Sacred Mountain

I. Dark Prologue
Walking through the hillside,
with a hiking bag slung over my shoulder
and a pair of dusty shoes, I feel the cold
seep into my bones, making me shiver.
The dim night, the howling wind. I drag my heavy feet,
continuing along the mountain’s flank.
My consciousness gradually fades,
blurring the boundary between reality and illusion.

II. Debris Narrative Piece
Perhaps I have returned to a reality
long buried in my memories.
My classmates turned my back into an ant’s paradise.
When their pranks crossed a certain point,
it felt as if an engine roared in my mind.
Powerless and angry, only cold and flame remained.
Mocking laughter was like the stench of rotting corpses.
Vultures might love it, but I detest it. Perhaps,
the vultures are the classmates themselves. Perhaps
they find joy in teasing one another. Perhaps,
the classmates: one, two, three, more.
Vultures: one, two, three, more.
The Sacred Mountain reappears before my eyes.

III. Rebel Sonata
Shadows flicker; the road is rugged;
the heavy snow strikes my face,
stretching endlessly before me.
I dream, I pray, hoping there aren’t
so many vultures attacking.
I dream, I pray to become a black-clad warrior,
to withstand all forms of malice.
I dream, I pray to reach the mountaintop
and find a tranquil realm—a place without
discrimination, war, or divisions.
Bellies, teeth, and fur. The vultures’ bodies
come into focus before me.
Their long claws shoot flames,
swift as lightning, like Wolverine’s in the movie,
longer than the epic of the Mahabharata.
The earth splits, and the shrubwood is destroyed.
Flames stab across my down coat,
almost scorching my hiking bag with violent burns.
The flames, like serpentine trails, dart everywhere,
burning everything. Their wings whirl,
bringing a huge chill wind,
akin to this arctic climate.
Fear is a tangible reality,
yet the shadow of fear within me
is more terrible than fear itself.
The vultures are the enemies;
fear is instant, always present in life.
They attack, they revel, they laugh madly.
I struggle madly to resist.

IV. Freedom Rhapsody
Unsolved math problems sway like classmates’ proud heads,
always presenting puzzles instead of solutions.
Their voices echoed in the classroom,
turning into atonal music,
reminiscent of Igor Stravinsky.
With blades drawn in my imagination,
I cut away my incompetent self.
Whatever the cost, I hope to achieve one thing.
I aspire, I pray, I cannot fall on this treacherous journey.
I aspire, I pray, to keep marching forward.
My flashlight not only illuminates the path ahead,
it also becomes a sword, slaying my weaknesses
on the frigid trail to the Sacred Mountain.

V. Solo Piece
When they prepared their mischief once more,
I rose, statuesque, with a voice like rolling thunder,
and said, “No.” My voice was loud: once, twice, thrice.
It drove away the vultures before they could plunge me
off the cliff. Yes, I can.
“I believe I can say no to the malice in life.
I can become my black-clad warrior,
driving away bothersome vultures
and all manner of monsters.
I try, try,
again, like Sisyphus confronting his boulder.”

Red Blood

Blood rain is dripping

from the battlefield in the Far East now.

Every second. Every ruin.

Every window. Every child.

The blood moon makes someone shiver

with a special prophecy.

Women varnish a bloody red with painted nails.

An American friend has a bloody floor.

He was scratched by a bloody-haired cat,

his arm bleeding red over the screen

of his phone, smeared with blood last week.

The sunset, “暮” in Chinese words,

turns at dusk into a giant, red blood egg.

The yolk spills into the mushroom soup,

becoming a red-blood delicacy

with a juicy, rare, blood-spattered steak.

A medical-themed drink— Blood Energy Potion,

popular in 2014. Back in 1957, A painting—

“Black in Deep Red” an abstract collision from.

Yukio Mishima’s self-martyrdom

was an avant-garde show.

A display of red, an art of blood.

The uncanny cup my teacher,

bought yesterday, seeping blood.

The Bombax ceiba blooms with a vital red.

The sudden snow last year in Portland

dropped red on my blood-covered poetry,

a memory of a deceased friend.

The friend’s name is pronounced like blood.

He was soaked in a bloody past.

A bleeding rose now grows before my eyes.

The red won’t let me forget.

It will flow into him at the grave,

whispering longing to him.

But Life Goes On 

 No one can touch my heart

 It is as cold as the Arctic Frost

 Friendship in the tech age 

 is Higanbana of flowers

 Unreachable – 

 Unattainable –

 My desire is lost 

I stand on the Tower Bridge 

amidst the dense fog

Faded memories drift through

not this foggy day

The vivid past has faded, somehow

And the party on the lawn

the dance during the party

the laughter of peals

echoed from yesterday

That’s yours, theirs and

is a blurred world 

Where everyone is near

As I reach out the misty rain 

like pine needles

it pierces my skin into London’s fogs

I can touch the raindrops

not grasp the joyous past

nor the distant future

within the fleeting mist

I want to ask

Will Men be one?

Will wars be none?

Will all races come together

And exist as one?

As the fog lifts

I am still here

  

Nothingness

Nothingness is silent,
yet contains all sounds,
empty, yet empty of nothing.

Nothingness is water—
water without shape.

Pour it into an indigo cup,
and the water takes the shape of the cup—
that is emptiness,
like someone truly seeing reality.

But nothingness is something
that reaches emptily toward itself.

Yucheng Tao, from China, is studying songwriting at the MI College of Contemporary Music in Los Angeles. His poetry has appeared in multiple literary venues, including three Wingless Dreamer’s Open Theme contest selections. NonBinary Review later reprinted his poem” Blue Horse” alongside an author interview. Synchronized Chaos featured three of his poems, while his work also appeared in Ink Nest, The Arcanist, Moonstone Art Center, Poetry Potion, and Literary Yard, Spillwords.

An Ecstasy

Whether beloved

Buddha or saint

Your breath quickens

Lips part pulse

Races your lids grow

Heavy so heavy

You aren’t bothered by

Your hair a bit disheveled

(I wonder if Saint

Teresa’s toes curled)

We cannot help ourselves

We ache for bliss

Mystical or corporal

Seek out an ecstasy

Seek to lose

Ourselves in the vast

Expanse of another

For a moment euphoria

Unburdening our identity

Setting aside agenda

Ownership power

The shame of suffering

Unleashing devotion in

Willingly relinquishing

Our bodies our souls.

How It Is

Here’s how it is

As I understand it

(Have I got this right?)

We go about our business

Scurrying about the planet

Clumsily clamoring for a spot

Spinning round the sun

Occasionally looking up

All crowded into a precious

Little space worshipping

Pondering upon the stars

And of course God who

Resides beyond those stars:

A lanky decrepit white man

Dementia setting in

At the very least quaintly

Absent-minded though still

Omnipotent and omniscient

Who merely surveils

Suffering from afar

Lazy old voyeur

And once in a great while

Sends someone special

When we get a bit untidy

On the seasonal precipice

Of self-destruction when 

We slaughter one another

Over slight differences 

In interpreting God’s

Incompetence God’s love

Another Silence

For those sages

Lao or Chuang Tzu

(Maybe even Siddhartha)

Silence came naturally

Nirvana turned slowly

Silence now requires

The unattainable –

Far too much patience

To be at all effective

To have any impact

Upon our lives

Our intricate elaborately

Constructed karma

The well-intentioned

Vows of silence

Of monks and nuns

In serene monasteries

Seem quaint but futile

Solutions to the clamor

Of a peevish throng

And I am thinking

Anymore silence

Is rather irresponsible

A reckless wu-wei

An obsequious inaction 

All spins too swiftly

Suffering too pervasive

Comes hard and fast

Though priceless

We’ve run out of time

For mute circumspection

To adequately flourish

David Sapp, writer and artist, lives along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. A Pushcart nominee, he was awarded Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants for poetry and the visual arts. His poetry and prose appear widely in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. His publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior, chapbooks Close to Home and Two Buddha, a novel Flying Over Erie, and a book of poems and drawings titled Drawing Nirvana.

Night Passage

Driving all night

nobody out on the road

listening to my truck radio

old songs singing along

remembering the old days

all my friends passed away

party times and praying for others

when it was okay

to speak your mind

heart loving

wife and kids

smoking my cigar

blowing the smoke out

exhilarated

in the freedom of America.

MY ABSENT PRESENCE

People will weep.

Maybe they’ll pray.

They’ll likely say

nice things – Oh, Christ!

–When I met them.

–Where we took care.

–How I look now.

Then all my friends

will become still

as our whole past

binds up their minds

and that’s my brand.

ANOTHER YEAR ENDING

The geese are gone.

Another winter’s coming on,

and then a sound sleep

before we wake and leap.

Another year’s ending,

and then a new beginning.

Because life needs a frame

every year’s the same.

DUCK TAPE AND CHICKEN WIRE

A man can fix any part

with duck tape and chicken wire

except for a broken heart

and a field of wheat on fire.

The crop will grow back again

but the heart will never mend.

TONY

My first dog taught me justice,

mercy, and forgiveness.

When I pulled Tony’s tail

he bit me without fail,

and then he’d lick my face.

And thus I learned ‘bout grace.

God gave a dog to Adam

both as consolation

and as compensation

for the loss of Eden.

773౺

I’m upside down in Hell deeper than a dry well.

Oh, but why am I here with crooked financiers,

blasphemers, murderers, thieves, and adulterers?

The Devil came to me and he grinned wickedly.

“You’re here because you failed to live a life unveiled.

You had your mortal faults and kept them in your heart

instead of admitting, instead of correcting.

You, no self-inventor, just let your failings foster.

You never tried to move, get better, or improve.

If you’d been more driven, now you’d be in Heaven.”

And then I woke in sweats,

aware of mortal debts.

EXACTLY!

Eggs white, eggs brown.

The yolk is the same,

exactly the same.

Albumen’s the same,

exactly the same.

White ones, brown ones,

their soul is the same.

Capetonian Dillon Israel’s dream: on starting out, the unproduced playwright and his city

Dillon Israel is a South African actor, creative, storyteller and an unproduced playwright. He lives in Ravensmead, a quiet suburb in Cape Town, near Tygerberg Hospital. He enjoys cooking, baking cakes, making desserts and he loves the outdoors. He reached out to me. He was looking for a mentor. He has a lot of energy. I can hear it in the sound of his voice as I listen to the voice messages he sends me. I came into contact with Dillon Israel in September of this year.

He is twenty-nine years old and wants to “make it”, like so many people in this country in their twenties, hungry to work in the film and television industry. He loves watching South African television, Chinese films and Turkish shows. He asks me to explain the meaning of his dreams. I tell him that there’s symbolism and meaning behind everything in a dream. We have become friends. He shares with me his hopes and his dreams. I tell him that he was born with a gift, but whether he believes me or not is another matter.

We talk about our struggles and depression, loneliness and hardships, the church, mindfulness, having an “attitude of gratitude” and prayer. We talk about our problems, the major issues in our lives that we have in common, we laugh, discuss the antics of our dogs. We tell each other that our mothers find it difficult to say they are proud of us but that we know they are proud of us anyway. We have brought happiness into each other’s lives.

By day he attends a college situated in Bellville in Cape Town. He loves his mother, his dog, Snowy, watching films on Netflix, his niece, writing, listening to Adele and gospel music, making malva pudding on a Sunday, going to the shops with his mother and, like the North American writer John Irving, being alone. Dillon Israel is a young man who prefers his own company to that of others. He lives faith and has a spiritual outlook on life. He prays, has taught me to remain prayerful in my own life and encourages me in my own faith.

This Capetonian storyteller is soft spoken, thoughtful, highly sensitive, an empath, what you would describe as a dreamer and he thinks before he speaks. Nobody has encouraged him to pursue this dream, writing for the stage. Not his family, not his teachers in high school and not the “drama people” he reached out to in the industry. Most certainly, no one has ever told him to become a poet. When I tell him that he can achieve this, he is nervous. He says that he doesn’t believe me. I hope his thinking will change his belief system.

This is why I text him on a daily basis and motivate him. I want to inspire him as much as he has inspired me. I can’t understand the world we live in where teachers do not encourage their students to read and to write. Both are difficult to master but can increase the learner’s self-confidence and help develop personal growth, improve self and lead to an individual having a fulfilling life. I want his dream to come true like mine did. I don’t want him to struggle as I did in youth in making my dream to become a full-time writer a reality. I tell him he has his entire life ahead of him. That he has enough time for the inner vision that he has for his life to manifest and become a reality. I ask Dillon Israel if he reads. He doesn’t like reading, he says. He prefers watching television and series on Netflix. I can’t relate.

I grew up in a house filled with books, rarely watching television. Books were my university, my school of life. It was Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast that inspired me to go back to writing after a period of illness and hospitalisation for manic depression. I found a message of hope in Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye, in the novels of Fitzgerald, the masculine power of Jay Gatsby, John Updike, and in the poetry of Rilke. These authors, Rilke, brought me back to life. We come from two different generations, Dillon Israel and I. We are as different as chalk and cheese, two polar opposites. I tell him that in this industry you can’t take rejection personally.

I tell him to always be humble and kind, like the country musician Tim McGraw’s song. I give him life advice. I give him writing advice. I tell him to write what he knows, that he should write from his own life experience, that he should make characters out of the people he knows, passersby. I tell him to do a poetry course with award-winning South African writer and poet Finuala Dowling. I tell him that doing an online course in creative writing will help him. Already his English is improving. I talk to him as if he was a younger sibling just about to start out in the world. I talk to him about looking for opportunities, I talk to him about responsibility and the writing life, seeking daily inspiration. He tells me I’m changing his life. When I think of Dillon Israel painstakingly writing in a notebook on his desk I think of the poetic genius of Ocean Vuong.

Today he is listening to Jimmy Swaggart. We don’t have much time to talk. I’m working on a novel with both a modern and historical context and perspective and he has a project that he’s working on for college. I send him links to poetry by Russian Anna Akhmatova (“Memory of Sun”, Austrian-German Rainer Maria Rilke (“You Who Never Arrived”) and the North American Charles Bukowski (“Bluebird” and “So Now”). He is excited about writing. So far, he is making a lot of progress. He has disciplined himself and I am impressed by his confidence, his style of writing and I’m just happy that he is happy, that he’s starting to believe in himself.

It’s such an honour and a privilege to help another person, suffering for their art, to help them achieve their dreams, to tell them that absolutely nothing stands in their way. He might not know who Athol Fugard is, the late Taliep Peterson and Dawid Kramer’s productions that made it to New York and the United Kingdom, but I can inspire him to reach those heights. Maybe one day he gets to “pay it forward” and mentor someone of his own.

I confide in him my love of Barbra Streisand films, Yentl and The Way We Were. He tells me his parents used to enjoy watching films like that. I feel my age. We forget about the lonely journeys that forge our poetic and literary forays. The childhood that we create in our imagination, the childhood from memory. I feel that mentorship is a calling. I fear that people think there is no more reading of books to be done. Now there is the reign of social media that has taken over our access to information. I believe in dreamers. I too was a dreamer once upon a time. I say good night to Dillon and his Snowy and finish watching a documentary on Anna Akhmatova. Afterwards I write a poem on aspects of the personality affected by loneliness.

The music in the poetry speaks to me, speaks to my soul. Tomorrow, Dillon Israel will set off for college, nurture the dream of being a playwright, and writing for the stage full-time in his heart. I’ll be at my desk working on my latest novel.

Genuine Love

Don’t’ pick up love from here there and everywhere

Love isn’t love that changes cover

That demands gifts  or anything.

It can’t be blown with the blowing wind,

Can’t be flown with the flowing water,

It is not spent with money

Can’t be  destroyed by the passing of time.

Be constant like the sun.

Justify yourself from the dawn to the dusk. 

Are you justified? 

Are you constant?

Are you pure?

Ask yourself again and again.

If you are positive love is positive.

Remember and always remember

Love is constant.

It is immeasurable emotion

That can’t be obtained through material possessions

It is a connection without condition

If you are intangible

Here is genuine love

Are you in love?

Are you in yourself?