C.W.: Suicidal Thoughts
The Algebra of Broken Mirrors
A new fix began from the frail rusted sunIn the sky hanging on by tilted screws
We become broken in shards from the heavenly mirror
On the ground put us back together with foamy tape
To put us back together in ragged equations.
The years of alcohol hooked them into the pivot of a tornado.
And they watched the hills move in waves –
Ast the windows break like the many bottles.
Oh, by the banks of the splitting rivers
Where the old men lived young & the young men lived death.
The soldiers were introduced as tawdry
Introduced as cash for blood.
All the war voices unite in the thunder
They cried bleed for me!
Will you march to the prophecy?
Of course you will.
Many drowning faces shallow looking up from the clear
The waters filthy through their ghosts
The cuts sting my torso,
The cuts bathe in my brain
My soul is lipped up into the wounded world as they battlecry
The God is the dove on your war torn shoulder.
The red stirs into a light pink
Over my wrist as the funeral fades
An old laughter, as well
In my paint, I see the once sparkling stars
I want to step out of the pain
And watch the ponies again
To trollop in the rain
Stuck in this exclusion
To silence the lightning
In the mud, I wish to dance in
When the earthquakes begin to disease us
And the fires wave into our pieces of translucent exponents
Our skins begin to blend
The cameras record the pulling crust.
I’ve remained nameless,
But never boneless
Never this defeated, bloodless
As another day circuits that sun
That lives in starvation.
Tearless,
Holding an empty cup
Begging for moonlight.
Suicide 20/20: A Basket of Fruit
Let us all, stand by our baskets of fruitThat the rain and sunlight bathed out for us to dine.
I want to leave aside the sidewalks that burn
I want to wash away the pain that lives in my wrinkles.
I want the depressants to live behind the veils
And watch the birds fly from North to South and back again.
I want the suicide to climb back over the fence
While I think about the comfort of skin
While I blanket my mind with the thoughts of sweet breath.
Leave a war-cry
Echo back in the canyons
That I shall never want to see again
Leave the glass bottles on the edge,
To never feel the wind tip them over the ridges.
I want to remain by this fruit basket
To close my eyes
And reunite me with the loves that hold me
In tenderness, they have passed
I feel them again, my tears must obey
I must obey to put those bottles away.
And live for the saccharine.
Suicide 20/20: In a Shoebox
The cold floats over my dying energyShedding the ghosts from my skin
My breath has a left a sticky gloss –
Over the plastic thin shoebox windowpane.
My last breath in the stained carpets of poverty.
The wind tunnels through the apartments
Like a storm, like a voice
That rips through my eardrum
They whisper the suicides to me
Like the embracing kiss of all seven archangels
To greet God in the corner
Behind the burning candles
That attempt to save me
My hands are clammy
And the shadows are already in unison to dance
Dance my freedom away
From this plane
From the rags of this old shoebox
The conquering of another peasant.
…And I Will Burn Down the New Circus
We are given mystery and surprise as soon as the infant’s eyes –See or feel.
As scrawny as the sky may be,
Or as fully as its belly of grey hovers over us.
We become weightless pebbles,
Like ants stuck in sand on this Universal birth.
Evolving Constables, dictatorship, mind control, slavery, to us
The baby, the humanity, the humble, the wise
Candle wick lit in the clouds.
Ready to light a new birthday to a new regime.
The same, old regime?
In the sand is the answers
Do we dig?
Afraid of finding more of our unspoken sins.
Illuminate circus of wonders with crackling whips,
And loud voices begging for the attention to their destruction and let them –
Vilify,
For they are the ringmaster,
And they need such a lush red coat.
In the sand is the answer,
To the fossils of many sacred bubbles
That burst.
From the ocean waves.
Across these clouds,
The angels once in tears
Fanning in new funerals
Sending out new invitations.
Statues and monuments dreamt up the old circus
Falling Angels in Rolls-Royces created the new circus.
While the old circus crumbled,
I say we burn down the new circus.
Scrape away the ashes,
Cascade in a wash of blues
Chroma in the pigmentations of all that is blue,
Is pure
Drain all the pain from the diseases
That turned us into flightless birds.
We can coalesce as humanity again.
And feed these devils to the termites
That eat away at the wooden hearts of ringmasters.
Our circus isn’t a circus at all.
It is a parade, for everyone
It shall be a sharing,
A puncturing of the death toll.
We will become the fuel for this Earth.
And we will no longer be weightless,
The Earth shall be full of our fruits and thought.
And not have to live scraped off into the gutters of the galaxy.
Precautionary Nightingales
Was I awake to slit the wrists,Only to finally find charisma?
The shy boy is just some ghost
When dawn flies into your psyche
The precautionary nightingales knows
The moon from a genuine fake at 6 a.m.
Every eyelash to a broken wing
A crusted, dry, cold flight of winks.
My dreams are an asylum
Not to rest peacefully
The skating on the thin ice that lines my veins.
Tremors in the belly
Jump off the arching cliffs of my brain.
The fires from flower to flower
Weave me into the flash of foolishness.
Unnatural photos
I’m an underlying flesh of bruises
Imperfect and limping.
Transform me to a hungered wolf
With a brittle bite and blood showing from the bone.
In the molasses of snow that chews on the mountains
Watch a radical metamorphosis from –
Death to the fighter – to the hero
When waking up to the survival of self
The wind shifts so quickly back and forth
In this cemetery hurricane.
All the flies die off in the swarming over the temptations we breathe.
Listen to the Bones Breathe
You stare like Manson at the clocks,Trying to stop time
And just pause amongst the crickets to –
Listen to the bones breathe.
You could be nude, and in the rapture
The sweating of ice drips from the bridge
You look at the sun deflate into the arms of the valley
Peel back all the layers to see more bricks inside.
You don’t hear laughter, or even a hunger pain
All you feel is the freezing lips of air smack your skin,
Digest my disease
And listen to the bones breathe.
You don’t seem like a savior, or
A pretending lord
You seem like a fading rattlesnake
And we just watch you turn gray and shake
Convulse your milk from the pipes in sheets
Dance like a ghost you coward
And then break apart, and erode with a thousand nights.
Watching over,
And listen to the bones breathe.
You watch my death as attentive,
As you are to a movie.
You love like the fossils that are fresh
And then creation ceased a million miles before
A collision of all the heavenly lights
They sprinkle down and the world said “more please”
You can’t please the sadist and the sweet
Only a chirp of spirit emits.
When you listen to the bones breathe.
Poseurs with Precision
When it is time to save the night,You hide in your gatherings of sacred stones,
In the buildings to talk to him.
But you have no battleplan.
Paper religions,
Not willing to sacrifice yourself to poverty.
Not willing to sweep the dying humanity up,
And protect them with the heart and breasts.
The cowardly talk,
And they can sound so fluid with some bravado.
Breaking inside,
You can fight the weak, and tell them to join the inferno.
The waves of the sick are among you,
While you listen to Satan’s whispers from the television screen.
And you leave the malnourished weak-boned,
Starving, and praying to the one thought you can’t complete yourself.
You’re one of the poseurs with precision.
David L O’Nan is a poet living in Western Kentucky. He has lived in Evansville, Indiana & New Orleans, LA. He is the editor along with his wife Hillesha for the Poetry & Art Anthologies Fevers of the Mind Poetry Digest and has also edited & curated the Avalanches in Poetry: Writings & Art Inspired by Leonard Cohen with original artwork by friend of Leonard’s Geoffrey Wren. He has self-published works under Fevers of the Mind Press The Famous Poetry Outlaws are Painting Walls and Whispers, The Cartoon Diaries & New Disease Streets (2020). He is a Best of the Net Nominee for his poem “I honored You in Pennyrile Forest” in Icefloe Press. David has had work published in Icefloe Press, Rhythm N Bones Press off-shoot Dark Marrow, Truly U, 3 Moon Magazine, Elephants Never, Royal Rose Magazine, Spillwords.
His website can be found at www.feversofthemind.wordpress.com which details info on both upcoming projects & with Anthology submissions info. Twitter is David L O’Nan (@DavidLONan1) / Twitter and for the book Fevers of the Mind Poetry (@FeversOf) / Twitter. https://amzn.to/3mnxUwU is Amazon link to paperback. Ebook is also available there.
Banner Art: Red, White & Blue Train-time #2, a digital collage by Robert Frede Kenter. Tweets: RobertFredeKenter (@frede_kenter) / Twitter
IceFloe Press 