Washing the Blood off the Barn
The tariffs began and blood started oozingfrom the mansions to the barns –
Caution: we’re ruined.
The women, the poor, the black & the white,
the whole Rainbow, the whole universe, even Mars,
frightened, bleeds.
There’s stiff stillness now,
the thick, almost unbearable silence of a nation.
We’ve forgotten how to scream, as we’re burned with hot pokers.
Like a barn in the middle of nowhere,
its old bones melting under the weight
of l’inévitabilité— rot of promises we should never have sought
in the first place;
the muscles are all pulling harder to make the weave.
The slow collapse of anything
built on a fantasy of invincibility.
They used to say that the barn was something special—
something you could grow around and within.
It was supposed to stand tall and endeavor any wind.
An emblem of grandeur and purpose,
not how many carcasses we could push in.
Smeared in the darkest red,
blood-spattered in a holiness
of hollow men with decorous names
to signify nothing but fallissement – cut, the praying hands.
Who knew it would come like this—
not with a bang or a fête,
but with a grating noise, the grinding gears thirsty for more oil.
A country built on rêves and paper,
hollowed out by the hands that claimed
they would restore it.
Restore it to what, exactly?
To the dreams of a moment too long-gone
to even remember?
To watch grandpappy’s ghost slaves work?
Or was it always just a house of cards,
waiting for the first gust – mauvais vent,
bad winds? Let the animals all become sick.
The blood? – Oh, it’s everywhere,
you can’t escape it.
It sticks to the rafters, the wooden beams,
to the faces of the people
who used to be so sure they were the ones
chosen to sit at the table.
The golden promises,
the cauchemar of make-believe,
the rhetorique, spun-like-silk,
so beautiful in the beginning,
so soft on the tongue.
But then the weight of it,
that damn weight,
that crushing weight of lies too big to hide
under the promises of one man’s swollen ego.
And it was so perfect, wasn’t it?
This act, this show,
as if the barn was going to gleam,
like some miracle at the center of a decaying farm.
But what happens when the barn
can no longer stand?
When the walls groan under the pressure
of a thousand hours of grandiose news,
a thousand messages that dismantled
more than just truth,
but the very essence of what we thought
we were.
What happens when you realize
the barn wasn’t good from the beginning—
it was never whole,
just pieces cobbled together
and painted with promises too glittery
to be taken seriously?
And still, we’re here,
scrubbing the walls,
washing blood off the barn
like it’s some chore we can finish,
some task we can complete.
But there is no finishing here—
there is no purity to be regained.
The blood is in the soil now,
seeping into the roots of what remains
no matter how much water we pour on it.
You can scrub it, sure,
but the smell never leaves. Pungent, the smell of vomit
only grows stronger.
Look at them, the ones who stand there,
still believing the barn can be fixed,
that somehow, someway,
the stains will disappear if they just try hard enough.
Pass another bill to eliminate our families, our brotherhood and sisterhood,
too imprudent to ever last.
Le déclin, it’s subtle at first,
a slipping of reality into the great yawning abyss
of rhetoric,
where every idea is a soundbite,
where every thought is a meme
that cycles endlessly,
looping back on itself.
And yet the barn stands,
creaking, groaning,
as though it hasn’t realized yet
that it’s already dying.
We wash the blood off,
the blood that stains everything,
but the barn is still there,
a monument to all the promises.
a mirror to things without a face.
At some point,
the barn will fall.
Maybe not today,
maybe not tomorrow.
But the weight of it,
the weight of the corruption,
the weight of a thousand half-truths
will be too much.
The beams will snap,
the walls will break,
and then the blood won’t just be
on the floor,
it’ll be in the ground.
It’ll be in the air.
It’ll be in our mouths.
And when the barn falls,
when the last of the grande illusions crumble,
we’ll be left
standing in the ruins,
washing the blood off the barn,
like we could ever really clean it.
Like we could ever really make it whole again.
David L O’Nan is a writer/poet currently in Southern Indiana, born in Kentucky with a stop in New Orleans in between. He has been writing/editing for over 20 years including this website “Fevers of the Mind” which has also put out collective anthologies of poetry & art. Inspired by Anthologies for greats such as Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Joy Division, David Bowie, Depeche Mode, Miles Davis, Townes Van Zandt, Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Elliott Smith, Chris Cornell, Andy Warhol & the Factory, Sylvia Plath/Anne Sexton, Jack Kerouac, etc. He mostly spends time trying to find time to write these days. Editing and posting for the Fevers of the Mind website. He also has several books self-published. “Before the Bridges Fell” “The Famous Poetry Outlaws are Painting Walls and Whispers” “Cursed Houses” “Our Fears in Tunnels” “Taking Pictures in the Dark” “The Cartoon Diaries” “New Disease Streets” & “Lost Reflections” among compilation collections. I’ve had work published in Icefloe Press, Dark Marrow, Truly U, 3 Moon Magazine, Elephants Never, Royal Rose Mag, Spillwords, Ghost City Press, Anti-Heroin Chic, Cajun Mutt Press, Punk Noir, Voices from the Fire, Wombwell Rainbow, The Poetry Question, Grains of Sand, The Poetry Life & Times, The Lothlorien Poetry Journal and is a 4 time nominee for Best of the Net throughout the years. Twitter: @DavidLONan1, Bluesky: @feversof.bsky.social
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