown! Yes, we've grown, and now's the time, to make a descent from our branches. II. I know how to tell time, sometimes I tell the truth. But this time- I see flowers bloom deep in the skeleton. III. Pull on the blue serge sashes; bear witness to Jamaica Plain. The darkest blue, much like motifs in the magazines you leaf through. Allure of the Novice Rain spears in a spiral with hammer and tongs a condensed chemistry lullabies filling the air The coy workaday chuckles from the slow motion queen. She chose pared fruit swollen by first light. New Poetry Showcase by Michael Igoe A Fevers of the Mind Quick-9 Interview with Michael Igoe
Worms Of light bury through wooden clouds. Insubstantial trees disappear, or are reshaped by sunlight and gust. They bucket down leaves, make the earth sodden with them. Rain making, thunder making anvil shaped trees make rainbows. You can see the grain in the clouds. Depending upon how and where gust and light saw through wooden clouds, defines their grain, curly,straight or flat in relation to their growth rings. I splish and splash paving slabs sending concrete waves and ripples to either side. Dive into the pavement, backstroke through crazy paving. Have You seen the face of flowers? A furrowed brow of lavender. The skin folds of a rosebloom. Gustblown fascinator of a Daisy. A lily with its yellow tongue out. A field full of closed mouth Tulips. Climb a mantelpiece of mountains. Pass the ornaments added to by every visitor. Step carefully round the opened envelopes of scree. An affectionate crown of thorns The gentle stigmata of a caress. The spiked maiden of your hug. Thumbscrews of our hand holding. Look out of the windows of the moon Let in a fresh air of stars. Street furniture of an ancient wood. A sofa of raised roots. Trees become lampstands ready for the moonlight bulbs to be switched on in their crowns, meanwhile sunlight bulbs move from crown to crown. A shared lighting display. What wallpaper did you choose for your face before you went out? Large red open flowers with a brown background? Anaglypta? The red brick wall, or geometric lines? Watch out for those with cat faces who may use your face as a scratching post. Skirting board round the hem of a room. Are we under the dress of this lounge? Or are we outside admiring the folds of paint or wallpaper the room has chosen from her wardrobe? Colour matching the carpet and three piece suite under or outside the skirt. Walk carefully over the floorboards of cirrus and nimbus. Especially, at night when you don't want them to creak and wake up the house. Watch yourself on the cumulonimbus, one false move could see a downpour. Your socks polish these clouds. They sparkle, after mop and bucket work. Bone Colours This morning sky is a blue bone, winter tree branches untouched by gust. Sky breathes easy amongst the silhouettes. Sometimes there are holes in the sky and you can hear a bone flute Naked branches become Aeolian harps, plucked by gust, sky's breath. The White bone walks across itself using its body as music. Hear the voice of itself. The voice goes ahead The body follows the sound from bright light to bright light from cirrus to nimbus from gust to gale The white bones is talking. It walks across the sky. A sunlight and moonlight path. At night it is a black bone. As if the sky is ash. A cremation of the blue and white into grey. Night is the burial time. Day is the resurrection time. The sky is a white bone made of clouds. Thunder is percussion of lightning against bone. A Knifeblock Winter's knife block is the key to unlock sharp and keen edges slice tracery and pages of thin skin let flow blood juice, let know a thin line between the bone and the dream. Every Bone is a word We grow into, one that may learn to stand, Uncertainly before the first step. Others may crash their words against us, to show how their strong meaning and confidence, might replace our word with another. Our words hold our frame up, a scaffold to others. Every word is a bone coming out of your mouth, wishbones, charmbones, angerbones, lustbones. Smallbones stick in your throat, largebones make your mouth bulge as they muscle out between your incisors, bang against your molars, restrict your tongue, breath blocked, wordbones hard to utter through spit and mucus. My Mop Bucket(Apologies to William Blake) I create moods with mop and bucket. My chiascuro is very expressive. My brush is very free. I learn from the Old Masters. My floors are landscapes. Spillages become portraits. Accidents are worked in In my head there is colour on my mop that describes dashes and dots. I'm a mophead full of bright colours I dip into and out of my bucket. No two floors are the same. I'm a buckethead. Washing away the muck, remaking it I imagine outside. Different temperatures, gusts, light. Bring them all into my bucket. To see the world in a mop And Heaven in a bucket. Infinity in a dustpan, And Eternity in a brush. A One Eye The sky is a skull. One eye is the moon. One eye is the sun, The sky only uses one eye. The one eye of the moon waxes and wanes, sometimes a crescent eye, sometimes full, the blood eye, harvest eye, wolf eye, hare eye, storm eye, chaste eye, Blue eye, seed eye, corn eye, snow eye, mead eye. Ocean eye works the tides. Draw down the eye lit by light borrowed from the other eye of the skull. Bio: Shop Assistant. Writer and performer. Books include Please Take Change, A World Where, As Folk Over Yonder. Latest: Wonderland in Alice... Twitter @PaulDragonwolf https://t.co/FM3fFo6T8z for the Wombwell Rainbow Blog.
Fevers of the Mind 