Caught Watching the Wind
The experts say I’ve been caught,
watching the wind.
The storms blowing in through the rusted bars
of this old, tired city-
I’ve been caught dreaming in the spider’s web, again.
I have a thousand broken promises in the rocks I walk in.
They told me it was all moving forward, from here on out.
Cracks in the pavement, reads like a tarot card,
They keep painting over and over and hope that the sorrow goes.
I love how they think they can hide the truth
under a new coat of paint, the machinery still dies.
I was one of those children,
Whose eyes were too wide.
too wise for their years,
caught in a loop of plastic lies.
Enjoy your dollar bin futures.
I see the workers with their backs bent and broken,
Faces hallowed out by the weight
The weight of a system that’s built to break ‘em.
And I’m caught too-
Caught in the middle of a song
That no one wants to sing anymore,
Caught in a place where silence
Screams louder than any protest ever could.
The new shift manager, he’s got his fists full of new policies,
He’s not offering handshakes, not reaching for the sustainability of this decade.
We really need a hand now.
They say we’re free.
What kind of freedom is this?
When you can’t even speak your mind,
When they money-men tell you to hush,
Telling you to wait some kind of turn,
Telling you to sit down and be grateful?
Telling you the backstreets are just fables, even though you’ve bled in that mud for years.
I’ve been caught watching the wind.
Ashes swimming across the streets.
Where it’ll all be forgotten,
And glued to the ground of 'his majesty’
It’s his world to burn down, now.
Yeah, that wind is still blowing.
This time, we’re not just watching.
The Desires of the Dead Man
The belt whipped to the ground
The cold wind chapping bare asses.
The sodomites are now tortured clowns.
What a way to enter the death of the circus.
While the rattling hums in the back of my skull
Fingers pressed to the pulse, tapping out some rusty screws.
An empty rhythm, the heartbeat is beating like a drum that
Knows it’s about to die, but it can’t stop because it is uncoordinated.
The Klonopin stares back at me, offering a dull promise.
Of nothing, nothing but blurred edges and visions of the fainted.
Glasses shatter, glasses they do break when my veins are stirring
and I’m scared to move an inch or I may wilt, away.
Everything is blurred,
Everything feels like it’s drowning.
Dull aches, the sky is awake and full of thunder for me to sleep to.
I’m stuck in a room of obscene memories, of dreams, corruption and no one listening.
You lose the job, they tell you
But you were never really working, were you?
Some oligarchy sits, grinning
Telling you that the sweat is the currency.
The broken system, some rusting chains.
Pull at this zombie brain, remembering that sweat never bought anything.
Except more boredom,
The walls full of desperate words that no one understands.
The dead man doesn’t get to speak
He only gets to slip under the surface.
It’s all too heavy to hold, even when you try to float.
Tossing pills, looking for relief in the shatters.
Tired eyes, burning, sleepless.
Too oblivious to care, all the dirty secrets in the air.
I’m defiant, when breathing is the reality
And the drowning is peaceful and noiseless.
The matter doesn’t matter at all.
Maybe it doesn’t
Hollywood Is Melting
Ashes on the stars, the lies have evolved.
City of golden dreams in the rolling smoke.
Standing tall while the flames take it all.
And watching the innocent become guilty.
And watching the guilty become the first to flee.
Fires in the hills, they say it’s just nature.
It’s not what it seems.
Who has the power to stop this? Who has the voice?
When the planets on fire, under this unholy scream, will we even have the choice?
Hollywood feels like it’s melting, the golden age to the current blue.
Glittering tears, the devil lays in his pool.
While screaming for justice, the one's who can’t fight
The wildfires taking over, the sky has no light.
The mansions from the gust to dust,
The denial of trust is evident,
Did anyone ever read that plan?
This is a war for the heart and the whole.
Everyone imaged a saviour in the ashes,
We were handed the curve, while driving straight into the flames.
Will we ever get out?
All My Knives Bled Out in Budapest
All my knives blew out in Budapest,
Beneath the shadow of Buda Castle.
Where the river swallowed those secrets,
And the night is a wet tongue in the throat.
The parliament’s eyes blink like ghosts,
it’s steeples hollow,
whispers curling in the alleyways,
the stones are soaked in too many sins.
I cut myself on the Danube again,
And the water, yeah, it didn’t even flinch.
In the stillness of the Városliget,
there’s a pond, dark as sin-
the water is thick with forgotten prayers,
black as the heavy air that clings
to the bones of this cursed city.
The lilies, pale as the dead,
Shiver beneath the weight of the concrete that doesn’t belong here,
Watching the shadows moving under the skin of the world.
I carved my name into the old walls,
Left it to rot with the others,
Let the rioters blow in like the wind and have
Fun with the burial,
The knives they never forget,
Not in Budapest,
Not in the places where my echoes
Are humming in the bones of the buildings,
Where my past still lingers,
I was the hobo that married the streets.
The night has digested me for good,
Swallowed me whole as that moon it just falls like a coin into the pond
And the ripples stretch out
Towards the forever darkness.
Living Inside This Crust
In this crust
Still, a dream maybe has a past
To have the wings again
My freedom has the taste of tar yellow skies
I am renounced of my nutrition
Anorexic little ladybug
Old, and finished with wars
Resting, segmented from a whole self in cobblestones danced by –
Rain droplets of children.
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 website, Ghost City Press, Anti-Heroin Chic, Cajun Mutt Press, Punk Noir, Voices from the Fire, featured on 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment