We have reached the end of our first online open-mic. It has been even better than I imagined! A big thank you to all the incredible artists who participated!
But don’t be sad, because there is much more to come! Next month we have Love Starts With You, a series on receiving love first for ourselves before we give to others. The submissions are open until February 1st, 2020, so go check it out to participate: Love Starts With You
Lyrics:
At times I want to hide
In the shadows of my mind
I know it there
I know my breath
I know the air
Sometimes I want to cry
Cuz the only thing that I can rely
on is pain
Maybe that makes me a little insane
I spin in circles
I spin in circles
As I search for the answers to life
And I cry myself to sleep because I
Never get it right
I guess I’ll just hope
For sweet dreams
Tonight.
At times I want to give up
When the going gets too rough
I want to close my eyes
And stick to pillow talk
And lullabies
Sometimes I want to scream
But I don’t cuz no one is hearing me
Like a nightmare that you can’t touch
You know it’s not there
But it hurts so much
I spin in circles
I spin in circles
As I search for the answers to life
And I cry myself to sleep because I
Never get it right
I guess I’ll just hope
For sweet dreams
Tonight
Dreams where nothing’s required to be
Dreams where it’s enough to be me
Dreams With no mistakes
Dreams where I feel I’ve got what it takes
At times I want to fight
Against the world
Against the night
I want to do my best
I guess I need a little rest
Artist:
Mia Savant
Australia, 2019-2020
When winter went into ember
wherein you lived your sleep?
I had a flaming kangaroo hopped between
my eyes, and I had none
until my aunt called me to tell the news.
The cold sat on our porch.
The beer bottles left for recycling spacies
refilled themselves with undyed.
Aunt turned up the news. The wildfire
crackled in the newsreader’s throat –
world just dipped south. Kaput.
I opened my sight to the life leaving lives.
Where were you? Did you see
winter fluffing the orange and red?
Our porch spread across the other dimension.
White covered our trash in another world
where I had two eyes sewn beneath,
and winter, alive, weaved a quilt of fables
for those miracles that could have been.
The One Arrested And Later Left At Our Doorstep
The missing one is restored to her apparition,
disoriented, oozy-blood,
smelling like a marsh; two days’ve passed
since the protest fired up from the gully to the alcázar.
We ask the silence to nurse her.
Tim answers the media in waiting.
We blame the throne obviously.
The air stinks of conspiracy.
The missing one, reinstated, exists in flickers,
now here, now beside the basin, a hologram,
a substance, now a totem archaic,
now a numen, Jesus.
The protest flows with the paradigms.
Tim and I ask her what happened inside;
she seems to miss herself if only by a smudge of soul
or some slogan half finished.
Silence bandages her; strings her together.
MediaMedia disappears to attend another somewhere.
Monkey’s Paw
A teargas shell tore off my bro’s hand;
since we called him a primate in childhood
we kept the hand, nicknamed it ‘Monkey’s Paw’,
presented it before every guest in our house,
cherished their shriek; the severed limb
just wouldn’t rot; the second hand revolutionists
often borrowed it for their demonstrations,
but no one asked my sibling what the paw
meant to him. Probably a missing link
in the evolution chain between Adam and Cain.
He wouldn’t have answered anyway, rather
scratched his arm’s end the way one alley cat
scratches the blind bricks when cornered
in dire need of some magic.
Artist:
Kushal Poddar authored ‘The Circus Came To My Island’, ‘A Place For Your Ghost Animals, Understanding The Neighborhood’, ‘Scratches Within’, ‘Kleptomaniac’s Book of Unoriginal Poems’, ‘Eternity Restoration Project- Selected and New Poems’ and now ‘Herding My Thoughts To The Slaughterhouse-A Prequel’ (Alien Buddha Press)
Follow the Artist:
Author Page – amazon.com/author/kushalpoddar_thepoet
Twitter- https://twitter.com/Kushalpoe
Us
We were young
Just learning how to love
Our friendship grew
Into something new
We belonged together
You knew it from the start
You stole my heart
Then I fell apart
And now after all these years
I look at myself in the mirror
The woman staring back at me
Misses what we used to be
Hate and love and broken trust
That is what’s become of us
But something pulled me back to you
And now I don’t know what to do
So here we are
Kissing in the dark
Too late to undo
I’ve lost myself in you
I crave you like an addict
Been starved, unsatisfied
You’re helping me remember
What it’s like to feel alive
Red
I reach out for you but you’re not there
I’m crying, grasping at thin air
I feel it underneath my skin
Your lack of love is creeping in
I’m seeing red
You’re in my head
I lost everything we never had
I missed all our memories
While you never once missed me
I’m your nothing
And nothing hurts more than nothing
Wild In Me
What can I do with this wild in me?
Where can I go to spread my wings?
I want to run, to breathe, be free
So I run, then it starts running me
How do I stay up here so high?
How can I stay in this open sky?
I fear the fall as I struggle to fly
The abyss below is consuming my mind
My aching wings, they’re giving in
My feet crave solid ground again
I’m falling, rushing through the wind
Back to the black I’ve always been
How can I feel when I’m buried so deep?
Twisted up in the words I’ll never speak
The darkness takes me, my body is weak
So I fall apart until I fall sleep
What can I do with this wild in me?
Where can I go to tame the beast?
I want run, to breathe, be free
Free from the wild inside of me
Artist:
Shannon O’Loughlin is 29 years old and has been choreographing, teaching dance and coaching gymnastics for over 12 years. She started out as a competitive gymnast before training in hip hop, breakdance, contemporary, tap, jazz and ballet. Shannon also danced and performed through college at UAA. Her choreography has been featured in halftime shows, dance competitions, auditions, talent shows, gymnastics meets, cheer competitions and dance recitals. She has also choreographed numerous productions for Valley Performing Arts and helped judged local talent shows. Shannon always tells her students, “I learn more from you than you do from me. You are helping me learn how to teach you in a more effective way during every class”. Shannon enjoys writing, watching documentaries, playing guitar, dancing everywhere and doing her make up!
Artist:
Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician currently residing on Salt Spring Island BC, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with over 1,500 poems published internationally in magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His books are ‘The So-Called Sonnets (Silenced Press); ‘An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy; (Cawing Crow Press) and ‘Like As If” (Pski’s Porch), Hearsay (The Poet’s Haven).
The Art of Being
I want to hum along the faded corridors and slip into
the diva’s dressing room, to flick my wings inside
her kimono’s silken sleeves,
I want to leave my tiny footprints in her spilled face powder
and wear her silver eye shadow like a pair of iridescent shoes –
I want to get a glimpse of my flash and glimmer in her bright mirror
then buzz through the shifting heat of the auditorium,
to circle zip dash dive the sweet sticky hairdos
of the ladies in their capes and pearls –
I want to land on the smooth black knee of the flutist
then soar to the tip of the conductor’s baton,
where together we stir the air, gathering a basilica
of notes then releasing them to mingle and pulse –
I want to burrow in the thick folds of the velvet curtains
and skim through the dust suspended in a beam of light
as I shape the perfect curves of figure eights
to the beat of the applause rising from the theater seats
my belief this is the way things are for everybody:
art and motion, ecstasy, ovation, encore!
Artist:
Linda Ferguson
https://bylindaferguson.blogspot.com//
(For the children aborted or separated from their biological parents as a result of China’s
mandated one-child policy which restricted most couples to have only one child)
In a snakelike dream, oolong stretches
to a sun-dried face pressed up against concrete,
nose breathing in the soles of sweetly caked dirt.
This overpopulated city. This overrun city.
Neon signs pass a loveless woman’s eyes,
time going under in maple blur.
She listens closely to the current of people going home.
Filled to the brim with harmony of grandmama’s cooking
and the light of their lovers laughing in their stomachs
when she herself holds an empty belly
void of her daughter, void of the light of her life
empty without the lovesong of her child.
Woman cradles her aching feet, the rhythm of her body
going back and forth, back and forth
Sway. Forth and back.
Blood bruises in a desolate color beneath her palms and legs
in the shape of plum hearts.
Woman feels for bright peony plumps
where cold air grips her thumb.
There can only be one, she knows.
One body of damp breaths,
a single cry echoing from the womb.
Half a lullaby to a one child policy.
Artist:
Emily Wang is a high school student that currently resides in Montville, New Jersey. She has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing awards and aims to use writing as a means to express emotions that can’t be confined to a single word. She can usually be found watching films or brewing tea.
