Author: poetryfest

I thirst.
So He said.
And I did.
I thirsted so.
And like Him, I had need of that drink which brought and sustained life.
But, also like Him, I was abandoned.
Eloi, Eloi, we were both abandoned upon the asperous acanthite.
For man cannot subsist on that thirst alone; he has need of the nectar of the heart, and
the liquor of the soul, and the hunger of the flesh, and that quintessential need of belonging.
Under that ablaze – summer sun – the whipp’d wrath of Sol Invictus, that thin veil holding us
back, did melt.
His Father did abandon Him upon that mont, looking away to keep pure the gates to
His divinity.
T’was, in turn, my eyes that turned all away, for the soul knew what the mind
repressed, and our body did act accordingly.
The law of Heaven is life for life.
That desire to sip, drop by drop, has been, by his awful grace, satiated.
Juices begotten of goblin fruit; goblin fruit begotten of Eden.
Teeth pierce as Sebastian’s arrows – godly Reni’s brushwork.
From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one.
We afterwards lie as the Dying Galatian, disgusted but satiated.
I thirst no more.
For now, I thirst no more.

Due to the socio-philosophical side effects from the rapid evolution of technology, come Friday, no one in America will ever fall in love again. And it won’t even be sad. No one will even notice. Because by Friday, everyone in America will have been replaced with non-organic versions of themselves. Credit this experiment to the Corporation that Owns Earth. They’ll take responsibility for quadrillions of subatomic microchips spilling into the atmosphere without a warning to ignore. No one looks up at the sky that’s no longer sky. No one pays attention to the clouds where tiny rockets shoot down into bodies of water, rendering every drop digital. No one spots microscopic robots skeeting semen across cornfields, their offspring coughing on trees. This is your secret, electric disease. First, it’s in the sunlight, then your cereal. Next, it’s in what you read, what you dance to. It’ll be the voice you hear when asking yourself, ‘Is it too early to celebrate? Too late to escape?’

Cos you know how it goes: You are what you consume. So how long have you been you? Perhaps you’ll sort that bit out by Friday, when babies and light bearers become the last victims of this imminent transition. Every choice made in the USA will be outsourced down to its molecular conception by Friday. Watch out for advertisements between your thoughts, credits to close out your dreams. Those names on the left, babies who cried, ‘Consciousness is not in my mind’, then spent their entire lives trying to find out where. Those on the right are the names of reAmericans. Don’t think of them as persons, but persons as a place, somewhere that appears when they find out where. But here’s the rub. Inside those subatomic microchips are quadrillions more subatomic microchips. And so on. And so on. Each imprinted with a hell for those who believe in it and a heaven for those who can afford it. Every day is a holiday; every day there’s a tragedy.

Will you come home when the World Series is played against the landscape of civil war, and in a maze of instant replays, you search for an edge to cling to, an edge to jump from? Who will bring you home when most people wouldn’t find home while fast asleep with maps on the back of their eyelids? They repeat themselves in memories they call today, everyday, till Friday. They don’t have names. They take names from the Corporation that Owns Earth, for corporations are people, too. But those who own Earth ain’t giving out names for free. Instead, they sell lives that have been lived quadrillions of times. On Friday, consciousness becomes currency, and everyone buys what already belongs to them. So to maintain an illusion of authenticity, reAmericans cease repeating themselves. They take your name, my name. We search for home, home not as in a place, but a person, someone who brings us home. And for the sake of our sanity, it’s best we pretend we’ve always been here.

Funny how we were once prisoners of artificial darkness, strung from rain machines, and posed as scarecrows for UFOs. After serving so many life sentences, Friday came. The sky turned pink from the fumes of tears; not just our tears, but also tears of children without coins for the wishing well, tears of parents protecting the hill that the well stood upon, and tears of grandparents filling pails with what used to be water. Remember crawling inside that well to never come out? But we never reached the bottom, didn’t know we were in the same well till meeting our digital ends, thus realizing that the well wasn’t real. And the hill had long since caved in on people climbing over each other, reaching for what they saw, but couldn’t feel. There were quadrillions of it, too big to see more than one of it at once. Those closest called it their own because they saw their names on it. Those furthest will call it home because they’ve never been home. And we call it love because we fall in it.

Why do I chase
migrating butterflies
when ones just as beautiful
are in my garden?

They’re on their way
to a beauty I can’t
provide. Yet, I
still beg them to stay with
me.

The flowers I tend,
while beautiful,
don’t have what they need to
survive.

Regardless, I beg
“Please, don’t leave.
Your colors. Your kisses.
I need them.”.

When I look at the
young man in the
pond below, I ask
him

the same question
I ask him every
day.

Why do I chase
migrating butterflies
when ones just as beautiful
are in my garden?

Air shot from her lungs;
the swan sunk to the top

.– .- – . .-.

Water, I wish for water,
the way the fish did when they drowned

-.-. — -. -. . -.-. –

Coquette, her heart is advertising

.– .- – . .-.

Beauty, pose for swan lake
they’ll love it they’ll log on

-.-. — -. -. . -.-. –

Pout so hard your torso has gills

.– .- – . .-.
-.-. — -. -. . -.-. –

This is what the screen says
swim woman swim
The (algo)rithm eats away all self from our heads

-.-. — -. -. . -.-. –

the world is so fucked

.– .- – . .-.

i
try to shout
“
grab my hand!
hold on
please
WATERS
CONNECT!
“

.– .- – . .-. -.-. — -. -. . -.-. –

Poem 1. The Yield
Born prematurely into selfhood,
before touch, I rehearsed departure.
Those before you taught exits, not entrances—
their lessons carved in absence.

A speculator of affections,
I traded glances for fleeting nearness,
each bond too brittle to hold.
Risk was my currency; staying, a bet I never placed.

An arbitrager between mask and marrow,
I weighed minted lovers, their clinking vows—
love’s value, depreciated at first touch,
a coin worn thin by handling.

Hedged against tenderness,
longing drifts at a floating rate,
need pools darkly, illiquid.
To love and liquidate—the oldest trade.

I am the residue of a sexless schooling—
not Confucian rigor, but parents
who misplaced me in their shadowed nights:
a zombie asset, rotting in dark pools of unspent want.
Textbooks taught systems, not skin—
guilt before pleasure, silence the mother tongue.

OCD’s survivor, I tally sunlit sins,
while your kiss—an iceberg order—
thaws unseen in veins. What is love
where need is moral failure?

Yet I kneel. I suffer. I beg. I believe. Not for worth, but for will.
Not to be remembered, but to endure.
What once broke me calcifies into past.
What once made me scatters toward futures unpriced.

Poem 2. The Floating Rate
Reality cloaks itself in ritual—daily acts, ordinary sights,
veils for light and shadow.
We shroud the dead, close doors,
yet all must pass through.
When reality frays at its edges,
a face—not death’s—peers through:
a fissure, unhedged, where love drifts,
a floating rate tethered to your breath.

I once priced affection like a bond—
fixed term, fixed yield, predictable decay.
But you moved beside me, a risk
no model could tame, only heart could bear.

I watched you sleep—
your shoulder, a soft exchange rate,
your breath, inflationary, spiraling desire
pegged to no anchor but you.
Now I carry you, a volatile asset—
too vital to hold, too alive to hedge.

Poem 3. The Stress Test
I set the city ablaze,
my grimace mirrored in its flames—
a footnote etched across its skyline.
Time buckles as fire laps
the tower’s ticking heart.
In that moment, we are decimal dust.

I kissed you, knowing I was insolvent—
affections over-leveraged,
promises traded beyond my means.
Yet you held me, collateral
no bank would underwrite.

I wake bare from the dream—
morals twitch, paranoid,
restraint gutted by wealth’s excess.
This body, a credit derivative,
unravels in the dark—
a seam-splitting loan, an interest-choked heart.

Our embrace: the terminal stress test,
where the soul declares bankruptcy—
the final audit flashing through my mind:
a ledger of unsent letters, unspoken truths,
and the hands I never held,
already written off as losses.

When I return to the cabin
from picking black berries
barefoot along
the grassy path,
two orange slugs
circle at the foot
of the door frame.
They trail smooth lines
on the rock steps
to the door.
One slug nibbles
on the tail
of the other.
The invitation sticks:
as this migration
dance moves up
the door frame:
these orange partners
lower themselves
dangling by a
single silken thread.
I watch
their twirling dance;
inner phalluses —
emerge & extrude,
the unusually bright
blue skirts —
glowing as they
spoon
joining together
in a flowering
conception.
Then separate;
To fall to the ground
for finding
a hidden space
in the grass
to lay their eggs.

When the world came to be
A voice called out in the darkness
“let there be light”
A prayer, a request, a spark
to begin an eons long project
An ever changing painting of
rolling hills and clouds and
perspective shifts
When I come to a blank page
a word document of cascading
nothingness
I approach in the same way
and clear my throat and speak
through my fingertips
“let there be word”
and I saw, it as good
My soul burns through letters
syllables thoughts feelings
as prose becomes poem
and my world knits itself together
into an afghan of myself
Wound tightly on the page
It is through this act of creation
that I play the role of benevolent god
and expose the facets of mind, matter
to the mirror of the universe
I gain worshippers, gain dissent
and become a force of nature
a fearsome feminine storm
unleashing the joy, the sensual,
the darkness and horrors
and everything about me
in a way that is palatable
digestible in words, in verse
Ready to be set to the lyre
And sung to every corner
Can you see me, now? Can you
believe in me? or should I begin
my services, my worship through
words again?
I’ll open to a new page, a new chapter,
and begin again with “let there be words”

audrey hepburn hangs up her hat
and takes off her pearls
She shucks her gloves finger by finger as
she moves to unzip her dress
The fabric of the little black number
falls to the ground around her
and her curves are met with the
chill of an air-conditioned apartment
And she sighs, her skin alert with
tiny bumps of residual anticipation
as she grabs a Red Bull from the fridge

Breakfast has passed and Tiffany is gone
and her dreams have vanished before her
like the smoke at the end of her cigarette
A jolt of caffeine at least brings her mind
out of the chasm it had fallen in
The swamp of disappointment that she
lost her heels in, that sticky, mucky place
Those Diors will not pass through her doors
Her Chanel will not be channeled
She can’t give any more to Givenchy
She is just she

Not the muse, the icon, the aesthetic
she craved, that she had imagined herself
She is on the outside of that wild world
The room where it happens that she
tried to claw herself into with stiletto nails
Her fingers are now nubby, covered in paint and
grime and nothing as exquisite as stone

Let go of the dreams, darling, let go
of the notion that you need to be a
poster, an image reposted on Pinterest
the theme of a twenty-first birthday
The sunglasses are no longer needed
to block out the bright future ahead
Because you already have what you
thought you needed.

The stitches of your limbs, the fabric
of your body hair and the button
of your nose, the epaulettes of your
fingernails, the brushes of your lashes
are the height of fashion
It is within you, ms. hepburn, in every
breath you take, each wrinkle and
drape of curve against frame

You are not a snapshot, but rather,
a flame, the lit end, a runway walk
You are not black and white, darling,
you are color
So, live it and use it

“The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last.” ~ Achilles, Troy.

they said the gods once pointed out atmosphere,
days, imagination & then, they created love.
“a sturdy object, love” they said.

then they created poets since poems
compose conundrums & sympathize
themselves into selves, never bare

of moments, of mercies, & the problem
horizons caused by endings like impassable
boulders.

& yet, they had no answers for her. no answers
for her dying way too young. to them, she
was nothing more than a decorative piece.

but to me, she captured daylight, just like the gods,
but maybe that was the problem? maybe it was
jealousy? so they worked slowly, stripping away at her

because the gods always work slowly when they want
to maximize the pain & agony. distant, shadowy, & always
working backwards, unfolding the ruins

of history – all of it like some strange fairy tale
titled, “the small regret that is the human body.”
but i ask you, dear reader: are humans just bodies?

no. we’re homes. we’re voices in almost-vibrant
Kodachrome. the loft of our voices bringing
us relief & because of this, we grow to love

this new body part. in this new fairy tale separate
from the gods where a clock never ticks its incoherent
code in the background, cramping all the air

inside the room. why couldn’t the gods
gift us two instead of one, like hearts?
why when their ears ring with our cries

do they not respond, “we hear you”?
it’s only then we notice they want us to look
at them, catch them in the corners of our

eyes, the way you’d look at a man holding
a gun at your temple. that’s when we turn gray-ish
like fingerprint dusting powder.

can’t you see, dear reader? it’s only then we
realize this fairy tale, our lives, that it’s not about embracing.
them. it’s about embracing ourselves, embracing each other,

embracing time, embracing one’s death in those eyes,
those envious eyes of the gods, & never wanting to escape
one’s self or each other because the ticking, that ticking

you still hear, no matter what of that ticking, if you keep
listening to it the way the gods listen to our heartbeats,
too closely, you’ll realize that ticking all along

came from a bomb strapped to our bodies
given to us by the gods.

from the poem Half Japanese Buddhist Daughter: A Poem of Love to Mother
by Francesca Biller

Every mother’s story is a story of need:
theirs, hers, the household’s, the great world’s.
Her imagination has been her worst fail:
chimerical visions of danger, misdeed,

fright, illness, grief. Her body has not sufficed,
her love has not been enough (important people
told her this). Her understanding and patience
failed. Her parenting style was a poltergeist

at best, malarial at its worst. Every
memory aches with her wrongdoing. God or
the universe or her own mother let her
know beyond all knowing (this in reverie)

what she ought to have been and what she was not.
She read the books the experts wrote, listened to
what the speakers spoke, purchased and heard the tapes,
kept the appointments, permitted everything..

The struggle to believe, the deconstruction on
the road to wisdom was the road she followed;
the signs were painted by all the mothers she
ever knew. They pointed just one direction:

See the sign. The pop-art finger shows one path:
This Way In. This Way Out. Beware of Quicksand.
All Damages Paid At the End of this road.
All Sins Confirmed By Your Offsprings’ Frozen Wrath.