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His words twisted the corners
so right curved into left,
and truth bent sideways,
making me believe
I was going the wrong way.
Hedgerows grew tall,
and thick with argument,
until they swallowed the gas lampposts,
turning pathways into shadows.
I walked blind and barefoot
through the thick of it,
earth damp, worn thin as my breath.
Was I supposed to find the center?
Was there ever an exit?
There was no map,
just whispers in the leaves,
and his voice,
ringing in my ears,
a compass spinning
from asking too many questions,
and doubt,
folded into my own pocket.
My soul became blistered
from chasing after ghosts of
wanted apologies,
so I kissed the ivy,
hoping the walls would soften.
but they spiraled,
a boa constrictor handcuffing my legs.
I took a sharp turn,
desperate,
crawling on my belly,
a soldier avoiding fire,
fingertips clawing into the red clay,
and found the center,
where a red lip-sticked mirror stood,
half cracked, words still whole:
"you're not the one who's lost"
 May 23 Mike Adam
Malcolm
Our love was deeper than the ocean
deeper than Poseidon's sighs, where leviathans hum lullabies to sleeping coral,
our love churned beneath sapphire trenches — ancient, glowing,
etched in whale-song scripts that only the stars could read.
It spiraled downward past jellyfish lanterns, trailing silk,
where seaweed reached like dreaming fingers toward the memory of moonlight.

We walked along the shore
fairy-light footsteps, hands in clutch,
we danced across the silver moonlit shore,
where the sea birds screamed stories to the waves
and the waves replied with thunderous applause.
Tiny ***** in brown tuxedos spun pirouettes,
carrying secrets in shells, clicking out riddles for the sand to decode.

Falling through the clouds like a skydiver without a parachute
we plummeted like wingless angels giggling in gusts,
through cotton-candy cumulonimbus, pierced by rainbow veins.
A trumpet played jazz for the falling golden, reckless,
and somewhere below, Earth slipped on her own rhythm,
dodging our love like a bashful muse.

We walked through the fields
across hills and plains soaked in buttercup breath,
fields covered in flowers drunk on the sun’s honey.
The grass whispered ballads in chlorophyll tongues,
while rivers drew lazy spirals, their laughter tickling the rocks.
Above, the sky blushed cerulean, scattered with ink-drop swallows
and a single cloud shaped like a promise we never kept.

Stars sang lullabies for the tides, their voices stitched with cosmic thread,
and moons — glowing like prophets —drifted in dream-silk robes.
The sands of starlit beaches shimmered with golden orbs,
rolling like marbles tossed by gods with time to spare.
And we, mad and luminous, kissed in the tide’s breath
as if the universe had no need for sanity, only sound and spark.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
May 2025
Where Skydivers Dream and Whales Remember
I'm fading with the light.
My shadow takes flight
naked unseen from sight
'til full moon midnight.
In your wake,
In your silence,
a subtle soundtrack
swarms my head.

The melody of beeping monitors,
The rhythm of knuckles on bed rails,
And the verses, pitched in pain.

They only grow louder, still.

But, grabbing at the void
for any last sound of you,
I hear the wind rushing by
as the world just keeps turning,
I hear the cackling of atoms
that never stopped their motion,
I hear the grass strands
rudely displacing your plot’s dirt,
And reality itself popping
as it rips apart at the seams.

Truth is, I thought I’d feel silent without you,
But it’s grown louder, still.
 May 23 Mike Adam
Onoma
Lightning drowned

its boiled quickening.

Its baptism's wielded thirst.

Sword unto water, water unto

quintessence without name.

Bubbles like a black dress

that meant to confuse its open

conduit.

Charms in cloth, cloth in motion,

motion in dance--downs the guard

of rain.

The silver flood of a star that crosses

its star.

Quartered water, reflectionless

water--spoken over in dead

containment.

Spells that do not spill from their

dead containment--hide the clearest

face from stars.

What's hidden hopes to poison

another's quintessence, that they

may become that dead containment.

Water sees this, water Knows those

blessed by its quintessence, its sheen--

its Fish.

Sees to it that those that curse die slowly

by water, jerking & sinking where a

fish would be.
he lives in an oblong trailer
at a trailer park.

every night he'd make a pitcher of margaritas.
salt around the rim of the glass.
crushed ice to the top of the glass.
the glass cold to his hand.

he turns the t.v. on
and the lamp on the night stand off
and sits in the easy chair
in the darkened room.

he'd drinks the margaritas
and watches t.v. until the station
goes off the air

and then watches the random dot pixels
and listens to the static coming
out of the t.v. speaker.

the flashes of light flickering.
and the blue light settles on his face.
eyes open, staring.

the darkness reached for him
and in the ghostly flickering,
he let it.
Punished by the sun
in a desert of our love.

Slipshod the sailing stones,
how dispassion speckles the playa floor,
salt pans dissolve motivating force.

I'm a man returning to his ground.
You're a woman seeking refuge
in the cracked crevices of my rib cage.

So far below sea level,
where does love go from here to survive?

Perhaps, Chloride City
and the grave of a James McKay?

Maybe at Bottle House in Rhyolite,
the "Queen City"?

Either way, this sensation has become an unsacred mirage:

the watering hole, a leadfield,
with which we can only look back from.

Praying the sulfur in the sky
passes on from this place,

before we turn into something sodium, something akin to
Lot's careless wife.
 May 23 Mike Adam
rk
poet
 May 23 Mike Adam
rk
loving you
turned me into a poet
both the artist and the muse
all at once
knowing i'd sing for you
just as quickly as i'd bleed
to make your world
more beautiful

even now
i'd describe the sea
a thousand ways
just to capture
your shade of blue.
 May 23 Mike Adam
Karen
Beneath warm grey skies
The soul saw you, heart felt you
In light and shadow
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