*the following poem was written in 2019 (c) David L O’Nan published in Reflections and Fevers of the Mind Poetry & Art Digest.     This is a piece based on the kind of man you have to look out for.  He’s not the most respectful, breaks hearts constantly, a controlling, narcissistic and isn’t the most kind in general.  He becomes a victim to self-medicating when he becomes a depressive,  he might learn a lesson of how to be respectful when it is too late.

In the smoky Ale House
Let’s call it Murfreesboro
He’s got the swaying hips of a murder machine
Slick backed hair,
a sex appeal predator
Collecting numbers,
spreading diseases,
I’ve known him to be a birdwatcher,
a greaser witch
Stepping up to women like a movie star
In a masochistic leather jacket
He runs up mountains without the fear of the plunge
A wind-up talking crash of dark caramel ale breath –
to a lost soft cheek
You become his stage
For all his radical jokes
Unnerving smiles
You become his surgery,
For all of his dissecting thought
Or so he thinks

A point from going macho to a drunk
Then he’s your neighborhood brute
A traveling circus riot
Wants you to become his scream queen victim
As he challenges all –
to watch his demise to –
being a bar wrestler,
A real Vaudeville bullfrog
And he wants you to be his dancing daisy
While impersonates a Rudolph Valentino
Now he knows to mimic an operatic wind
A gust of bravado to a riverfront
Stuck in a canvas frame,
from the beating heart of Ambroise Vollard
But soon his oil stick is broken in the engine
And the hood is falling off

From the Ale then the pills
Now he’s turning to the surgeon for good
Baiting you to a show, a one-man cult display
Like swarming buffalo gnats –
to a jar of Wild Maine Blueberry Jam

Clay Huntley,
a vivid swerving waterfall
While under his spell,
a master weaver
An electrician pulling all the wires of our bombs together.

In 5 years
He doesn’t breathe free
When lungs are wooden,
Set afire from all the tobacco digesting tumors
– in the Superior Lobe
Guillotining away at the Pleura,
becomes like Mayonnaise
A sick interception from ego back to man
Now as death awaits
Imagination and nature became the object
– of his lamenting eyes
He likes to stray the fields,
giving each bird a personality
Funny, how he never saw that in the women
on his pinup calendars
Time is a fickle demon
So, can we pray in the arms of what is timeless?

Photo by Patrick Brinksma on Unsplash