The Bible Belt Bachelor Beat, The Prison Speech (2005) Poetry by David L O’Nan

(c) David L O’Nan

The Bible Belt Bachelor Beat

So now the beat was out on the streets again,
Darkness hears the soul’s tears burning within.
Finding home wearing the sadness coat.
Fighting a love affair with a knife wielding holy ghost.
My beautiful girl is at rest, wasting away
She is staring into the darkness – Of this evening’s shade
The horror calls from across the halls,
They were deafening, my silence proved too late
So now I know, how the death bell tolls
I seek revenge, I fuel myself with scorn and hate
To take apart, the crooked heart
Who severed my soul, magician of greed and loath?
Reincarnate myself into the heroin, the addiction
The power rose, the mighty lion, the sorcerer,
The dictator, the cult king
The need to be disillusioned
The creation was to be crazy,
To break apart with newly found powerful hands,
That used to be so gentle.
So fragile and weak,
When I used to touch her cheek
The morning like a celestial daydream,

The haze of fog
Sipped her tears,
When she began to cry
The dryness,
Like a desert for sad brown eyes
This germ will not run, cannot hide
Cannot mutate, I know that I can design
The perfect plan, the perfect kill
Alas, I may become dirt on the way
Dear God, knowing however
His bones are already chilled
Spirits have cried, they dry, they fly
They live in my heart, for my love
That was taken by the evil in a wild heart.

The Bible Belt Bachelor Prison Speech

Hello,

To all that have been captured
We are breathing the same chipped paint walls,
Yellow urine stained floors, pneumonia air.

The air of a criminal
Locked up, prison guards whistling our death tune.
Death will be coming soon.

We’re already dead in a sense.
Nature is outside, designed for the free man

On a warm sun-lit sand.
The touch of lovers, the natural consumption of lust.
In my cell asleep with the poetry –
I felt when I was one with the free
When I wasn’t practicing bullets
Setting fire to Mother Nature and to faith.
When blizzard walks exuded freedom.
Through the snow chills devouring my feet
With numbing, cutting skin
The pain of past freedom
My name is Dante Moricelli
Her name was Nadine Angelis
You might have read about me
In your wrinkled newspapers, Slippery
phlegm gazettes

The glossy excitement of a Time Magazine.
The mortality sonnet depicting the surrealism in a slippery dream.
Nadine Angelis was my love as the tender years began to fade.
Young, careless, we were the storybook tale of the unsaved.
I will tell you more about my love,
If your ears are tuned to listen “Must
we have a heart, we never listened
before?” “Must we have ears,
To be attentive to your listless self-loathing?” “Must our
maniacal spirit be all and sundry To your hopeless
prophecy?”
“Are we peasants to your pulpit?”
“You, bleeding your cold love propaganda in our troglodytic tomb”
“Interrupting the carving of our minds with a fever
That comes from watching roaches scurry down prison floors, Spiders climbing up our
shirts, flies and decay consuming our food”
“Marking x’s on our calendars with our life force fluid,
The countdown to our demise: the foregone conclusion”
But I am a human heartbeat
I was a 5-year bachelor that fell on hard times,
The loss of reasonable thinking,
And a self-confessed stalker of love
So, if what I’m about to tell you –
Were the opening of a movie
The song “Let There Be More Light” Would be
resonant, magnetic to the ears
Illuminating, flashing of lights from psychedelic trips of torture
The horrified manic looks,
As we drive erratically down a desert road.
Passing cacti and breathing in dry arid air
The sun setting down to a dark orange/bright red hell.

The flashes of a nearly perfect capture lay –
In the trunk of a Pontiac Sunbird.
The music, the music like soundwaves to our mind.
We can see the sound
We have become the sound
We have become the light
Passing by leather skinned lizards with masochistic claws,

Wanting to give you one more bite in the jugular before – The eternal
damnation of our soul’s ease.
The serpents black flickering tongue – Spreads
over the heavens
With a Hallelujah Chrysalis of poisoned tears.
We, looking for an escape to find peace again
But, knowing the only written word of our future is that of a Eulogy.
A eulogy given by family members who didn’t know us well enough
to care before.

All because of espionage and jealousy.
And the loss of love that wasn’t understood quickly enough.
The burning of a desert,
The scarring on the face of Mona Lisa
The victim that lay in his own bloodletting on torn towels – and
shredded t-shirts.
With the rips, that remind us
The struggle it was
The determination in us that caused our perfect lunacy to this near
perfect kill.
His false hopes of spiritual happiness
And wellbeing exposed
by his crooked cross on a cut chest.

Even though I’m terrified by the outcome.
As sheriffs, detectives, specialists all pace faster and faster behind our car
of forlorn sin.

The electricity already beginning to pop in our veins! The multiple
trips are scary, long, and all indicative
That we had almost masterminded the perfect crime.

So, now the collapsing rollercoaster ride has ended.
The song has ended.
Let me tell you how we came to this plunge into ridicule and reverie.
I’m Dante Moricelli “the Bible Belt Bachelor”
The name they stamped on me,
I’ve lost all identity and dignity now
I’m just a title, less of a man.
Because I erased a man from existence
Who deserved to die.
He took away the root to my soul,
My dear Nadine Angelis
She made my heart feel, She
made my blood pump
And he twisted my mind into only one way of thinking,
Left me with the confusion

Much like after an aneurysm
The pounding, splitting shards of glass as well
shakes to the wild howls of coyotes.

Releasing small increments of mania.

Poetry from David L O’Nan in the Famous Poetry Outlaws are Painting Walls and Whispers

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

The return & revised version of “New Disease Streets” by David L O’Nan Poetry and stories

Hard Rain Poetry: Forever Dylan Anthology available today!

Available Now: Before I Turn Into Gold Inspired by Leonard Cohen Anthology by David L O’Nan & Contributors w/art by Geoffrey Wren

Bending Rivers: The Poetry & Stories of David L O’Nan out now!

Poetry from David L O’Nan in the Famous Poetry Outlaws are Painting Walls and Whispers

photo by Margaret Viboolsittiseri

The Outlaw of Words

When the wind blows in, 4 a.m. hour
Through the murder prairies he walks.
The traveler, a weary boy.
A true “outlaw of words”
The Godless son who negates the proper.
The loner in his final Omega.
Who’s ignored by the sensationalist.

His outfit, classic hipster fashion funk.
Conversations with tooth-aches at pool halls.
In soiled small cities, he strayed in from Virginia.
The disarray among the safe havens,
Or the security of ill heavens.

He’s thrown in with the images of the city hauntings,
Or the wind the now blows futile fascist dust into the lungs.
He believes he was one of the hoodlums from the “poetry street gangs”
That carved T.S. Eliot in their arms with razorblades,
Brand markings of Hemingway into their souls.
Eyes that melted for Plath and Sexton, wash the sweat from Walt Whitman.

Where does the blood mesh with the art?
Let the blood flow boy, like the Prince you are.
Illustrate your loyalty, show us your words. Can you unleash the words?
Become a minder to your heart,
The “Professed Outlaw of Words”

Travel those circuits of Midwestern cities, you are now Brooklyn.
Like many cornfed poets, the words don’t flow well like a blue blood.
He’ll become smoke and mumble into ashes.
Receiving the looks that creeps get.
The look of being ignored like the “average” looking new-born baby in the nursery.

Old West bowler hats crumbling down in shame
There are no smiles, giggles, and cute burps.
He’ll leave the heavy impression.
And we continue counting our cancer dollars.
We’ll breathe in deep.
Become high off his electricity.

With nowhere to go, we’ll commute through his aura now.
And we will realize that we’re all just looking for an amazing, wild adventure.
Whether it is our own bus stop folklore, or asleep in the puddles of poetry being stepped in.
There is a sense of achievement, just pursuing this adventure.
A nice consolation prize if to ever get caught being a punctuate fool.
Perhaps we’re all just a font for the jealous.

Outlaws Revisited

Creepy eyes walk into a brothel
surrounded by outlaws.
Jumped into your shadow
and discovered all your footsteps.
The happy ones…the nefarious ones…
even the footsteps you tried to cover up –
with mud and sticks.
Your mouth escapes a smile,
and you think life as a joke.

You live in the blood flow of outlaws,
and your creepy eyes just rest in those smutty footsteps.
I saw your shadow disappear,
when the sunlight ripped your cape away,
and you are just a nude bore.

Hero Dilemma

A hero is a beloved jewel
That can be discovered by the sunburns,
That crisp of an old city.
Who was belched out into a bed of rivers,
That lets an old soul sleep.

When hungry, when exhausted
A hero has not left his pastures,
Or even thought to scatter the ashes of a lesser man – across a fine powder of soil.

A hero is a leper discovered in the armour –
of a broken armoured knight.
Traveling miles and miles for his broken bones.
Scattered in winds that had no emotion.
A wind that had no ties between love and drought.

A scar on a star
Can barely see its gleam in a dark pale night.

A hero is not only breath,
But a touch by an angel when a shout –
rips from the mouth of demons into your ear tunnels.

A handshake by an eroding building,
Dictating a new friendship
A blinding vision in a drunk, peeling tree bark
Sap steamed by the decay of the sunlight.

This city is full of heroes.
This day was full of comradery,
Night full of bloodshed.
That is energy puffing steam into static,
as new heroes are born.

Bulls

We are all bulls ravaging through the gates…
at the masks.
at the clowns…
all is left is the splinters.
We lost our fury
became deprived,
starved, dehydrated…
left to an animal burrowing you –
into some form of temptation.
Are you gold when you’d rather be silver?
You don’t inherit lies, cohesion of truths
and thoughts balancing on bitter.
We are all bulls.
Some of us don’t have the power,
Some of us give up
when challenged by hoods
and bosses that drink up the syrup of secrets.
Skies are stressed and stretched
ready to birth your raindrops.
A day when you can rest your head and become a stone
For a while and less of a manic scramble.

Little Horses

Little horses gallop unafraid
Through meadows in fresh grass.
And why should they feel secluded or feel endangered?

They are a symbol for power, freedom, bravery and even beauty.
They shall not be intimidated by the social robbery of the souls,
The daily exorcisms we do on this Earth, our world, our supposed freedom,
Power, beauty, bravery

Cover-ups in make-up and hideaways.
There is always a claw out, through grounds, meadows that –
Want to shape you into their control, a mind change.

Be strong, be proud, be free, be beautiful.
Like a flowing, graceful horse with freedom away from the fusion of winds.

Empowering self and love for your own run.
Equality without masking.
Not such a novel concept.

https://amzn.to/3JZGuiG for a copy of the book.

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.

Poetry: The Parody King’s Castle by David L O’Nan

The Parody King’s Castle

I'm a troubled man.
I've got snakes in my head.
Persecuted for living out of my bed.
I've got nails in my hands,
from the day that I got crucified.

I can sleep with no worries.
Now the day has come that I've passed.
I look a lot better now.
I look years younger now it seems.
I feel a deep calm.
I feel like I've unlocked the chains.

I burned away the evil demons that were attached to my soul.
I caught a burning thought and saved it for my own.
Beware of my skin,
I've grown very thin.

I'm wasting away,
My bones are all that is left from my sins.
You wonder where I went
You thought that I went away,

Never imagined,
I could fall all the way down.
The path of hidden resentment to the world that took my crown.

I was living in a shallow tomb.
The weight was too heavy to shake loose the closing casket.
So, I just let it close, unpursued.

The mind being sketched over.
With images of the lies, the cheating.
Connected the dots on my skull with a pen dipped in the filth,
The sorrows in the soil.

Memories being erased, questions I must ponder.
Childhood electrocuted out of my cranium.
I am only a child in my heart,
The heart is growing smaller,
And more porous from the holes that has been cut by the lies,

the cheating.
The long fingernails emerging from air, vanishing
Then sinking into our internals.
Prayers to find my inner self
Prayers that were unanswered, my inner self decides to yell.

I was yelling out of the sands of a lost September day.
When I had unity, feeling free, no worries, no decay.
Months passing, unity split, new fears.
Fears of betrayal,
The ensuing betrayal with clarity of manipulation.

It wasn't me who took the first bite
You were hungry, hungry for new blood, new skin to run across your own,
The new man to make you scream,
To make you feel fine.
Leaves you banging at the door and begging for more.

Laughing down onto you, over your natural being.
Eyes beaming for that certain glow.

Are the tears real, are they mechanically grown?
Caught up in the rapture, 
the thrills of seeds being sewn.

A cold, cold man now
Ears tingling through series of codes
Will I screw up this, will I screw up that?
I'm sure I'll pay a price
Standing at the gate, leery of gatekeepers.
They are begging for one more slice.

Now here I am with frosty breath moving slow motion across my lips.
Feeling so cold laying in this dirt.
I've got serpents and insects crawling through my new lair.
I bought this new kingdom for the price of a lost soul.
It was cheap considering the condition the body was left in.

Now fly away to the unknown, or to a Heaven?
Let the birds and angels bring your wings.
So that you can carry on as someone who wouldn't dare to have known hate.
Try again, 
never trying any harder to never choke.

In reluctancy of caring after the thoughts are permanently blinded.
The relaxation is now for grief
Everyone can now leach onto the stinging release.
Time will go on, hell may not.

Falling away, black hole.
Wet muddy tumbling ground I fold.
Leave me with a lullaby as a chaser, relief of doubts.
A new day brings life to some of us, 
the lying, the cheating

To a crownless king it brings one last sleep.
 

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/ 

Available Now: Before I Turn Into Gold Inspired by Leonard Cohen Anthology by David L O’Nan & Contributors w/art by Geoffrey Wren 

Poetry from David L O’Nan in the Famous Poetry Outlaws are Painting Walls and Whispers 

The return & revised version of “New Disease Streets” by David L O’Nan Poetry and stories 

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



Poetry from David L O’Nan : Tumbleweed Corner

Tumbleweed Corner

from books "The Famous Poetry Outlaws are Painting Walls and Whispers" and "Bending Rivers"

Buried hearts at Tumbleweed Corner.
The thistles split apart bad men as they choke.

Santa Fe, on a hot New Mexico morning.
The jury decided to hang the man.
The creeps,
They follow with chisels, with rope.

 A chilling smile,
Their creepy walk.
Like a dictator marching from their tomb.
Cuff marks leaving my hands raw and sore.

Dry air sucked in,
That dust,
That failure.
On the septic trails,
My dusty boots enriched in blood.
From a man that found his soul.
He was lost forever from his native Ohio.

He met his demise here in New Mexico when -
The sunrise began to drop dead heat on the wagons -
during our horses first meal of the morning.
The lonely man,
He was enamel
bare to the shaking,
the menacing inevitable.
Once he saw my hatchet teeth,
My bull rope eyes
He was just collecting horseshoes off dirty roads.
Those cloudy roads named in honor of befallen heroes.

As I sat there, judgment awaiting.
The judge sweats the sun's breath.
Moving his body into a boring inertial state.

He's a rock
And will not change.
His mind is predetermined
My lifeforce begins to drip.
To image itself as melting metal.
The toughness,
I become a shy child.
The people look at me with evil intentions.
Purity no more in their Christian hearts.

They wait to see my remorse.
My sunburnt face with the boils,
The leather chapped cheeks
The flaming sticks for a nose,
The ears that are dark and hidden like a tunnel.
The face that can't find the guilt.
I've been ripped away from my internal being.

I can only hiccup memories to the brain
The crying mornings,
Under this town's smoldering bridge.
Almost every morning.

They grab me by the stale leaf hair.
Pull my hungered body to the bird-shit ground.
The smell is now of old crusts and ashes.
That hot New Mexico sun has been burning -
my skeleton chest through my flannel shirt,
My bank robber legs through my tattered jeans
The sun poisoned my mind to obscenity.

I'm clinging to you,
Clinging to your thistles, Lord
I've eaten from all the ratty coffee cans too long.
I spit out all the ashes
Of all the dreamers.
Just rake away.

Tired of the spirits of those
I've killed for green greed, awakening me
Kissing the blade of the machete
A sorrow of laughter,
And then disappearances into -
The nocturnal rib of the air

Tumbleweed Corner is now heartless.

Those that were buried are now walking
They become the zombie vision,
Thieves that stole back their dignity.

My soul is left for scavengers.
Drag me away like rags.
Empty with the scars
To bury me in the gut of stars.

Eternally trying not to fall to the fires below. 

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

Bending Rivers: The Poetry & Stories of David L O’Nan out now! 

Poetry from David L O’Nan in the Famous Poetry Outlaws are Painting Walls and Whispers 

Hard Rain Poetry: Forever Dylan Anthology available today! 

Available Now: Before I Turn Into Gold Inspired by Leonard Cohen Anthology by David L O’Nan & Contributors w/art by Geoffrey Wren 

The return & revised version of “New Disease Streets” by David L O’Nan Poetry and stories

Honey-Texas by David L O’Nan (short story/poetry)

brown and white wooden star print board

photo by Glen Carrie (Unsplash)

Honey-Texas

Honey is
Dreaming the life of a millionaire
Born to a trailer park
She always felt lonely in her painted golden lawn chair.
Never to be a thief in her dreams.
Torn apart each night by the ghosts that lived inside her mind,
That cut away the demons living inside the skin of her meat.
Morons whistling by the windows each night,
While prowling through town
The personification of the creeps.

Will she ever feel like a princess?
Or even a woman again?
Honey, you’ll have to forget that you didn’t follow him down to Texas
He is just a memory to a gurgling beating heart.
As you cry into stale factory air pollution,
You are still stalking him,
With a poisonous tipped dart
The voodoo of the Spring Equinox.
And the clouds were pissing,
She awoke inside the tickling of the alarms
And then the whisper of a twister
Bound her to her sleep paralysis bed.
The clouds began laughing within her
It became that demonic orange-lit room.
Night sweats have deformed her bed into a fevered lake.
Bubbling up infestations of banshees.
Moments of lost lusting opportunities.
“Honey, you should have followed him down to Texas”
They say your energy fights your soul.
You are beginning to miss the medicine that he fed into your arms.

Your tall drink of water,
He’s bent over crippling with you and the junk clouding in your veins.
The tunnels of a morphine maze,
So, you decided to stay.
Stay to try and help your mother.
Texas couldn’t wait, for a renegade hobo.
Help your mother ignore your father for now.
Watch the bastard come home from the bars.
After factory work, he would bitch.
And throw his fists like a prairie boxer.
Cursing out your mother and threatening the whole Earth.
He’d attempt to fistfight his own shadow
Then collapse into the yellow curtain drapes.
And finally, spend another night crying from jail.
Watching him crumble into the arms of a toilet shadow.
So you put your family on pause.
When you met your own cowboy chewing jerky on the tracks.
Near the greasy pizza shack in the corner of Jefferson and Main.
He was surrounded by his drugstore starlets.
When you first looked into his eyes.
And you saw a burning heaven.
And you felt his naked touch.
He tipped his cowboy hat and offered you exotic sweat.
And you fell in love with all that came with the hissing snake.

“But honey, you didn’t follow him down to Texas”
On Repeat,
Robotic in your mind.
You believed you were his cure.
To saving all his ravaged purity.
You’re stuck in the harbors of crashing nerves.
Like the gunfire of a thunderclap.
On another night, paralyzed to your bed.
Enter the orange-lit room demons,
It felt like you were shooting –
A Colt Mustang into the eyes of a fading sunset.
Try to escape the holy spirit,
You thought you saw the Trinity in a funnel cloud.
So, why do you continue to follow him in circles,
Around the spinning rodeo in your head?
You don’t want to lose your Cult King Cowboy with –
The smile of a dust bowl grim reaper.
“Honey, you didn’t follow him down to Texas”
He packed his ropes in his muddy jeep.
With his cocaine concubines down in Denton,
Sucking the high off his lips.

In your mind he’s still a stolen kiss away.
Those burping heartbeats that you carve in the heartbreaker woods.
Little hearts into stumps
A breath and a fading sigh, until fainting from the power from his eyes.
A cigarette,
Quivering cool around your slender face.
Another night, another nightmare
Awakened by the sickle to your throat.
A shadow man begins fading into walls,
Leaving a caricature in the image of his face.
You lost your breath,
You begin to cough.
The cigarette smoke burns out from the blankets.
The windows begin to peel.
Paint chips to the heads of yesterday’s energetic cockroaches.
You shake out, convulse out all your pain.
Just grab a new blanket.
Wipe the sweaty make-up from your face.
The house glows like a green light on a busy street.
Then the tornado hit the Ohio Riverfront.
You barely faked a tear,
Then the river becomes a wall over your inflammation –
To the damns built in the corners of your eyes.
The river scars like lassos hitting skin.
The mosquitoes die off into the air.
They left nibbling tiny bites,
Over the swamp that is left on your thighs.
A whole body became one with the twister.
A whole inclination surrounded by the blisters.
Left by a violent whip in the shape of Texas.
The wind smashing in doublewides down like an anvil.
Honey, you didn’t follow him down to Texas.
Could you feel this gravely illness in your blood?
Don’t slice away your beauty,
That percolates in the cracks of the clouds

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

Hard Rain Poetry: Forever Dylan Anthology available today!

Available Now: Before I Turn Into Gold Inspired by Leonard Cohen Anthology by David L O’Nan & Contributors w/art by Geoffrey Wren

Bending Rivers: The Poetry & Stories of David L O’Nan out now!

Poetry from David L O’Nan in the Famous Poetry Outlaws are Painting Walls and Whispers

Bare Bones Writings Issue 1 is out on Paperback and Kindle