Author: poetryfest

The shadowbird flies highest on the moonless nights (and there are seeds in my palms)
It gives the appearance of a passing cloud, as there are stars no more (but I am my own land)
Who could have predicted its fragile wings? (devastation came)
The bird is a contradiction (I was not ready)
Hollow bones (I was not ready)
Sharp beak (I am not ready)
Dark eyes (I am not ready)
Fearful (I am not ready)
and (I am not ready)
Pleading (Please)
Does it need to be held? (Please)
Or killed? (Please)
A danger (It cannot be real)
A friend (Deep breaths)
A living being (Not again. Not anymore)
This grief can fly (That one cursed phone call)
But it won’t. ()

She was caught with a gun in her hand.
The guy had bled out in the sand.
“It’s not me,” she exclaimed.
It’s another she blamed.
“The Beach Butler has done it again.”

There once was a man from Nantucket
Whose pump failed – with an ice pick she’d stuck it.
She’d snuck up in disguise . . .
But the biggest surprise?
A clean limerick – now you can go suck it.

’Twas a dark stormy night in Sin City.
At the end of the bar, she looked pretty.
Her gat did him in
Ere he’d finished his gin.
His tab was paid up, more’s the pity.

She said it hurts to smile,
Enamel weaker than her spine,
Having been stepped on
As she slept on
Park bench after park bench
With sparkling new segregated silver lines
That politicians melted down from her very own rain clouds.

She told me misery is heavy, like the air of a storm, and it
Shrouds
That her hoodie bears the brunt of
Blunt force trauma,
Covers her blunt, force, and trauma.

But she said,
“Drawstrings look like
A noose in the dark,
The same way a candy bar
Looks like a gun.”
She doesn’t carry either.

“To be honest,
The president must still envy my spine.
Even if it’s broken,
It’s mine—
To remove
And crack like a whip
Or tie around my neck.
Same difference in the end.
Fragile things
That last till after death,
Eroding with each sip of lemonade from the lemons they gave.”
Still, she smiles.

So many times the body is found
because water tumbles over stairs,
along furtive hallways, across creaking
thresholds to slide headlong down the slope
of the driveway and onto the blacktop
street where it tidies itself into a message
people wade through wade through wade
through on their way to work church school
the market, hoping to ignore the insidious
damp soaking their sneakers, seeping into
their socks, squishing between their toes
beckoning them to follow the swirling
rush that started as a trickle, that started
as a slap of an argument, grew into rage
with hands teeth broken glass until
a stranger sister friend can’t help but
flex their feet in the sog of shoes, slosh
up the driveway, over the threshold,
undeterred by the small flood eddying
down the hall to shoulder past resistance
and pressure on the bathroom door and
discover her, still afloat in the spit and spill of
no more never again you made me do it
while her limp hands and hair rise
at water’s command and the spout runs
like a mouth without mercy filling her lungs,
bloating her cells until the spigot is switched off
and the water drains, leaving us crying
drowning really in the message
that we are always always too late.

Oh, what a lucky day!
A student’s briefcase fell
into her hands
with several credit cards
How yummy yummy
yummy
They will take it, gut it
with their thieving fingers
Inspect it maybe
Nobody needs it anyway
How tasty tasty
Three credit cards
They will not use them immediately
but put them in their thieving pockets
What lucky pockets!
And leave town

Vanitha means desired
means loved woman
Vanitha is the supermarket
where they will try out
three credit cards

Vanitha 02
Is loved loved loved by three stolen credit cards
Vanitha 02
Is loved loved loved from 23h03-23h04

Midnight stains the windowsill, a shadow licks the floor—
She whispers love like counterfeit bills slipped beneath the door.
Her kiss, a loaded pistol pressed to my collarbone,
A heist of trust, the safecracked heart we’d sworn to leave alone.

Lipstick smears on bourbon glass, a ledger of her lies,
The locket in her pocket hums with someone else’s eyes.
I trace the cracks in her alibi, the bloodstains in the thread,
While sirens weave through silence, stitching futures to the dead.

“Darling,” she croons, “the jury’s blind—they’ll never see the knife.
We’ll bury truth where roses choke, and call it second life.”
But moonlight spills her fingerprints on every vow we broke,
A cyanide confession in the smoke of her last smoke.

The clock strikes guilt. A shot rings cold. The walls bleed neon blame.
Her ghost now wears the wedding band she melted down to flame.
They’ll find the cracks we papered with the skin of borrowed names,
But never how her laughter hangs, a noose without a frame.

There’s a man with bright blue eyes falling down the subway stairs tonight. He was bleeding before the fall, but it’s going to be worse after. He’s not going to get up. He’s going to lay there till he dies. He’s going to moan and cry and people are going to walk by like they don’t see him. He’s going to die bleeding and screaming and being ignored by the only people who could help him, which is how he’s lived his whole life up to now. But that screaming man with his blue eyes is happier in his final second than any of the people passing him by. Because that man has a secret. And if anyone stopped to help him, the scissors in his pocket would go into their temple. And I think the people passing know that on some level. And that makes him happy. Maybe the world isn’t so bad after all.

I kissed you at midnight, my hands on your skin,
Whispered sweet nothings—concealing my sin.
You thought it was passion, the heat in my stare,
But love turns to murder when built on despair.

The gun in the drawer, the poison in wine,
Each sip was a promise—soon, you’d be mine.
A heart full of secrets, a house full of lies,
You begged for redemption, I silenced your cries.

They found you at dawn, cold on the floor,
A note in my writing—”I loved him no more.”
Now steel wraps my wrists, the jury won’t see—
The deadliest weapon was always just me.

The gavel struck hard, my sentence was clear,
Yet none heard the truth I whispered in fear.
They wept for a man with blood on his hands,
While I played the role their story demands.

They spoke of your kindness, the love that you gave,
Not of the nights I fought to be brave.
The bruises, the threats, the locked bedroom door,
The crime wasn’t mine—it started before.

I sit in a cell, but sleep without fright,
No footsteps will wake me alone in the night.
They call it revenge, they call it a crime,
I call it justice—his life for mine.

And if I must burn for breaking my chains,
Let hell take me in, I’ll smile through the flames.
For love isn’t love when it steals your breath,
And sometimes the answer is written in death.

If I am the girl drawn adorned with thorns, see me.
If I am your keloid scar, anaesthetise me.

If I’m the tap that drips out of sync to your
steady steadfast slow breath, teach me.

If I’m the serpent strangling your calf, I’ll suck poison –
venom on my tongue – an impure art. Feed me.

If I’m the callus on your thumb catching skin –
A shot of rum for every pass, soak me.

If I’m the hungry dog days curled on your bed
for the scraps I’m fed – don’t parade me–shoot me.

O, how I would bark and piss and spit! – the true fight
against the cowards’ word in verse on your fist. Hit me!

If L is for your gaze, then you must be a tiger –
this scar reaches deeper than my jugular. Eat me.

If this needle blunts, promise me, you’ll carve
my name on our Sessile tree—Eleanor, deeply.

A wolf once roamed where the wild grass grew,
Its shadow stretched wide in the morning dew.
It lived by the howl and the scent of prey,
But the wind had schemes to alter its way.
The wind spoke soft as it twisted the pines,
“Why hunt alone in these endless confines?
Follow my course, and I’ll guide you near
To valleys of plenty and skies crystal clear.”
The wolf, though wary, obeyed the breeze,
And wandered far from the forested seas.
Through deserts of dust and cliffs that groaned,
It sought the treasures the wind had intoned.
Yet when it arrived where the wind had led,
The land was barren, the rivers were dead.
“What trick is this?” the wolf barked in despair,
But the wind just laughed as it teased the air.
“You trusted a song that cannot be seen,
Chasing a promise of places serene.
But I am the wind—I carry no weight,
And those who follow, inherit my fate.”
The wolf returned, though ragged and thin,
Its fur was torn, and its ribs showed within.
Yet it stood once more in the ancient trees,
Where the earth had roots, and the air was free.
“Beware,” it warned to the beasts of the wood,
“Not all that whispers intends what is good.
Let winds blow wild, let temptations play,
But never forsake the soil that stays.”