Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
  Jul 2014 Ophelia
Amitav Radiance
Nurture your fertile dreams
Those are your wings to fly
To distant lands and beyond
Enriching the earnest mind
With the folklore of mankind
Dreams meeting dreams
It can take you beyond Ether
Dreams help you meet
With the higher consciousness
Dreams give you wings to fly
  Jul 2014 Ophelia
Westley Barnes
Somebody
had thrown a cassette
of Therapy?'s "Troublegum"
its nicotine-hued tape
mangled like the innards of
a gutted fish, or
so many sprayed limbs
in a crowded car pile-up
-decorating the bare branches
of the winter-stricken trees
which lay beyond the barbed wire fence
that separated the state-supported
and architecturally sound
playground facade of the solitary concrete grounds
-with empty swings-
of our mixed gender primary school
of 200 plus students (whom were
referred to as "pupils"-which reminded me
too much of eyes, but children are all eyes, aren't they?
With golden-hued irises, who seem to remember
everything).

Who had thrown it there?
Smashing all the angst-sodden, ripped guitar reverberations
-the fruits of a few individuals hard grasp and compromise, toiled out through a probable number of significant years-
that had lurked inside?
Why that gesture and why in that place?
Perhaps it had been the jettisoned request
of some clandestine love affair
(ephemerality also lays claims to gifts, to its plural gesture)
or, maybe in a more obviously classical mode,
it was only the result
of a bored friend who cared little for the music
or the efforts behind its delivery?

Whatever the reason,
its one of a handful of memories
that have stayed with me
when my thoughts strayed back to that school
(mostly without an intended purpose).

Also, across the same wasteland
there were assembled corrugated shacks
lined in front of back-garden walls
strewn with illegible graffiti
anticipating the waning rave culture
where we supposed-and were frightened by the thought-
that were the hang-outs of Drug users (AIDS was still a topic then)
and Pedophiles.

But then again,
we never tried to find out.
Therapy? are a Post-Punk (early-career) / Pop-Punk/Metal (-present day) band from Northern Ireland. "Troublegum"-their most commercially successful album- was released in 1994.
The image from this poem dates from 3/4 years after the album's release.
  Jul 2014 Ophelia
k
he looked at me and for a second i saw stars fall. i was no longer submerged in gravity's thick blanket, i was wrapped in his iris and pulled into the arms of his eye sockets.
i thought i must be an astronaut, since this was a different planet, something i'd always imagined venus or jupiter would be like.
i'm breathing through his lungs and it feels foreign to me, the kind of feeling you get when you step inside someone else's home--
except this one had a soul and a voice that put me to sleep even when i was so restless i felt i had the moon hanging on my shoulders.
so, with that, i crawled inside his bloodstream and shut out the lights, his voice barely audible when he told me he could no longer feel me pushing him away.
  Jul 2014 Ophelia
Tark Wain
There were ten boys in a room
numbered one through ten
they all lived peacefully
until the moment when
number ten took a liking to
number seven's suede shoes
three defended ten while
six and seven made a truce

ten shot a rocket
with questionable aim
after which we find
number two had been slain
eight and nine shot back
with a sling shot blast
while ten used four
to cover his ***

four perished, as one
came to his aid
spraying blindly
over where four laid
when it was over
only seven and ten remained
while one fell over exhausted
his resources drained

seven looked down at his shoes
which after the fighting were no longer new
he took them off one by one
and handed them to ten
deciding the war was no longer needed
ten thanked seven and walked away
to the corner and turned around
he'd fight again another day
  Jul 2014 Ophelia
Haruka
I found an old sweatshirt of yours under my bed yesterday,
and I spent the day crying over a box of your memories
that I don't have the courage to throw away.
The days pass by at the speed of light,
but nights are spent endlessly heaving out old promises
of children we will never have,
of places we will never go,
or lives we will never share.

You left without a goodbye
and I convince myself that closure is what I need.
But somewhere behind my cobweb covered heart and dusty bones,
I know I really just need you again.

I built my flimsy paper home within your ribcage
and I saw you had a lit match balanced between your fingertips,
but I stayed.
Because I knew going in that this game was dangerous,
and I was willing to risk it all for the idea of you.

When the walls came down,
I frantically reached for some solitude to hold onto.
My hands clawed at the inferno looking for your familiar relief,
but all I found was ash.
Because that's all you really left in your wake:
black ash that thickly coated my insides,
suffocating me until the last molecule of air
exited my exhausted body.

Despite all this,
I still hold onto
the tragic memories,
the series of dismantled almosts.
The silence is crippling,
and the idea of what could've been,
plays painfully across my fragmented memories.

"You're simply extraordinarily ordinary."

This is my final goodbye.
I titled this poem
with a song from the album, "Scotland, I Wish You Had Stayed".

It was something I listened to a lot when you left.
Next page