Oil Trough
There are blood on the trucks babe in Oil Trough.
The markets are blown apart, shingles shredding from roofs.
Whipping around in the heat of Spring. The dust threads into my lungs.
Me and Lydia walked the tracks every day.
Deaf from the endless whistles of locomotives that pounded the walls
Of the factories.
Shake out more breath when I try to earn a little more than a minimum wage.
I became a beggar in Oil Trough, drank the White River dry.
Inside I feel these nails in the pit of my stomach.
Drink myself asleep at the end of the docks, washing the fish
And writing letters to Lydia’s ghost.
She skid off the wet road one sleepless day after a double-shift.
In bleeding July, a mix of wind and soot came down with the graveled rain.
The crashing of the glass to the squeezing of a post.
Her head sweating and coughing up the grass.
All I could do was follow the flames. And pray for her survival while sitting in the devil’s thunder.
In Oil Trough,
I played guitar in my brother’s band.
I sang songs about Lydia and he sang songs about getting high.
I became so tipsy to a pool hall drunk,
That the frogs and grasshoppers would dance like we did back when we were in love.
We’d played music for the silence. No one there to recognize my haunting wedding.
The one I see blowing up in my head.
My brother said I’m leaving Oil Trough.
Moving his shit van to Little Rock.
He and Betty and a little button on the way.
He asked me “Am I ready to battle the world, or are you just slipping away”?
And man, I thought I was ready.
Just watching these muddy hands wipe tears away as they fall on my bent in knees.
On the grounds of Oil Trough, too often and often too dead.
I jumped into my barber’s truck one afternoon after a haircut.
Stole the keys right from his coat. While he joked about politics and smut.
It’s my first and last criminal day. Leaving Oil Trough to Arkansas and steal
away the sunshine and moons eyes for my own. I’m looking to cure my ills.
Little Rock prostitutes and old marijuana just left me more bruised. No one was Lydia
And you can’t polish the dried blood from my veins. Sometimes we live when we’re dead.
I walk alone now on those tracks again in Oil Trough.
In and out of the jail, visiting the graves of my mother and Lydia.
My fainting spells and bible shreds in my pocket to practice meeting God.
I’m leaving footprints in the new mud, I ask God to wash away my breath so
I can ease into her hideaway. Where we can meet again. Oh, just to meet again.
I’m middle aged and dancing barefoot in that mud.
I entertain myself in the lightning, the rain, the thunder and the clanking bottles as I dance
Sounds just like 1940’s Blues. Purge out my pain to the crippled grounds of this Earth.
The clouds follow me like an eye. The metal of my car begins to melt away.
My friend is the dirt. The last sounds I hear are the sparks of the fire.
I just sleep away the hours. I whisper “I Love You” Lydia, I’m on my way and I’ve got
A sunflower in hand.
Midnight Angel
I’m known as the midnight angel where I made my fame.
From the deserts, dusts & neon of Chestnut Avenue.
Where the maniacs do prowl.
Where the cowboys are deaf to a coyote’s howl.
They have passions on the borderlines of love and hate.
I fell in love with a criminal in heat. He was much older than me.
And he was a hustler on the streets. I needed money and fast.
He enjoyed abuse, deer in headlight stares, and a lustful glance.
Drugs and sex, the wicked and the desires were a sickness in his heart.
He pushed me out the door, to be any mortal’s world for a few hours or more.
While he was heading blindly into the Fastlane for a clash.
I saw myself fading in this course, I see a broken down Ferrari in a looking glass.
And I wanted this all to past. But sad eyes are hard to hide within the flares that wave in.
Reclaim myself, hide from the whispers and the voices, the jovial rot.
I just have to get away and re-find that lost child that still dances in my yard.
The drunks and the highway moon, the storm brings the noise in with the hailing rain in sheets.
They go so well when the breeze is blowing the bones from my skin to be buried in these streets.
I’m done with these knives at my throat, in the chalk they’ve got me mangled in this heavy knock.
Eternally, forever in his stamping. I’ll be dithering with the grandfather clock.
In loneliness he’ll promise me a martini, he’ll promise me the moon all with a slayer’s eyes.
On a midnight shift I drift away, from my path to the end page.
I leave his storybook ending and become silent and flyleaf.
In my breakaway page, I dreamt myself into an escape.
Climb in with a harmless destroyer, letting the lion out of the cage.
I seized the day, and grew ripe in the static. Leaving the radio howling.
And the cowboy slithering in the quicksand.
Small Pox Vaccine
Standing in line, drunk and tender veined.
Kissed many strangers, like a sun to a flower, from flower to wind.
It was Summer and it was happy and full of an elfin crowd.
We returned home soldiers, but felt sick and naked to the fever.
Smelling roses and cry out our combat. We just want our home.
Feeling thin and shallow, bruised and yellow
Watch the boxcars, the rails, and the circus leave town.
It smells of animal urine and anxious clowns pounding curses to this town.
We need plenty of rest, and plenty of fluids.
For tomorrow we’ll be awaiting our small pox vaccine. Without thought.
The needles doesn’t phase our sanity. We take it to just keep on moving.
In this mythos of freedom that we preached through bouts of invincibility
The sobriety begins when the wagon wheels fall off. When the racecars run off the bridges.
Into the river hopefully all those fish know how to swim.
The forecast is cruel and the poisons are airborne. I have to conquer my own mind.
An old cactus like this needs watered and needs its air.
A stick like this looks better in the pile.
When the camera flashes. We look better in love than lame.
I want to migrate and shed the gospel like glitter
Over the incompetent, obnoxious, murdering meadows. Where all the riots begin.
So stand in the line, in health over vanity.
Lose our quagmires along the way and have a true family reunion.
And we can return back to our Summer when we were left for dead.
Opium Den Horses
Feeling Oppressed in this vague utopia.
I’m uncertain and madly falling madly again.
Into the faint of an orange dying sun.
Inside a dream, aborted in an opium den with bored horses.
Surviving only to hear the birds sing a new song.
To hear the melodies of the rocks pop against the water.
To listen for a fire to save us for the escape.
Let out these fugitives and put our beds in the graves.
To the edge of the chase. We can catch our spinning mind.
The resistance is the survival. The survival is in the sip.
The threading of our blood into the sterility of our shadows
Our prisoner’s dress. Being spit on by the twilight jokers.
Merge our eyes to the waving, blinking stars.
As convicts to our trembling, We can celebrate our misery and quilt ourselves as one.
And soon our shaking will be done.
When I realize I was all alone. And the horses ran free with the fancy.
The Haunting of Saint Robert
The towns weren’t ready for a holy wind and an unholy moon.
The boys reek of absorbing skin to bone that is purpled and gray
The girls watch the didactic saints preach nihilism to a crowd.
They talk of hangings, sudden screams, and ghost-men in the waste.
To walk around in silence agonizing in poverty, prayers in a jagged shake.
The monastery is flooding, the obedient are trails to the immure.
In this asylum with hoarse voiced births, in the swinging pendulum
From prison to prison, cell to cell.
Pursued into a drunk wink. A soggy kiss over the bleeding concrete.
Let’s just wait together and hope that the devil is asleep in the trees.
Our brothers and sisters are steering into the idiotic waves.
Solve what is heaven, what is hell, what is the same?
To see our house in the castles. To see our shredded boxes in the streets.
It is hard to roar like a tiger, promise paradise when you dream of only the shame.
Earn yourself a harmonic gravedigging. While the horsemen exchanged everything for a nicer ride.
In our suits we rest a final rest. In dresses, in make-up to look fabulous in death.
That is the final arrest in a narcissus mass. Equality in the slits through the bark.
The sobbing loners. The beating heart of the giants knocking down the forest.
The laughing socialites. And the ashes of our churches twist in the rays.
I just wanted today. To not be haunted by Saint Robert and reformation be festive.
To offer growth and burn the waste.
To erect life in the bottom of the jail. Stimulate our revival out of our jungles and
Insert our stingers into the root. Go back to pale and shake off this soot.
Migrate in the clear waters. Strain out the diseases and the draconian liquids
We want to be more than straw. The sperm, the egg, the humanity of blood and not wires to clip off.
Claudette Dying
In a funny hat, walking down to conduct a band.
With Claudette dying playing in your mind,
With all the stones tossing from heartbreaking to blind.
She was always your muse, a mother, your left shoe.
She seemed to be the walking stick in your endless travels.
Speeding around the curves, imbibing in all her clues.
That she was nothing like you, you’re just a shadow.
Claudette talking to the walls, her
father’s photo, and the broken glows.
The wind is so cold beginning to cherry the tip of her nose.
But she keeps drifting deeper into the storm.
In and out of the darkened walls. She carves spirits into the multiverse.
Where the fireflies become her magic carpet.
Where the sun dimmed to a full eclipse, and we began to cut it through shields
of wind.
Our utopia is in a barbaric stoning, and
Claudette, she shook it off with a broken teeth grin and a shattered jaw.
She was always accident prone, especially around the invisible and violent men.
Oh, can we save her? I am not quite sure.
Our dull jokes or superficial support.
Sometimes words are best unsaid.
Sometimes it is more comfortable to
have the magnum against the head.
And tease the psychopath to come up with a new riddle.
Claudette watched a holocaust from her bedroom,
the burning towers from the shadows sleeping in the moon.
She watched divinity become soft and washed out.
The bricks of her foundation began to crumble, hypnotized into
the fluid of the eyes of a new ghost lover. Who lived a cult,
more than in a faith of loving.
The funny hat man can do nothing more,
than spread his song to all his students and the core.
Everyone just wanting to belong.
He’s just as miserable as Claudette, yet he floats around in the majestic roars of love.
His Claudette is a lost case…
A ziplock on a burning brain. Let us hope she’ll
meet a warm hand during her exit.
Out of town to trick herself out of the present.
©2022 David L O’Nan All rights reserved.
David L O’Nan is a poet, writer, and editor. He has curated up to now 5 Poetry Anthologies including Fevers of the Mind Poetry & Art Digest Issue 1, Fevers of the Mind Poetry Digest 2,3, Fevers of the Mind Press Presents the Poets of 2020 & Avalanches in Poetry Writings & Art Inspired by Leonard Cohen. A 2nd Leonard Anthology coming soon “Before I Turn Into Gold.” He has released 6 self-published books that have been combined into a super book entitled “Bending Rivers.” Look for his upcoming manuscript “Before the Bridges Fell ” with Cajun Mutt Press in March 2022.
Check out www.feversofthemind.com @davidlonan1 and @feversof on Twitter. The Fevers of the Mind Poetry & Art Group on Fb.