Author: poetryfest

Brindle coat like a tiger, bouncing ears like swine, an elf, your face
at 13 years old has grown white like a Madagascarian lemur, none of you
is the fighting wretch they told me you were. When I brush you,
your hair flies like a hoard of locusts
in the air of our apartment, my sneezing startles you.
I find new lumps on your chest, your neck, your head
of dander, my kisses land there. I begin with the short-haired comb, then
the curry comb, then the boar’s brush to spread
the oils so your skin — a landscape of little hills
and dermatological stumps — doesn’t dry. On your left eye
an ever-bleeding wart, you whinny and snort like a thoroughbred horse,
trot and prance on the concrete searching for trash. When you sit
your hind legs are magnificent
like a sphynx. Black eyes inside them a man’s soul. Clouds
in your pupils, your chest like pure white cotton, linen thrown
in the grass and mud, your teeth a mangled mess,
o fifty-six pound, snow-footed beast with ever-growing claws
that scrape on the tar of our neighborhood, its enchanting
strangers, their legs to sniff. Your adorers. You don’t know the difference
between this block and that. Blight from the manicured
three-story homes of fence vines and front-yard sculptures.
Just its smells, prowling into the hedges where you don’t belong, your teeth a mangled mess,
lunging at the other leashed dogs. Your family
contains Shih-Tzus, Havanese, soft and groomed.
you a goose among prize ducklings. You wake every five minutes
from your curled-body naps on the couch, stare longingly over your shoulder
at me. You pule and grumble like a bored child, something along the lines of outside
or food, stomping your little feet, your tail in a semi-circled path
like an infant’s first crayon. When we do venture,
your nose like coal, obsidian, is to the ground
like an anteater, a scapegrace. Sometimes I’m not quick enough
when you snatch fried chicken skin or bones,
then throw them up a day later, and yet I feed you
like a king of beasts: salmon oils, joint supplements,
kibble and beef-flavored wet food, pressure-cooked
chicken breast, Greenies, I will give it to you willingly like a servant. I pick up your shit
and hose piss off your front legs when you aim poorly. hold you
like a toddler and buy you sweaters. I rub my face into your snout,
that wet nose, wherever it’s been, because I can’t help it.
o bourgeois idiots I pass on our walks with their $5,000 purebreds
they have no idea what they’re missing. With you
every day is gentle, kind like a secret
I stumbled upon in the dirt. Pristine
and overlooked treasure. Effigy
of the carnivorous, war chief of the benign,
creature key to a whole life, master
and teacher of the unconditional love that we,
the companions feigning to be the evolved species,
would never learn on our own.

Growing up, playing in the streets
Soccer with your friends, who’s gonna win?
Only problem is homework, no motivation
Want to get outside and just have fun.

Getting older, playing some kinds of sport
Part of a team, working hard after school
First crush, first kiss, first relationship
Feeling excited, so mature, still innocent.

Graduating school, grades okay, future awaits
Having a rough plan, studying and partying
Cause that’s what’s university about, right?
Getting to know yourself, finding out where to go, what to do.

You finish university, celebrate your degree, happy
The next day you watch the news, a war close by
Everything gets more serious, future insecure
Will the violence reach us, what can we do?

Sharing posts on social media, visibility, awareness
Nothing changes, people fight, every day a new horror
Then they start talking, rebuild the army, old strength
Mandatory military service for the younger generations.

Fear, uncertainty, never learned patriotism, only shame
How should I fight for this country, not even believing in it?
Feeling unwelcome, politicians discussing women’s rights
Not waving the rainbow flag, friends I’ve known for life facing deportation

Politicians come and gor, telling lies until they get cancelled, dying rich
Shouldn’t care about them people say, news ones going to replace soon
Problem is we voted for them, we let them reign, fighting like little children
Wanting security for themselves, “us”, not realizing majority of their people’s excluded

Giving my life for the cause, the greater good
But if the young ones die, the ones responsible for change
The only thing left is the old white men on the top
Violence can’t bring peace, only loss, hate and revenge

Remember humanity

America the nebulous, we cannot yet define thee,
America incredulous, your dreams of wealth do stymie.
America the infinite, America the cruel,
your hunger indiscriminate, you belch out sweat and fuel.
Thy holy ‘City upon a hill’ is a mountain o’er the rest
where water flows up and slakes the thirst
of billionaires and their jets.
Thy American Dream of a white picket fence
was truly fool’s errand dream,
for the suburban mother Benzo diet
belies a deeper disease.
For the cost of living is a free man’s soul,
and as he toils away his every night,
his dreams begin to invade the day
and divorce him from his inner life.
‘A free man must choose his way!’
was the first American dream,
but how can he embrace the world
if he drowns at your capitalist teet.
In America the plentiful, there’s enough to go around,
just drown the pleading poor with that pop music sound.
And when you see a forlorn face stepping off the train,
remember in America all bootstraps are made the same.

“The lone and level sands stretch far away”
And pieces of us dot the sand
Like a colorful crumb trail
From an antique land.
Humans crumble in bits and pieces
And end up on the beaches,
And today, a gray day,

I pick up bits and pieces:
Cigarettes and surgical masks
Bottlecaps and wine stoppers,
The tide tickles my toes and offers
A pill bottle and a seaweed Whopper.

The sea cycles the vices
And the progeny of vices.
I smoke cigs, too,
Their filters a Percy Bysshe Pedestal
Telling a story
Long after I degrade.

I want to write a ballad for the voice
behind every spam call. But what’s
musical about a conversation with someone
who wants to speak about my car’s extended
warranty or about how their underwriting
department is missing documents for a loan
never applied for? What’s love got to do
with the salesperson, sitting in their cubicle,
trying to meet a weekly quota—a goal
betrayed by the AT&T app flashing “Spam Risk”
before they speak? They offer their finest pitch,
unrequited by voicemail. I’m the ghost
they seek to bust, the specter of their failure
at a job they have because the Anniston strip mall
between my parents’ print shop and the closed
Ruby Tuesday is walkable
from their trailer park rental
and they don’t have
transportation
healthcare
family.

Because in the shadow of Mount Cheaha
Governor MeeMaw don’t care.
A Noccalula story revised
not with a leap, but a slow fade.
A story written in hangups.

Let us sing, Muse, not of your treacled, honeyed lips,
from which the murmurously buzzing poet drinks,
launching a host strong some dozen-dozen ships
only to cry ‘Calypso!’ at the last and in her deep eyes sink;
nor of your distant sister, the pale Lady Memory,
who dwells in the skies above, concealed by her long,
dark and starry robe, who sees all and knows much
of the blind man she loves, the seeming-fathoms of his mysteries.
No, to the youngest of your line and least themed in song
we will bend our humble rhyme with earnest and loving touch.

See how lightly as a cloud she frolics upon and passes
the verdure of Elysium, blown as by a breeze that haunts
the highest mountains and stirs the pleasant grasses,
this our Melody, who with her playful, ever-graceful nature taunts
her sisters and the solemn tunings of their strange, uncanny thoughts
in bursts and fits of happy disruption; sometimes she feigns their manners
(favourite pastime of the youngest child), sometimes she hoards her laurels
to work into their tightened tresses, and with unfurling passion exhorts
them to forget their office, let down their hair, for once unscroll their banners,
and draws from them, if this fails, another bout of sisterly quarrels.

For oft she breaks (such is child-cunning) their sage, impassioned circle
peacocked with fanned arrays and ravishments of girly colours;
they, all-knowing, cease their chantless tracts and open up their oracle,
till she their warm and loving beams accepts with preening flutters,
and imbues them with her native touch, making solemn tresses gay again
which, trinket-trapped, swing now as once they did in the golden youth of childhood;
and softened are their magic tones which treat of her with human and with hearty laugh.
So all, unbeknown to mirthful Melody, approaches her gentle ken,
meeting the errant music of the wild but natural wood
or of such as he who sings, holding steadfast the crooked shepherd’s staff.

By the ancient farmhouse with its incense rich of oak and cedar chips
stands the winter-weathered sovereign of that line, high, oft-consulted Saturn,
in whose dread wave the fired and mutinous city of Atlantis smoking dipped
to learn the icy currents of his rage and the consequence of passion;
ah, but in her presence his aspect is changed and less of terror now,
almost softened are his eyes, as even old ocean must be when the long-labouring sun
pierces the cloudy confusion of night to join in hands with earth,
his patient child, again, and not so deep seem the furrows in his brow;
for awhile Hydra rests with Atlantis, all his troubles are done
and he can joy with his daughter his share of mirth.

So is Saturn and his noble train made mellow
and reminded of their human traces by the playful youth,
and all are linked, one to each and man to his captive fellow,
all in a line with the splendours of radiant truth:
impeccable beauty’s dress, storied tradition
and the purity of rhythm, a comb of honey rich
for the priestly poet to drink deep and gift
to the thirsting masses of his mission,
who cry out nightly for a higher pitch
to harmonise with and curb their errant drift

Angels sing
To troubled souls
To broken wings
Burnt and buried
In ashes
Shining light
Through fear and despair
Like

You sing
To my troubled soul
Weaving hope
Through songs of sorrow
You are the perfect harmony
To my ballad of desperation
Like

Angels whisper
To sinners
To lovers
Porcelain hearts
Shattered to pieces
Declaring the mess forgiven
Like

You whisper
To me, a sinner,
Anecdotes
As anti-dotes
For my pain induced wrath
You make me want to be better
Like

Angels speak
To good
To evil
To me
Like

You

You
Like
Angels
Like
Home

They called him King in chalk-dust court,
his throne a broken locker door,
his crown—the fear in smaller frames
that flinched before his hollow roar.

Each lunchtime feast of stolen sweets,
each nickname carved in bathroom stalls,
each tear he wrung from weaker hands
only proved the walls were walls,

and no one came to tear them down.

At home, the microwave beeped
its lonely anthem to the dark.
Mother’s perfume still haunted
the doorknob where she’d hung her coat—

now just a phantom of a scent
on jackets from the secondhand store.
Father’s voice survived in echoes:
“You’re nothing. Less than nothing. More.”

So he made something from the nothing,
built his body into threat,
learned to weaponize the silence
before it swallowed him. And yet—

The more he made them shake and scatter,
the more the mirror blurred at night,
until his face became a stranger’s,
pale and stretched and never right.

Graduation came. No pictures.
Just a name in peeling paint
on the bench where he’d held court,
now just a ghost of finger stains.

Years later, in a parking lot
behind the Walmart where he worked,
the engine running, windows sealed,
he finally faced the thing he’d birthed—

not fear, not strength, but absence,
a hollow where a boy had been.
The carbon monoxide whispered
what the silence always meant:

You built a kingdom of your hunger,
but the throne was always empty.
No one’s left to say you’re gone.
The world won’t tremble. Just the air,
just the flicker of a star
that no one noticed wasn’t there.

And when they found him (three days later),
no one claimed the body. Just
another John Doe in a file,
another turned-to-dust.

But sometimes, when the wind howls
through the schoolyard’s broken fence,
the lockers hum a hollow tune
of what was all that violence for?
And the answer comes in whispers:
Nothing. Less than nothing. More.

I want a truth, curated for me
You may serve it with wine or fine aged Brie
I want a truth that is made to my liking
Acceptable, pleasing, relieving, not striking
I want my truth boiled and braised
Topped with breadcrumbs, hand fed, farm raised
Oh picking and choosing is oh so much fun-
What do you mean you have only one!?
I made an order! With salad and rye
What you’ve told me today simply must be a lie

I felt my heart skip
It went pitter patter
I went to the doc
To sort through the matter

In the history they asked
Any new things to figure
Things you might feel
That could be the trigger

I thought very hard
Was there anything new
Yes… this Jersey girl
On Toepfer Avenue

They ran all the tests
And pulled all the stops
To know why my heart
Did gymnastical flops

The results all came in
Jersey girl, she’s the trouble
We know she’s the reason
Your heartbeat goes double

Well now that I know
It is sort of sweet
To live with a heart
With a Jersey girl beat