We Need Not Speak
As you hold me close in your warm embrace
I feel like we will melt into one as our hearts beat together.
We need not speak..
Our unsteady breaths speak for us
They are as pleasing as any love poem ever passionately uttered
My love for you will show in my eyes and in my touch
I slowly drench your heart's barren ground
Whenever you reach for me, I will be right there..
I will always come to you, and there will never be
any doubt that you are alive inside... ❤
Love is our Song
Love as we know it, is like a prayer,
and music is what fills our souls with life
It flows from my breath like a gentle breeze,
and I see you come alive with each new song
When our souls met, you gave up your heart
You sacrificed your life for both of us as a whole
You name became mine and mine became yours
Burning in our love was our destination foretold
and the many memories are as many as the stars
We have spent many nights just remembering them all
And our love will be forever eternal..
I see it in your eyes. ❤
A Flame Between Us
Like a match, you started a flame between us
I've always understood my place in your life
And remembered when and how it all started
Look no further than right in front of you
because that is where you will find my smile
It's never changed, and has always been for you
My light glows around you like a flame of life
If you hear my voice, follow the sound
I will light the way to where you will find me
and the dark will no longer surround you
For this flame will light our path together.
Kristy Raines was born in Oakland California in The United States of America and is a poet, writer, author and humanitarian/advocate.
She has five books getting ready to publish soon, one with a prominent Poet from India which will launch hopefully soon called, "I Cross my Heart from East to West", two fantasy books of her own called, "Rings, Thins and Butterfly Wings" and "Princess and The Lion", and an anthology of poems in English, "The Passion Within Her" and her Autobiography called "My Very Anomalous Life"
Kristy has received many literary awards for her unique style of writing.
DREAM
With a bunch of lost images
They don't say anything anymore...
DREAM
With verses from other times
May they appear suddenly
Lights that illuminated
my times of youth
DREAM
In vain; trying to recover
sparkles that the water crystallized
in scattered reflections..
DREAM
With a diluted history
in the air
with similar gesture
to the absence
DREAM
With a swan with blue feathers
An unchained elephant
A jungle full of fruits
Before the extermination comes.
DREAM
With a place for voices
old
who fled behind the walls
DREAM
With lovers
they invent poems with life
DREAM
Detached from the cluster of clumsiness
ESCAPE
Of the shadows and everything
what doesn't taste like tenderness
DREAM
With eager eyes
Astonished
The only ones with whom you will read these verses
I lived without you
The love spell struck suddenly,
Made a nest in my heart,
As a miracle my love novel,
I dreamed with your absence.
Right and left, wedding knot,
On the happy day of lovers,
I stayed true to our love,
I got engaged with your absence.
My eyes longed for you,
I could not be happy with you,
Signed my soul pen,
I got married with your absence.
I knew the love poem,
I loved life so much,
I did not blame my fate,
I lived with your absence.
ETHICAL HEIGHTS
The lofty heights of ethical paths,
Where virtue shines, where light shines clear,
In the hearts of the brave, in the souls of the pure,
A beacon of ethics, a guide to truth.
Courage like a rock, steadfast,
In the sea of challenges, in the storms of life,
We walk firmly, with insatiable faith,
To the heights of honor, where the light shines.
Reverence is like a flower, sweet-smelling,
It spreads around us, like a roaring wave,
Appreciation of every being, every work,
In the shelter of ethics, where the heart burns.
Selflessness leads us, hand in hand,
Through labyrinths of compassion, through challenges difficult,
We share love, give strength,
On ethical heights, where humanity meets.
Oh, may our steps always be firm,
On the path of ethical heights, where virtue flourishes,
May God in our hearts be a guide, a beacon of the world,
We soar high, where we subtly walk the bridges of meeting a soul like ours to embrace a soul-elevating thought. How to help humanity sleeping on the wings of the witch Maya?
In the name of ethics, an attack in defense of the truth!
The park
In the park where dreams take flight,
Beneath the trees so green and bright,
Children's laughter fills the air,
As they play without a care.
Birds above in graceful flight,
Their songs a melody of delight,
Flowers blooming, colors array,
Creating a beautiful display.
Families gathered, picnics spread,
Love and joy, no words unsaid,
Couples walking hand in hand,
Creating memories so grand.
Oh, park so serene and fair,
A place of peace beyond compare,
In your embrace, we find respite,
A sanctuary, a pure delight.
-Don Bormon
Still burning black, the dizzy morning stretches vastly across the infinite and wakes me up with a rush of its torpidity. It is infectious and I am unwilling to quit my slumbering position. Why should I quit this lull, this rest, this magnanimity of nothingness and descend into the littleness of life that swims without an iota of comfort? What little courage I have, I must use it, extra hours must be a possibility. For if I wake, it’s for the sake of this morning which is dizzy with it’s sleeping run of sweltering glow. I will not go gently into this day, I war with the giddiness of weak bones and an excessively crushed spirit.
The scion of a sleepy eyed warrior is to be feared for laziness is more effective than hard work in the right hands. What I would do with my match stick, and my blunt and hard cock and other miscellanies would tear the world away from itself and at the same time, would mean nothing. None of it would matter, indeed, none does matter as much as a somnambulant passion, an unconscious dog burrowing his snout in stinking sand, digging and pissing, that’s why I wish to sleep. I badly wish to sleep and I would return to the rays of my slumber if only the bus of life was directed towards that destination. What is the use of waking when man, in his infinite finiteness, only truly spreads his pinions when he dreams? What is waking but a torment, a mosquito sucking the aspirations from every vein treading the mirrorless earth. It is my intention through these verses (for consider this bad poetry unversified), to sleep while I wake, to bite back the skin of the mosquito and drone and disturb it’s ears. To curse this circus is to mock the thin thread and what higher goal should man aspire towards in this gamut of deception we call wake. Eating the muck that makes up the bug which sucks our blood.
Everything, everything that moves and breathes secretly secretes a wish for death as they progress through time. It’s like they grow weary and purposely slip, hoping they crack their thinking skulls on the porcelain; like they were tired of thinking and would gladly give away the faculty for it. Like it, a burden rather cast away, had done it’s time. It had always done its time; thinking. My eyes are tired of seeing and I wish I could close them, forever and dream of nothingness or of a Hera’s plump breasts. Whichever soothes the mood I am at that moment– nothingness for ennui; the poetic breasts, well, is for everything else. And like a cockroach, seeking death at every turn, hungry for a corpse of food, hungry to be a corpse of food, I hasten towards the pails of soothe to bathe me in its gushing enshroud. Fogs, clouding against the backdrop to sanctify my choices; to be or not to be, rather to be or to perish and gloat in the perishing– rise like buildings half decimated, half eager to be seen. And in the hubbub of the court of life, I ignore the fog, the sanctity, the choices brought to the steps of my bolted door and I choose slumber; the peace of it, the comfort of assurance. And does this make me an impotent pretender, who even in his parts– the pretense, is made impotent, or raw, like the secretion of all that moves and breathes, that aspires to flee from hunger? Does it make me be? Am I– in the indelible food truck of laughter, laughing at myself, throwing a mock at everything, even this bedsheet, rumpled from giving me repose, while wishing I was an acolyte of something; my trusts saving me from the deliriums of free will?
At the edge of the shore the waves merge with the thirsty sand and it’s saltwater provokes parching through delicate care. The waves hopes it’s tides of love, which it repeatedly bathes the shores with, would one day sate it’s love, pacify her, relentlessly bring her to the four walls of a gentle climax. But each act of kindness, each touch of thoughtfulness only worsens the state of the shores. But to protest at this point, (if even it could do that, as all protest is a mask of dissatisfaction which leads to more tedium,) is a futile activity. It could even be termed rash; so the shores die in silence. No wonder the pallidity of the beach so stuns us we inevitably fall for it. All men long for woe in their massification, and thrive within the tokens of dry bones self destruct gets from pity, but the men who last… No man lasts, but all unconsciously believe they will.
All girls are lesbians, but I must wake now from my waking dream. Aurora begins to sieve her provocative rays through the meshes in the window, laying siege to my thoughts. It gilds my room with a flood of light this sunlight. I have not consulted the time. I hate the time for it reminds me of my minuteness and makes me wish so badly I am god– above time and more mean spirited, like a fish that devours the reeds, man and other fishes. This wish targets his aloneness most of all: imagine controlling the world, watching naked bodies, envious: far above the threshold yet close enough to judge. I don’t mind god too much because I don’t know much of him and I don’t believe that any man could know God better than I know God, if he did exist. Pale face that shames the sun, a dick with the seed of stars and buckets of galaxies, time in his pocket, a haughty nature which still is revered? Why give excuses for God while the same characters are disdained in man, and even give God veneration? What makes him of better stock when I exist and he does not? For to exist is to be in this world, and to be in this world props more honor than any transcendence ever will. Death is a nullification as well as all things in the unknown alter; all forms beyond the void.
To survive the melancholia, the wake, the aches in a blunted finger, to walk a distance under the blazing sun and still love it. God! Why should one not love life and hold it’s beauties however tedious, to greatest esteem. The cutting sunlight, like a knock on the head, begins to discipline me to efficacy, begins to steer me towards stirring from the bed. Still my leaden feet resists, my eyes are shut, still shooting towards sleep and I wish to dream forever.
Iduoze Abdulhafiz is a poet, playwright, short story writer and philosopher. His works delves into themes of introspection and existential questions. In them he explores profound emotions such as grief, longing, ecstasy, the divine and other worldly issues.
He hopes that through his writing, he brings some form of sate or a glim of light, to the reader reading his work.
Many of his works contemplate issues of existence using metaphorical imagery and philosophical reflections. He has been published in the ekonke magazine.
Once upon a time, in the very heart of the Village of Greenwich, there lived a performance artist, known for her vision, manifested in striking stage pictures and bold feminist statements. She would tell you that her art was not just her work; it was a calling, emerging out of her journey from small-town midwestern girl to tour de force, with periods of victim and survivor somewhere in between.
Having lucked into a rent-controlled apartment in the ‘90s, she kept her needs modest so that she might enjoy every bit of serendipity that came her way. And, oh, did it ever. Learning early on that she could give herself a fuller life than “a good man” might, she relished in her freedom to travel the globe, staging performances, be they sanctioned or rogue, speaking her truth in a manner so memorable as to land her on the cover of many a magazine.
Then, there came a time that she found herself sidelined with mysterious symptoms that no doctor could diagnose. Thus, the hours that were once spent beneath the Washington Square Park arch, advocating for the visibility of women, the neurodivergent and the gender non-binary were whiled away in her double bed, reading and dreaming up pieces that she began to wonder if she’d ever have the opportunity to perform.
Ever the resilient one, she buoyed herself with fresh flowers, dinners of Instacarted supermarket sushi and Netflix Originals; yet, as time passed, the phone seldom rang, for her friends and colleagues quickly tired of asking after her health. Once a handful of invitations had been declined, they stopped coming. The magazines and theatres, of course, simply had no interest in her beyond the impact of her work.
On a visit to one of the doctors who found himself at a loss as to how to help her, she merely shrugged when he asked how she was doing.
“I feel like I’m disappearing,” she said.
“Perhaps an antidepressant would help,” he suggested. “I’m happy to write you a prescription.”
“I appreciate that, Doctor. I really do. Of course, I was happier when I was living a full life. But, the facts are what they are. I have an undiagnosed illness, and, well, I’m not as young as I once was.”
“That’s nonsense. You’re the same woman who’s always taken the world by storm,” he assured her.
“Maybe so, but that doesn’t equate to feeling seen.”
Over the next few months, she put on a few pounds and her complexion grew quite pale as it became more difficult to make her way from her third-floor walkup down to the concrete stairs that overlooked the street. And, not but a breath after her fiftieth birthday, which she celebrated with her old-lady cat, Marina Abramović, by lighting a candle atop their tuna salad, her periods stopped.
Done. Fini. Once and for all.
The next morning, when she rose to brew herself a cup of gingered black tea, Marina Abramović began to weave her way through the woman’s legs, only to find that they were less than solid. Taken aback, the woman’s treasured feline brought her paw to her heart, then dashed off, mewling as she took shelter in the cubby of her carpeted tree.
“Well, okay, then,” the woman scoffed with a roll of her eyes. “Be that way.”
Once the tea had steeped, the woman tossed the spent leaves into the sink, and after an invigorating first sip, made her way to the shower.
Setting the teacup next to the tap, she fingered the yellow stains in the porcelain, where more than a few cigarettes had burned down while applying her makeup for any one of those old nights on the town.
Then, she turned the shower on to warm, whipped off her nightie and tossed it into the hamper. An expert shot.
Taking another sip of her tea, she glanced toward the mirror, hesitantly, of course, for she refused to accept the lack of fullness within her breasts, only to find that she was . . . well, ever so slightly transparent.
And made a mental note to talk to the doctor about the Ambien.
The heat of the shower worked wonders on her muscles; and, as she stepped out onto the bath mat, she found Marina Abramović waiting on the toilet seat, eager to nuzzle her knees as if in apology.
“No worries, Girlfriend,” she said, mussing the loose skin on her scruff.
It all happened, in the grand scheme of things, gradually. Relativity being relative, after all. And, not a week later, the woman found herself to be as invisible as a princess’s pantyline.
Yet, Marina Abramović, fortunately, seemed to have worked through her issues. Though she wasn’t quite sure where to rub, she managed to hold vigil over the woman’s form, regardless.
“I’m not dying, for Goddess’s sake,” the woman protested as the cat remained glued to her undelineated side. “We just need to play the circumstances to our advantage.”
And that’s when performance art became more than performance. It became magic.
Over the next couple of months, the woman and Marina Abramović crafted a piece that made all of her earlier works look like child’s play.
And, when it was ready, the woman placed a call to Désirée la Bombacere at the Fiefdom of MoMA, advising her of what they had to offer.
“I thought you’d retired,” Ms. la Bombacere said upon her return call.
“Who told you that?”
“Well, we just assumed–.”
“Yeah, that’s never a good idea.”
Thus, on April 7th of 2024, the woman and Marina Abramović presented “The Pussy Whip,” a work that would go down as the most influential one-cat show in history. Those courageous enough to take a seat within the audience departed with their greatest fears and desires exposed, as well as their judgments and dismissals, for in a very short span of time, they witnessed the grains of their own depravity, which they worked so hard to deny; and, as they exited the space with their panties either wet or soiled, one couldn’t help but to notice distinct feline bite marks gracing each ankle.
And, from that moment forward, no one dared to disregard a pussy, no matter what her age, her physical limitations or her lived experience, ever again ‘til the very end of time.
