By: Sverre G. Holter & Digital Asylum*

I|

I am a man. I was put on
Earth to bleed from my hands.
Work is my virtue. I only sleep well
If I'm exhausted.
Your food and shelter is my gain.
My sweat is the salt on our table.

II|

I *am a man, but also child
with a paper-mache heart and
sandcastle dreams, a child wishing
for later tides while we play
splashing in and out of the waves
but the tide always comes,
and castles crumble, and we
we tell ourselves that there's no need for fear
because we will build stronger walls
tomorrow

III|

Today is our day though
Let us work at love.
Let us play with love.
Let us dance until our feet
Blister and we collapse
Laughing into each other's arms in equal fatigue.
All I want is you.
All I have is you.
All I've never lost is love.
It is our costliest toy;
Unbroken

IV|

Unbroken it may be for now
yet the time will come, as with all good things
where life and love will come to its bitter end
our lives will have ran their course
and in that moment, we will know and be known
we will laugh our last laugh
we will drink and be merry
knowing we loved and were loved
and as the water comes washing in
we still stand behind walls of sand
and we will face the tide together

*unafraid

When I was oh, so younger
I used to rule the day
Catching toads
And flying paper planes
Until the lure of pretty girls
Got right in the way
My destiny came calling
And I chased it on the run
Time goes by while tears run smiles
And not every day is fun

The chase was fun,
But oh, how it ended.
They no longer caught my fancy.
I turned to games and friends instead
Until one day, girls started to chase me

And what a merry chase it was
Living and loving just because
Age is a constant gardener
A teacher of self and suffering
The premise of life eternal
An opening of not merely eye
But heart, mind and soul
To find love is to know life
And to know life is life eternal
Captive on a carousel of time
The world is yours, ours and mine

We fell in love and the world erupted in fireworks.
Nothing could have been better.
The pure joy that I felt with her was unrivaled by nothing I've ever felt before.
She was the one.

The one who became my other
Who completed me
Who took me to places love had never shown me
And felt like home
A place to belong
Yes...she was the one


No other could take her place.
She was mine,
Just as I was hers.
We were one, together,
Yet still just me and her.


And in that we found our destiny

At St John's church in the year of 1843
The priest Father O'Day couldn't rise off of his knees
The congregation did attempt to stand the man upright
Yet he'd not be relieved of this his stuck plight

Some in the congregation checked out in the back
Hoping against all hope that it wasn't that
But the sacramental wine was filled up to the brim
Which had them wonder further as to what was wrong with him

Like the sculpture of Mary Magdalene his position was set
Of the rigid state he'd never ever forget
All the alter boys offered prayers for a solution
Being quite disturbed by O'Day's poor kneeling elocution

Was this a trance or was he deep in prayer
Given over to the circumstance did it really matter
They called up Mother Superior to ask of her advice
As it was fish Friday, she said some other time

From out of the fathers prayer book a letter it did drop
The contents in it was not news that he could readily cop
A decrease in his annual stipend had on this day been proposed
On reading about it his knees quickly became indisposed

As he wondered how he would pay for his chalet in France
Or the expensive clothes he liked to wear to the local dance
Along with his butlers and half a dozen maids
In all of his high living never once did he think to save

A litany of poor monetary decisions had brought O'Day to his knees
No divine intervention would undo his futile freeze
Coveting the high-life on a paltry priestly wage
Would awaken him to a lesson of that more like a sage

Instead of falling into all man's sinful desires
He should have first consulted with his Higher Power
We all see it so plainly there's not much you can say
Except another valuable lesson learned from Father O'day

We will leave you in the midst
of a poetic truce, as you spill
experiences into our open palms.

Writing to make sense of what
has happened, nestling your
deepest secrets in our fingertips.

Our roots so deep in our poetry,
if you tried to unearth us, we would
shriek louder than banshee's.

Unravel our words, enter the
labyrinth of our minds, there are
sunsets in our stomachs, and
December runs through our veins.

We are the stars to your blank skies,
the pause between each ragged breath,
the tragedy suffocating the air.

We are the pause before the applause,
we are rarity's like Haley's comet,
making you scramble for a telescope.

Only crows writhing with broken
necks are more twisted than the life
stories resting under our tongues.

We are poets, engraved in history,
fluent in all that is artistic and worldly.

Poetry is a warm blanket we remain
hidden in on a cold winter morning.
Reality is a cold floor that our
bare feet are too scared to touch.

*By Rapunzel and JannaLee Perry

Sitting here silently stripping my mind of the setbacks in my life, is just what I do to set the record straight for myself -it's so simple, I smile. I travel in my seasoned mind to the streets lined with live oaks along the streetcar line on Saint Charles Avenue and stand in the shimmering sunlight between the dancing shadows on the broken sidewalk for a while.

In the classic void of reminiscences,  I see the staggered walkways set askew by the carelessness of Time, meandering past the stately antebellum homes, guarded by hushed sentries, these whitewashed lions tinged with the chartreuse hues of age and forgetfulness.

Sentries sitting for centuries on static haunches, frozen in place by inertia, while azaleas bloom 'neath the Magnolia blossoms that fill the humid air with a perfume that beggars the reek of Forget-Me Not flowers.

If I must travel in my dreams, let them be daydreams of the fruitful past, when the uptown scene seemed complete, with moving pictures in technicolor themes; and they moved the wooden seats back, facing home.

The end of the line was a block from the muddy Mississippi, and my lover's house was too, (although further up the Old Spanish Trail.) Once I followed it all the way to the Pacific, and a different time zone alone.

It was like a
nuclear explosion
the day vision
caught fire,  
atoms were fusing
  and reverberating
titillated skies were
  in accordance,
the force of power
    by which poetry
       is reckoned,
eyes full of mist
heart ground to grist
at least 1000 lonely
   teardrops kissed
mind overflowing
with notions impossible
then it occurred to me,
   words are unstoppable -
irrepressible as
  hot steam locomotives
   and star combustion,
  waging a crusade 'pon
fire breathing dragons
'tween undulating cloudbursts
       of empyrean's ' stardust
amidst the conformation
       of an unrestrained utopia

I recently saw something I wrote published in Poets online under the name Pamela Hope. Does anyone know anything about this person, or did I mistakenly write a famous older expression into my work? I don't recall that, and this is why I am reluctant to post any of my better efforts anywhere but in a published book.