Author: poetryfest

I got new glasses that have yellow lenses. They sit a bit crooked on my face, but I couldn’t pass them up. Besides, they get the job done…sort of. They don’t protect my eyes from smoke and dust, but they look really cool! Everyone’s wearing them. Some people try to get the filter off, but it was added years ago. You can’t remove some things that’ve been engraved for years –– Yellow lens…is there anything as flashy?

Because you couldn’t keep your feelings hidden for more than a week. Because I caught all the times you were staring at me, but you pretended not to. Because I saw the way your eyes softened when you looked at me. Because of the intense chemistry I originally tried to deny. Because of the tingling I felt whenever your arm brushed against mine. Because I couldn’t help but smile when we spoke. Because you were patient. Because of the pointless arguing. Because I tried to push you away, but you wanted to stay. Because you said you wouldn’t leave unless I gave you a reason. Because I couldn’t stay mad at you no matter how hard I tried.

Because of the way you couldn’t help but listen whenever I spoke. Because you remembered that cherry blossoms were my favorite. Because of the way you remembered everything I’ve ever said. Because you said I was “like a flower that stood out, that you couldn’t snatch just yet, but always wanted just for yourself.” Because you called me “adorable” whenever I “stressed over nothing.” Because you noticed parts of me that I always thought were overlooked. Because you said I was “purehearted” even at my worst. Because you knew I never had a safe place to land, so you became that for me. Because you called me out for my “bad acting” when it came to showing my true feelings. Because you simply just laughed every time I got mad and called you a jackass.

Because you called me “beautiful,” and for the first time, I actually believed it. Because being wrapped in your arms made me feel safe. Because of the way you played with my long black hair. Because of the way you could take one look into my eyes and understand me like no one else. Because you understood the deepest, darkest parts of me and still said I was worth everything.

Because you pushed me in a way that no one else ever has before, and in the best possible way. Because you never made me feel like a burden. Because you brought out my vulnerable side. Because you brought back that childhood giggle I thought was long gone. Because you brought back the version of me that’s a romantic and loves the color pink. Because you helped me fall in love with my naturally curly hair again after seventeen years. Because in the short four months we shared, I started to like the version of myself that I became whenever I was around you. Because it was simply just you.

Red suns
Over a burnt
Horizon
Culling life
From glass land
Sands of time
Shattered
As innocence
Crumbles
And cries
Out for reprieve
Assassination
Of all that
Resembles human
Severing moral
Ties and proceeding
To the lion’s den
Believing to be alive
But only a walking
Corpse
Harmony conducted
By armored weapons
Of self-appointed
Saints
Eating the Garden
Scraps flung
Off the table
For disillusioned vulnerable
A chess match
For financial supremacy
And the club is
Exclusive, exempt
As carnage paints
Itself across a
Desert canvas
Blood is a sea
Washing the feet
Of survivors
And a weary world
Watches on,
In debate,
In uneasy trust,
In quiet,
In unrest,
In anger,
In disgust
In favor
And those
Wading through
The rising tide
Gasp on thinning air
God has withdrawn
For only the just
Are given
Room to breathe.

Pity the people who pity the party,
who pick on the poor,
who take a poke and a prod at the penniless.

Peoples, plentiful as you—
the man beside you,
and the man you think you see above.

The prince pours pints of purple piss on the paupers;
presidentially, he pours onto—

Wondrous women went wandering with the willows—
wildly witted woman, walk wayward
to wilt and wine with the wizened.
We won’t wish to wash away our wonderland,
So, walk right by, on the world you wired to fire.
Witches wise and rising, going westward,

watering the woodland for the we and the wee on the way.
Wear out your wailing whimsy and collect the waif,
for I cannot wind our withering alone- watch.

You’ll find the trolls triggered,
tripped on and over the tomb.
Then the truth will trudge forth,
for this is leading them to that.
The tasteless and torturous take to tame a man who mends and bends his amends.

The men who won’t pay mind to my merit.
Merely mortal are we,
and might man be morally evil? Eyes rise—

Everyone is exempt from eternal exile
in the eyes of a non-earthly individual—
an equal opportunist
who eats and feasts with the sky lords.

Let us not lose sight of the lucky.
Lucky is the lad lying
in the lair of lunar lights,
looking on the lowly, lumbering laborers,
letting out a lion-like laugh.

Ah, the abundance of apathy
athwart the Americas.
Apart, the awry ones—
a part of the apprehended.
Almost all are unaware,
apart from the astrals.

Oh, the oppressed ones—
onward to the oracles!
The obtuse and obedient—
let us put out their obituary,
and only the objectors
will be outed to oblivion.

Rare riders of the righteous horse
through the rubble,
to the ruins of the roaring rain.

Rash are those reaping rewards,
who are rightfully rabid.
Radical is it to remind the restless
of the once right-minded,
roaring roof-toppers.

Eager ears, ebullient
for equality’s epithalamium,
each awaiting the earthlight,
an exhale and its epiphany.

An earnest expressionist,
our effervescent educators—
rest easy, to the visionaries and the envisioned,
eliminated by economic enthusiasts.

Now know nativity, nurtured by a cycled nursling,
neglected by the nightlight.
Hush now, nascent one—
come November, he will need
the stark and naked avengers
to kneel against the Nile.

Even the knights engorge on the nation’s neglected,
Their noses nestled as their knees go necrotic.

A Ney will trill as once before,
when they said long ago—
and again—
nevermore.
For it is the nearness of the ending
and the knowing of the null.

Blanketed by the distance between our mouths
That substance between us hovers strung out
Floating, living in the air that we mingle
You and me everything else un-seeable

You tell me I’m a tree, then you carve into me
Scraping out the demons old lovers left lingering
Breathe life into my branches
Sap drips from my leaves
The air round us hangs pure, crystal, clean

You can’t stay for long, you live off the ground
Soaring around like you live in the clouds
You stop time to leave me covered in dust
Shimmering, glimmering, a trail of light where I touch

I’ll keep changing and growing, may never see you again
But that thing we left hanging, it’s perfect and never ends.

The angels envy us. The broken,
the weak and greedy because
we are free to be so.

Weep for their loss.

They covet us because
angels are able only to watch
from the edges and yearn with
empty white eyes.

Weep for their ennui.

Become more than an angel.
Breach the limits of your heartbreak.
Rap on the glass
with fierce, bleeding knuckles.

Weep from the pleasure of it.

Experience what is broken, weak,
and greedy; the sorrows of the world,
then weep in wonderment of it all.

6:27 – Mercius Attys is dead, which marks it as the 27th city to be heavily bombarded and reduced to a single word which speaks volues, FREEDOM not with a period with a question mark.

6:30 – You sit in your lime blue sofa on other days it would feel soft but today that word is absent. ‘Don’t come out, don’t open the door’ you remind yourself. You go to the window but stop, the same sentence crosses your mind, last words Mom said before she promised to come back.

6:45 – Hell is closer to our knees so you pray while standing, repeating the same word again and again in fear until it loses meaning, in belief until it loses meaning, in hope until it loses meaning.

God,God,God.

7:00 – God is asleep, its been weeks now Dad hasn’t come back. You stopped asking but it will take you years to stop questioning.

7:22 – ”The state is urged to play host to any citizen and stay indoors. Mass shootings and futile killings continue upstate.” the TV says. Someone knocks on your heart it’s terror.

7:40 – Ali calls”Hello-Yeah I am fine. My mom and dad left too. No”. You put the receiver down. 1..2..3, you cry why? You wonder. That’s the first time you have spoken in 46 hours so every word weighed, brought back the life before. ‘Hello’, ‘fine’, ‘My Mom and Dad’. Ali is alive-as alive as someone can be right now. You wonder about other students of class.

7:44 – You try to breathe because you have to, alarmingly, irregularly or unusually but you have to breathe.

7:50 – You pick up school diary and a pilot pen. It is this or insanity. You don’t choose so you write. Grief? Pain? Loss? What am I feeling? What can one feel when every face you have seen in your life is potentially dead? So would you.

7:56 – You break the pen and throw the diary at the lamp. Your hands in a foreign colour. Blue blood.

7:58 – ’I have to find Mom’ you say to the faint smell of smoke and plastor.

8:02 – ’I have to find Mom’ you decide.

8:04 – You are searching for it but you can’t find that one thing. True nature of coincidence. TV still talking to smiling pictures in the living room.

8:10 – Behind the cupboard, under the bed, nothing,’Oh wait! What is that? Ah just a broken cracker’, you continue searching.

8:12 – You are tired. Didn’t thought that you could be anything other than scared but you are.

8:14 – So you realise the hierarchy Love, Loss, Grief, Hope, Hunger. So you eat that goddamn cracker.

8:15 – No one told you what to do when you can’t stay inside because you can’t risk dying alone but you can’t go outside.

8:17 – Checkmate, fried beans, necklace, emporiums, southern mall, dimsums random words in your mind, scenes playing in your head of your Mom talking.

8:19 – Dracy?Yes, yes he was the one who flew to study dragons or was it Charles or Charlie?, you can’t stop your mind from going on.

8:25 – A four letter word for smelly, you pretend to think.

8:26 – What exactly will they achieve by all this?

8:26 – If I run to Claire’s place. It’s like 2 minutes.

8:26 – Going to grandparent’s doesn’t seem so bad now does it?

8:26 – ”Mayor’s both wives and 3 out of 4 children abducted, one presumably dead. Unidentified bodies count increases to two thousand.” T.V. tries interrupting.

8:27 – ”Is anyone home heh!” he laughed as he sang in cruel mockery, broke the door and got excited to see you.

8:28 – You are still, scared to move or breathe or run or cry. So you hang in front of him, unsure unlike his gun metal, cold and sure.

8:29 – He aims for your heart from the back.’COWAR-‘ you lie silently, ’I am back mom’ last breath freed as your eyes said.

She rolled the wooden cane
towards the open doorway,
down a narrow hall.
She squeezed her
bunioned toes
into her new orthopedic shoes,
still a bit too tight.
Bertie leaned down.
She could not pull the sock
with her swollen fingers.

Last night’s Shabbos chicken soup
had no backbone or taste.
Too much salt. Tears of fear.
Rotating circles of oil whirling
between dill and parsley tails,
shifting days and seasons into
80 years and one week.
Time has moved on.
Mama’s chicken soups
lingered on her tongue.
Memory.
That is all she has left.

Shuffling behind her walker,
Bertie shifted her weight,
and moved back and forth.
Bent over like the Joker yet
standing still.

How much has been forgotten?
Too much has been lost.
A wooden cane was hidden
under the living room, one deck
of playing cards, joker bent in two.
Bertie did not understand.
Facts And fiction interfaced in storytelling.
All that is left is memory.

Imposing passersby,
already forgotten,
remembered all too well.
That girl with the red woolen coat,
almost a century now.
Inhale
exhale
one day
one hour
one minute
one hushed
breath
at a time.
Tick tock tick tock tick.
The taxi toots its horn.
The time had come.

Bertie stared out over the crowd.
Scrutinizing her surroundings with
the raven’s glare.
The memorial flag,
flew half-mast while hundreds
marched in solitude,
memory between each shadow.
Mumbled numbers, names forgotten.
Ticktock ticktock ticktock.

Rivka and Ruben emerged,
the welcomed mirage.
Fragile blue-veined fingers
waved hesitantly in the wind, relaying
shouts of joy from above
the amassing crowds.
The flag was raised.
No one was lost. Everyone knew:
We are here.

Bertie and Rivka clasp hands,
forgetting the decades that have passed.
They are no
longer youngsters.
It is over.
Tick tock tick tock. The flag,
the numbers not
forgotten.

There was a time
when the chicken soup
was not too salty
and when names were barely
remembered or spoken out loud.
A time of the other.
A time when time stood still.
The time when counting minutes
tick tock
and watching the movements
of one another
saved lives if only for
one more tick.

This time Bertie and Rivka
stood at attention, fearless.
They have survived.
Memories of last night’s
chicken soup, somewhat salty
tasted delicious while tears of laughter
jiggled their new false teeth.
Bertie swallowed her pride
and Rivka savored it all.

They are together now.
This is what truly matters,
more than anything.
They embrace each other and softly
whisper their names.

Arms enfold,
legs entangle

Battering memories
change to sighs,

in my mind’s room
of reliving

Remember meeting
in

light?
honeyed

Remember lying
in

entwined
bedsheets?

A bottle of lip balm
A letter, never opened

A copy of Bowie’s pop

These are all objects
that linger in the memory

These are keepsakes
of a love that forever thunders

in the caverns of the mind,
and always resounds

Remember the myriad caresses
that wrought us both?

Remember, yes, remember,
we can only, now, remember

Cherish these ruminations,
never let them ebb

Because they honour a bond
that teemed more than any,

that out-twinkled every star,
and that must always be revered.

Seemed she of serenity
When sails through teeming fog peered,
Weaved she her intricate melody,
Beauty such the sailors teared.
Loved they her song so heartily
Lest turned away their souls did sear.

Her voice upon the waves adorned,
Loomed vessels by the waterside,
Cliff by ebony sky so mourned,
Ship wayward plunged by potent tide.
Never did cognition dawn,
With rocky depths did they collide.

Came through the mist the telling wood
And gladly sang to him did she,
Where on the bow the sailor stood
And became the anomaly.
He at her call unsheathed his hood
And love met tenderly.

How the dark the stars awake
So did his eyes his face alight,
She reached for to strong arms embrace
Against obsidian night.
In her heart she did ache
To behold such a sight.

For what in her he fondly woke
Him alive and well she’d keep.
To her he gifted one auburn rose
And would again return to sea.
Her chorus rang and drew him close,
Both by verdant love set free.

Alas, hers was a siren’s cry
On the rocks echoed her symphony
The cliff cloaked by onyx sky
And on watched she so bitterly
As on the rocks the wreckage lie
His absent breath bid roar of misery.

With her tears did the ocean rise.
When next a boatswain came a-listening
Her perished love had made her wise,
Their vessels on cliff’s edge splintering,
As ‘fore their deaths they’d see her eyes
Where farewell’s sorrow lay glistening.