Poetry Owl

--prompts from mine (10 July)

Let's share a Porto wine-- the one in which you shipped yourself on a cargo ship to obtain so that you may salvage the original while saving the world.

In aluminum goblets, from which we engraved our memories and our vows, we consume the first consumation of what is true, what is sacred, what is...

darkening the tub with just a few drops.

Nobody is dying here, but you flipped the cup over. I'm still taking a few sips to measure the dryness, because our love is worth the murky seas of desperation.

The bathwater imbues; bitterness muddies sincerity when you offer me rest in merlot bubbles. But I'm blowing others and making wishes of having another day.

You eat dates without abandon, spitting pits like darts on the tiles. I want a date to decide if I'm bound to you with an open heart,

without the iron shackles, rusting without a key.

They built a stage out of anger a kingdom made of sound where every wound became a weapon and every enemy was found

They wore the color like armor held the slogan like a prayer believing if they shouted louder the truth would disappear

A promise wrapped in nostalgia a dream of yesterday a golden picture painted over all the cracks along the way

They gathered beneath the banners beneath the flashing lights where fear became a currency and outrage fueled by nights

The crowd became a mirror reflecting all that they feared a thousand voices drowning out the doubts they refuse to hear

They called it a movement called it a righteous fight but some lost themselves completely chasing someone else's fake light

Because power loves a follower and anger loves a throne It whispers "you are chosen" while leaving them all alone

The greatest tragedy isn't that the people want a cause it's when they hand away their hearts and never once see the loss

A nation isn't healed by hatred dressed up as pride or by building walls between us and telling us to choose a side

So I watch this red tide rising the division and all this pain wondering how many lost souls will lose themselves within the flame

In France, the dance of the animals

Was told in stone. Alchemists masked

Marched between castle and cathedral

Leavened land danced

Between sweet unmanaged stretches

Where reaching necks swayed in garment-taking gales

Enchanting nameless features

The handsome sort, rocks which by phantom moonlight’s torch

Seemed forts for faeries or parts of old forges

Where lost arts were explored

To source great arms and armour for sworded lords.

A field ragged and bombshorn 

Low shallow, a trench formerly

Marking where the drenched advance 

The time itself keeps a diary

Where the lines are crooked, and the sentence spree

Doesn’t stop or end, though misery

Rips pages off, admittedly

As time re-reads and doesn’t like remembering

That’s why it stutters the same words

In panic, in its room, walks back and forth

Looking for oblivion little by little

Now, time isn’t very smart, no no

The lows of then will come back to bite it

Forgetting is but opioid, and time’s an addict

A frantic disillusionary, a youngling still in diapers

Though until its own ideas ripen,

I fear,

It will throw away the diary

Brother tells me I’m going to hell

For baby-birding the Eucharist

To my three-year-old niece

Because while riding shotgun on my hip

She held a hand out

In curiosity

Never mind me taking a sacrament

When I forsook that part of me

I give my grandmother’s eulogy

I am already in hell

____________________________________________

Astral projection, Detected (perhaps dreamt); that face, and…

Maybe I am filling in the blanks with these Ecoline ink clouds.

Vivifying emptinesses. Twirling all colours Ever more till something sticks for a while, Not instantly obliterated by the adjudicator. I recall

Animosity? Mist wisps; Omissible details, still Reestablishing (you) my unforgiving nature.

details, like mosaics, decades old

around eleven, the adrenaline slow 

fall from my red Christmas bike,

ripping skin on loose gravel,

catching the pain across my palms

facts of a sort

followed by conjecture

the sky was winter grey—

I was heading home (from where)

hurriedly (was I late, for what

or just the thrill of speed

or both— fear and joy dancing

together like flames)

perhaps, perhaps

what-ifs’ multitudes unravel

with time and causal doubts

as perhaps twist and spin into now’s

singular, tight, and irretrievable knot

I tell myself I know and knew

the bits of broken glass cohere

but I don’t anymore than I did

I fell, I bled, I must

have made it home

for I am here

Assuaged now, the brink Adorning l'appel du vide with its silver.

Lamentations sucked into the vacuum Reverberate not. A storm-eye beckons.

Revivified, Emerges the sight: Illumination — once again Whispering of time constructs I cannot

Possess; far beyond my grasp, this you That is permeating my Every subatomic particle, Shapeshifter.

deal of seconds-

you

along with the moment

if darkness was empty, filled with you

fetched out of the

earth

in blur pale turning

hiding

a feeling swept over the heart

Jessica Bahr

You preach collapse like it's a religion in basements that smell like mold and cheap beer Milwaukee chewing you up through broken windows while you cosplay revolution in thrift-store black

Every patch on your jacket screams louder than you ever did Every slogan half-read, half-believed stitched together like your sense of purpose fraying at the seams the second real life shows up

You talk about burning systems down but can't even hold a job long enough to understand what you're trying to destroy You romanticize hunger like it's protest like starving is some noble middle finger instead of just…being hungry

There's always a meeting another circle another endless argument about theory no one's lived

You shout "no gods, no masters" then bow to whoever talks the loudest in the room another self-appointed prophet with a zine and a superiority complex

Milwaukee winters don't care about your ideology The cold doesn't debate It doesn't recognize it just freezes same as the looks you give anyone who doesn't fit your curated rage

You eat your own faster than any system ever could call it accountability while sharpening knives made of moral purity and boredom Exile is easier than reflection

And em? I wanted something real Something that bled truth instead of performance But all I found were echoes angry, hollow, rehearsed ricocheting off brick walls and boarded dreams

You don't want to tear it down You want to belong to something breaking

The insanity in mundanity has turned me quite irrational

Holding onto glimpses of some other world

Fading where memory fails, déjà vu

what have you

Re-create me something brand new

in your image

Dilate me sweetly beguile me with your innocent eyes

Erstwhile those out there wreaking and seeking my exile

Won’t you take me, keep us safe

The most spontaneous thing I did so far in my life, was right after college when I was 20. I had gone back home after school to Florida but moved in with a roommate in Jacksonville after a week at my parents but that situation was not working out. After a night of partying to not deal with anything, my best friend at the time, asked me to go with her in 2 days to go back up north to Long Island to move and stay with her sister and her family. I, in a moment of impulsiveness, said okay let's do it. Stayed in Long Island for 8 months, loved her family but decided to move again ( in total that year, from 97 to 98, I moved 6 times, and 28 times overall in my life so far), let's just say their was a rift between sisters and I didn't want to come between family.

Would I do it again? Well quite simply yes.

Last night,

the moon poured silver

into the empty cup of my skull,

and I drank until I could no longer remember

which side of sleep was real.

I dreamed of a garden

where every rose had my face

and every thorn whispered,

You planted me.

A nightingale broke open its small red throat

singing to a Beloved who never arrived,

because the Beloved was already

the branch,

the bird,

the longing,

and the song.

I wandered farther.

There was a river carrying stars

through the black silk of nowhere.

I bent to drink

and saw a thousand lives trembling in the water,

each one calling itself I.

A child.

An old woman.

A beggar sleeping beneath a cedar.

A king removing his crown

when no one was watching.

I reached into the river to touch them,

but my hand became water.

The water became moonlight.

The moonlight became an eye.

And the eye was looking

from everywhere.

Then laughter

Not from a mountain.

Not from heaven.

Not from somewhere hidden behind the world.

The laughter was the world.

It shook the figs from the trees.

It rattled the bones of the dead.

It danced inside the moth

burning itself against the lamp.

Who do you think is dreaming whom?

I searched for the one who had asked.

No one.

Only this vast, impossible Presence

wearing ten thousand masks

and kissing itself through every mouth.

I woke before dawn

with my hands empty.

The room returned.

The walls.

The window.

My sleeping body.

The faint blue morning

waiting behind the curtains.

But something of the dream remained.

Or perhaps something of me

did not.

For now I wonder:

When I close my eyes

and a universe appears,

and when I open them

and another universe appears,

what is it

that never closes its eyes?

Perhaps there has only ever been

the Dreamer,

dreaming the dream,

entering the dream,

forgetting itself beautifully

in every creature it becomes,

only to awaken somewhere

inside its own creation

and whisper,

Here I am.

And even that

A Tree's Scream

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

emptiness swallows my screams

I am still sorting through the wreckage— jagged glass embedded in my knees, crushed metal cages me in, measuring what is gone by what will not grow back.

I am the tree lying in the undergrowth

the absence of observation does not soften the damage in the aftermath there is still debris there is still me.

I am the tree, or maybe only the space where it should be trying to remember if I ever stood at all