June 30~ DAVID L. O'NAN

Welcome back to SHINE, poetry lovers. On this last day of the month, I'm pleased to shine the spotlight, once again, on the talented and prolific David O'Nan. David is an Indiana-based poet and indie editor/publisher at Fevers of the Mind, who brings us three new poems: A Carnival of Knives, Dream #30, and (my personal favorite) The Archivist of Unquiet Rooms. Thank you, David, for sharing your words with the SHINE international poetry community!

A Carnival of Knives

We’ve all just been playing with the carnival knives
laughing through the makeup.
Slashing time into ticker tape illusions
as another carousel spins
as a ballot rigged in reverse.
The ringmaster wears a corrupt senator’s smile,
he has a mustached inked with lobbyist grease,
the clowns begin to bite their tongues
into bleeding treaties dancing in their oversized shoes.

Here there is no trapeze,
just an illusion of flight,
a mid-air contract that dissolves
before your signature dries-
and we are still juggling,
we applaud the dangers and the creepiness,
Our dignity sliced like candy apples,
caramel hands stuck in the applause of wolves.

Behind every curtain,
the mirrors cracked and slimy
the knives twisted as if the stabbing has been done.
The air is heavy in ghoulish whispering
‘You signed the waiver, kid-you bled like the rest.'

Dream #30

I was supposed to be gone-
thirty minutes flatlined under pale blue machines.
yet my mind flickered on
as a film reel coughing up its final scenes.

And there it was-
not fire, not demons
but a hallway of biting,
and doors pulsing with memories
they didn’t seem to fully belong to me.

I walked barefoot across a floor of ticking watches,
each one I could hear a laugh from a different voice.
One sounded like my mother on a night I didn’t come home.
Another hissed like the brake I never pressed.

I saw my face levitating on a veiny string hanging in the sky,
stitched skin with rearview mirrors and glass-filled pores,
crumpled seatbelts with prayers written from my mind
telling me “You’re here because you blinked at the wrong time”

I saw a church made of IV drips
And the nurses all had red wigs and wore rings of rust.
They sang blues songs in defibrillator chords,
A choir of death, mucus filled static
Like an A.M. radio between goodbye and no, and I’m here, I’m not.
I love you, I loved you, and I remember you, I forgot you.

I saw children pulling sleds of ribcages through the slick snow
from a blizzard to a desert to a funeral of ash.
Their eyes looked more like a television playing a repetitive commercial,
or reruns of collisions.

And somewhere,
behind a blue velvet curtain that pulsed like a wound,
was the crash,
suspended in honeyed glass,
every scream slowed to a drone-
like God was trying to rewind and make a decision.
The buttons had shifted and left him in confusion.

I woke with a throat full of wires,
lights battered me into an epileptic trance dancing in my bloodstream.
My lungs filled up like two rusted accordions.
The remaining life around said I was lucky.

They hadn’t seen the hallways I just walked through barefoot, and they never heard the ticking, ticking, explosions and what a final breath could be.

The Archivist of Unquiet Rooms

There’s a filing cabinet in my skull,
drawers crooked, a caution and a screaming,
labels smudged by panic and sweaty thumbs –
every thought receives a new folder and tab
and runs naked through my mind in the hall of NOW.

ADHD is the conductor of this haunting train.
It forgets the passengers,
asks the clocks what time it actually is,
and eats the answer before it can be written down.
I will start sweeping the floors,
then blankly end up listening to all my failures and regrets,
poems I didn’t get to write, the excessiveness of trying to hurry love.

Anxiety-
She pounds in wearing tap shoes and performs from midnight to dawn
on the stage scattered with nerves,
tapping codes and wild languages into my bones,
breathing in my ears the worst-case ending to fairy tales
while I pretend to breathe like a well-adjusted human.

Claustrophobia-
lives in the air vents
hissing in while the ceilings lean in, and sweeps me in the enclosure
from a tornado to a sinkhole.
The elevators seem to never move.
Your clothes can give you panic.
The animals can go from beautiful to terrifying in a quick second.
Hell is a fitted room with no windows, with all the chairs facing me.

OCD-
The curator of small, invisible fires.
Like an experiment, I feel if I don’t, then I will fail.
Count the breaths, and then count them again.
Count the heartbeats, and wonder if they are sin.
Re-arrange the messes, a dumpster, or a sacred temple.

And then-
there’s the Empath,
the drunk compassionate oracle in my chest,
a rebel prophet tasting emotions like a whiskey that they secretly ordered.
Feeling the strangers’ heartbreak
like a physical bleeding pouring through their clothing.
To know the tension and the edginess
just from a twitch in the lip.
Inside you feel you’re hugging too long.
You’re remembering your dead father just driving your car.
Tears appear during an insane song, and suddenly I’m asked what is wrong?
I feel like a scream when I try to numb them,
yet they always cry when I leave them raw
to want to fix the world,
but can’t control the tape even when the signals blink “ready.”

Together we live in this house –
slanted floors, walls always peeling
even when scrubbed for a repainting.
We argue over who gets to drive
a loose wheel that ADHD grips,
Anxiety screaming the directions,
OCD rewriting the GPS,
Claustrophobia refusing to get in,
and the Empath sits in the back feeling everything
while depression is making up its mind if it even wants to go, or wants the party.

David L O’Nan is a writer/poet currently in Southern Indiana, born in Kentucky with a stop in New Orleans in between. He has been writing/editing for over 25 years including his website “Fevers of the Mind” which has also put out collective anthologies of poetry & art. He has several self-published books available and is also a four-time nominee for Best of the Net.

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