Author: poetryfest

A Dramatic Monologue based on The Musicians of Bremen.

The first I took with trembling hand,
fruit succulent from a tree in
the landlord’s orchard,
tasted it, tasted juice, never
in all my years had I tasted such juice
for was not I too turned out from home?
Sent to the road?
A person of the road made to live
the way of the road.

If it could have been different
I would have done different,
the church, a trade, apprenticed, a carter
anything but the road
but the road it is and living is lean
it’s bone
it’s no honor among thieves
it is one scare, one fright from the shakes
and I can’t go on but I swallow
I take, I steal, I hold you up on the road
in the dark forest and take what is mine
for won’t you be made good
in this life or the next?

There is nothing for me in this life
or next, there is only the road
the darkness
keeping one up on those beside me,
my brother my captor my killer,

the food at our table, a banquets feast
warm, there is beer and for the taste of beer
I will sell my soul to wrap my fingers around a stein
and have it

that is the bit of living I crave in the cold
when I see you coming down the road
with sacks in hand bags over shoulder
that’s what I crave at the edge of the forest
but tonight I am lucky
I have found my brethren and a man
who knows how to get things,
to get things done
to rob from farmhouses, from inns
from taverns, to waylay
people on the road
and what is that sound at the window?

I thought I heard something.

I haven’t eat this well in weeks
been this warm
never mind what had to happen
for us to get it
to gather together to break bread
we here brothers now
fill our hungry bellies
same as you’d do if you’d been
turned out on the road left for dead
and become
a beast in the night
you’d willingly set the table
and dig in, not pause for breath
because life is short, brutish.
A meal might be your last

Is that a scratching at the window?
I swear I‘d heard something,

save some beer for me will ya
there’s cake and my hands
are warm I can feel my hands tonight
and

we’ll sleep good tonight
never mind whose house this is
forget about it, they knew this was
part of the world, it is the gamble
of being alive, they knew that every breath
could be their last and this land, this house,
this meal, this could end and they’d gladly
claim their heavenly reward
and for once i am happy
for the prospect of a warm bed,
we are the beasts of the night
of the dark woods and is there
something greater than us?
A judge, you say?
A witch you say?
In this forest?

AND they drink.
The wine meets her upper lip taking some of the lipstick with it,
Down her throat,
Into the bottomless pit that is her stomach
Leaving a smear that would never be cleaned off.

He has drunk almost an entire bottle by himself.
He hasn’t changed,
She comments on it.

You haven’t changed .

I have.

His blunt response halts conversation.

Still the same refusal,
Always right never wrong.

That is what he’s like.

He raises his glass again.
The red liquid stirring from its sleep.
And then the harder landing,
That comes from slight misjudgement,
When in a drunken state.

MORE wine, another bottle.
Thank God she left him.
He apologises.

Always so critical,

It’s improved.

Good. Excellent. If you say so.

She knows why he retreats behind his menu,
He embarrassed himself.
One of the few things he does well.

Come on, no sulks, be nice.

She knows that only by talking will he come out of his shell.

THEY shake hands.
His hands, sweaty, clammy,
Omitting the alcoholic odour.
His, firm then light,

then firm again, in hers,
then slowly withdrawn, wanting longer contact.

Better?

A grunt, in response.

It’s getting there,
It’s always a slow resumption.

SO. Who’s to start?

You.

Short and sharp,
Still embarrassed, he needs more cajoling.
Still in is impenetrable cocoon.

Right.

His glass, always drained,
Hers hardly touched.
She is drinking in moderate quantities,
He is drinking by the bottle.

Next it will be a Magnum,
Followed by a Jeroboam.

Judiciously, he brings the levels level.
Of course, she notices, despite what he thinks.

Right: I’ll tell you everything I can.
The wife, struggling to force him out of bad habits,
And a loving mother battling with two wild children.
I’m busy, with no complaints.
And then work,
Authoring my books, reeling out the pages.
And Paris.

Now it is her turn to be wistful.
She could be in a lovely boulangerie.
Wistful thinking, another thing he is good at.
Will he ever change?

(In her bedroom. She’s pacing, rehearsing an apology.)
I don’t know what I was thinking. It was a flash in the moment, I—I panicked. The words just (she gestures) tumbled out of me. Escaped me. (She sounds breathless, almost like she’s just ran a marathon.) I didn’t mean it, I swear, I…I don’t know what happened. What took over me. It was a mistake. I panicked. One moment we were…(swallows) and then, because of my stupid mouth, we weren’t. And there was nothing more to be said after it. Nothing I felt that I could do. I couldn’t pull them back in, I—I didn’t have the strength to. It was like a dam broke inside of me and everything I had been holding in gushed out, and I just had to sit there, and let it spurt out for a while. (Shaky) And when it was done, I had nothing left in me. Nothing left. It felt— (she inhales sharply, like taking a gulping air before submerging in water) it felt as if I had been drained. (She pauses, thinks, sits down on the bed.) It felt as if I had given everything, my heart, (she rests a hand over her chest) my head, my love, my everything. I had given it all, and yet…You have to forgive me. You have to…reconsider. Remember the good times. Remember when we first met (she smiles to herself). It’s gone sour but we can get that back. Can’t we? (She looks around her empty room, looks to her hands in her lap.) I don’t know what happened. When the love spoiled, and we both became so bitter. And I so angry. I didn’t use to be like this. I think…I think it happened gradually. Like erosion. Slowly, the happy parts of me, the ones you loved, the ones I loved, chipped away. (She sniffs.) I didn’t mean to become this. I wanted us to be happy, together. Maybe I was too insecure or too selfish or demanding, always expecting, always hoping, always wanting more. Or maybe. I don’t know. Maybe I wasn’t enough. Maybe you—I’m sorry. I know it was mean, what I said. I shouldn’t have said anything, I should’ve let it go. I just couldn’t bear the weight of it any longer, all the pressure building. The heat. But I’ll be better in the future. I’ll learn to be grateful for what I have. I will. I love you. (It sounds wrong, almost like a question. She tries again, with more certainty.) I love you. I do. I have to—I do. Please. (She releases a sigh, puts her head in her hands. Fades out.)

I gave you the fire
You watched it burn
Hands in your pockets
No hint of concern

I whispered forever
You mouthed a lie
You built me a heaven
Then taught me to die

Now silence is louder
Than all that you said
Your words still echo
In rooms in my head

I waited for answers
Your heart cold stone
But love isn’t love
When you’re left all alone

You made me a promise
Then vanished like smoke
Now the words “I love you”
Just feels like a joke

But I won’t keep drowning
In oceans you made
You turned me to ashes
But ashes don’t fade

I wake in a body that is both mine and not mine.
The first thing I taste is iron.
The oxygen burns through my throat like rust,
scouring me from the inside out.
The machines whisper their mechanical language,
a steady beep-beep-beep drilling through my skull,
a countdown to something I can’t see.

I should be gone already.
I know this.
They told my mother I was a mistake,
a smear on an ultrasound,
a wrong answer waiting to be erased.
The doctor squinted at the screen,
said something that made them hesitate.
I should have been a decision they never regretted.
Instead, I became a question they never stopped asking.

I should have left with the others—
with the pale hand curled stiff beside mine,
with the body zipped inside the thick yellow plastic,
with the wheels rolling slow, slow,
the fluorescent light smearing over sealed flesh.
I watched it move past me,
a body still holding its last breath,
trapped beneath something that does not breathe.

How long does it take to become cold?
How long before skin forgets that it was once warm?
How long before the body no longer belongs to itself?

I have died before.

In the silence where my mother tongue was buried,
choked beneath the weight of foreign words,
drowned beneath the tide of languages I was told to keep instead.
My first tongue had no letters,
so they made sure it had no future.
But I still remember how it sounded before it disappeared.

I have died before.

Beneath the hands of someone who did not see me,
only the body,
only the shape,
only the way it could be arranged,
bent,
reshaped into something that belonged to them.
I walked out, but I left something behind,
something I can never retrieve.

I have died before.

They scanned my brain and told me something was missing.
A hole where an artery should be,
a riverbed that was never carved,
a structure that should have collapsed at birth.
“You were never supposed to live,” the doctor said.
I think he meant it kindly.

I want to ask him—then what am I doing here?

A mistake that refused to erase itself.
A scar that kept growing back.
A body that should not exist,
but does.

I wake up again.
The bed beneath me is still cold.
The machine still beeps.
The plastic curtain still flutters at the edges.
I open my mouth to speak,
but nothing comes out—

Somewhere, the flowers begin to bloom.

My hand shook my shoulder this morning
until I awoke.

Both my arms are wondering
where your arms could be.

They miss you.
Both of them.

We should take our arms to the beach again.
They’ve become quite attached
to each other
the way they wrap themselves
around each other
arm in arm,
hand in hand.

They were meant for one another,
I think,
their hands clasped together so perfectly.

The way
I was meant for you
And you were meant for me.

I loved her the way the tide loves the moon—pulling, yearning, never touching.
And I, a distant shore, could only watch as he drowned in a sea I could never step into.

I watched him sail toward her, and that’s when I realized—the cruelest part wasn’t that I didn’t love him.
It was that he spent a lifetime wondering why.

I glanced back one last time, watching her walk away.
And I finally understood—it was never going to end happily.
The greatest tragedy wasn’t leaving.
It was that when I looked back,
she was already gone.
So was my boat.

I couldn’t watch him leave—not when he’d already offered up our love to the gods of his bluest longing.
And so, I turned around.
My feet sank into the silky sand, a stillness rising in me—a tranquility among the blue.

He made me feel complete.
But the God’s honest truth?
It was too perfect to be real.

Just like the ink that shaped this confession,
the ocean I once drowned in has finally dried up.

“And then, it clicked.
She was always my sun—
never my moon.”

A great love has its ups and downs, its good moments and its bad, but can love be just as great.? “Butterflies is a way your body is telling you this isn’t real,” people have said. Could they have told me this sooner? Does your body really tell you that?

Eventually, he walked into that room on that day (could time redo that moment for me) I thought it was true. For once I thought I could get over the past, how could I know it wouldn’t last? “Good morning sir,” he said walking my way. (How could first words make me feel this way?)

It took a bit after that first day but now things have gone my way. Just two months and we were free from the lying about us and the between. (Kept on pushing that voice inside from telling the truth about the butterflies this time.) Longing for more, things have changed, a bit more love, a bit less lies at least I thought so. More people knew, more
people cared (how could it get worse from here) less hiding, less caring just that he said she said coming about. (More of the butterflies coming about, less real it’s starting to get.)

“No, he does,” I tell her when she asks the big question. “Ok, but if he doesn’t love you you need to leave him.” (Perfectly imperfect she was, but this time she was perfect. Quitting I couldn’t do perfectly but loving the wrong person is the one thing I could do right.)

Ready to get hurt, I kept going in the relationship. Starting to think this was a mistake, I got distant and he got scared, I thought it was real. Two weeks later, I got the gift, I regretted it almost instantly, but there was nothing I could do. Unless his gift was heartbreak, it was wrong, it was wrong, it was very wrong.

(Very smart, he was, just not right now, told my friend it was fake, said we finished weeks ago. What a liar, what a briber.) You know how it goes, tears and anger, how do I know what was real? Zooming to today it starts again just this time I will know if the love is real.

Green rolling grass and growing pines as far as the eye can see.
3 board fences painted tar-black and dirt paths mark the road.
Inheritance split by barbed wire fences, built by the hands of the future as the eyes of the
past watched them. This land is bought and paid for by generations whose remains lie in a
graveyard off the beaten path, marred by the passing of time.

Thus, a legacy of triumphs and failures begins.
Like the moon’s siren call to the ocean
this land cries out to me
of legends of outlaws and bandits
turning into preachers and teachers.
Wisdom imparted or lost.
History repeated and of monsters defeated.
Here lies my birthright
This is a precious gift to me.
Combining past, present, and future

The creed of the land is the way to be a man, A Grandfather tells his grandson.
It’s The way of life of those who came before.
In a man’s hands lies his strength
in his heart, his love
in his lungs, his passion
in his eyes, his hope
His shoulders, fashioned for the yoke of burden
In his feet, his determination
In his mind, his knowledge

Follow the creed, and when time kisses you with its mark.
Your hands will find strength by being held by another
In your hearts, love lives on in other hearts whose love was affected by you.
Your lungs, marked by time with each breath, which burned full of passion in your youth, will
see that passion live on in another.
Till your eyes make that final drop, hope lives on in the legacy you leave behind.
Your shoulders stooped by the yoke’s burden will see another rise to the challenge.
Your feet, by determination, will have trained another to be just as determined as you.
In your mind, the gift of knowledge will be shared everywhere you go.

In the center of it all lies the land the creed lives on for another generation.
If something is lost, will it be found?
Just ask the land because it remembers

Hey asshole, you left an open bag of chips in my car
and they’ve scattered everywhere.

By “Hey asshole” I mean
Dear son
Sweet child
Nearly independent offspring who I love more than air.

And by “an open bag of chips” I mean
an open bag of chips
because not everything is a metaphor.

This particular non-metaphor has spilled all over my car and
I am non-metaphorically angry about it.

But when I weigh the new need to vacuum my floorboards
against the fact that you are likely leaving soon, I soften.

This is the pattern lately;

My low-grade chip bag
or laundry on the floor
you left all the lights on
dishes in the sink
frustrations falter in the shadow of days peeling from calendar pages
bringing us closer to your exodus.

Annoyances leveled by the memory of your young childhood voice
toddler bed nighttime routines
1,000 unnecessary plastic items purchased for your delight over the years
the way we used to bump our hips together when we’d stand next to each other
because it used to be I wasn’t so much shorter than you.

Hey asshole, I joke
because as nearly a man now you can take
my particular brand of humor,
even dish it back to me
like you’re trying adulthood on for size.

Hey asshole,
because we can admit that sometimes you are
and sometimes so am I
and we can see each other for who we are
not just for the genetics we share.

And, let’s be honest,
chip bags and laundry and lights on and dishes aside
you are not an asshole at all,
you are my son
and I love you fiercely
which won’t end when you move out.

Meanwhile, go vacuum my car.