Fish in love

*

The fish caught on the hook began to gasp for breath and drink the silence.

Scales scattered on the snow like reflectors blind passing cars

Spruce trees cast their proud shadows on four-legged tracks in the snow

Conifer needles pierce a fish’s heart

But who will eat me?

Who will play with my torn heart with their cat paws?

A fish in love is asked last

*

The trees were silent with wooden palms about the coming end of the world

If the sun could die and snow could kill I would still only think about you

…

Pew Pew

…

I shoot from my finger into the soft wrinkled forehead and the end of the world begins

The almost polar night mixed with snow continues to remind me of you

*

Call me to your house and I will walk through the walls

I’ve been waiting for you all my life

I’ll wait for you all my eternity

But you will never let me in

*

This song contained the phrase “let’s run to fly”

But planes don’t fly to your city every second

And my legs were torn off by the mine 

[Of my executed childhood which will no longer exist]

*

Church of my heart prays for stolen money

I don’t pay bills on dates anymore

Now I threaten the waiters with a gun every time I’m in a restaurant

Fortunately my head prosthesis looks like a bullet molded from dust and clay

The lessons of sculpting rain and people were not in vain for God

The rain washes away the clay death and people

I drink the cold of October snow and I feel warmer:

Now I know that my dates with people from Tinder have only one purpose:

Loneliness

*

[The money allocated for the writing and publication of this verse was stolen]

(The people I loved were stolen even before)

I’m demanding the world’s largest royalty for the following line:

I left money on his nightstand left the room and never returned

*

God spent a lot of time on you and me

We won’t kiss for the first time at the nearest train station I made up

Love is sculpture love is religion

It’s good that I’m an atheist

*

Good God

Google said

I love you

I’m silent

I love my god

My god has name and snapchat

My body is a temple for my god

My body does not belong to me or my god

I belong only to money and blood

I remember my god every hour

I’m fighting my brain for the right to unconsciousness

I kill my brain with TV shows and chicken filet

(A world born of a dead chicken gives rise to discounts on fast food

What is the purpose of the chicken?

The chicken is the last thing asked about this)

I’m turning to stone

The stone will silently endure everything:

The name of my god carved with an awl on my hand is proof of this

*

The sky constantly turns black like the bruises of a whore bought at a sale

If cities have the right to be bored and birds to freeze then (?)

The sky constantly floats away like punctuation marks

No one has the right to be bored only the heart has the audacity to freeze

*

The loneliness of antiquity befell the cemetery

Butterflies played a symphony of heritage with their wings:

They were once in a cocoon

They once cocooned themselves

They were once their own parents

Flowers tickle themselves with playful wings

How much is the life of a butterfly if thanks to a butterfly spring comes and the cemetery lives again?

*

I don’t know a single word in your language

I’m afraid of your touch and glance

I have never learned the language of love

I bite looks and burn touches

The receipt says that three crowns is a deposit for a plastic bottle

The receipt doesn’t say that my heart is floating in a bottle

People very rarely write anything useful

I hope that this verse will be torn apart by the wind

The letters of your name are scattered inside my head

All in vain

*

Why are the northern lights green and not for example red?

In the end lighters stolen by a refugee from another refugee are red

Even the blood of dead soldiers is sometimes not so black that it appears red

Why the northern lights if I’m already cold

Why doesn’t the light fall on your head if everyone wants to die?

Why does the light shine like a killer and we are not afraid

I know that you will forever leave the north for the warm south

I want to leave you with my cold hands as a farewell

My hands do not know how to cry but they diligently want to come to you

I have a little hope that my hands will learn to wait

I believe that hands are capable of learning

Perhaps hands can teach something

A knot of my fingers tries to touch a dead squirrel

The roadside is covered with snow

I feel like this squirrel and my fingers are trying to wake up my squirrel corpse

*

Only God believes that I exist

Amen

*

Релігія трав

Релігія травм

Like a puppy I want to play games with you and then chew your leg to the bone

Insatiable hunger

Unquenchable cold

*

My happiness gene has been torn off

You’re sailing away from me faster than my heart beats

The ferry will be crowned with white flowers made from my tears

The air you breathe is warmed by the breath of my loneliness

Unfortunately I’m not capable of more

*

I don’t know anyone except you in this part of the country

I have no one but you in this country

I have no one but you in this world

I have no one but you inside my head

<You’ll never be there for me>

I have no one

*

I want to run away from myself

I want to run to you

I want to say something kind

I want to be silent and then die next to you

*

I’ll lay the sky for the seagulls

I will force the night to pray for silence

I’ll make the water find own veins

I’ll paint the pipes with snow paint

I will sing quieter than the leaves

I will become greener than pine needles

I’ll sneak up on the stars to burn them

I will steal the remaining stars and weave the stars into your braids

I will die so that no one else will die from a bullet or from love

I’ll wake up the wind to freshen your bed

I will come to life along with the snow-covered grass

And still you won’t know anything about me

*

Glass with drops on its surface dreams of dying without pain

*

Nobody picks mushrooms in the cemetery

Only buried love always returns

*

I imagine you leaving me along an invisible road

I don’t see you catching my gaze

I don’t feel you touching my hand

I steal your hugs from random passers-by

You steal money from random passers-by

Passers-by crumple the bitterness of faith in their mouths

I haven’t believed in anything for a long time

I haven’t hoped to be near you for a long time

Love is the destiny of believers

*

I will not see you

I’m blind to the future

I’m blind to money

I do not know you

I saw your photos on the Internet

More than anything in this world I would like to be blind

*

My body hates me because

My body will never touch your body

Letters of silence fall out of the window

I would like to fall straight into the abyss

But I’m already living in the abyss

I live knowing that you are somewhere

I live knowing that without you I’m alone

*

A fish swims on the surface of the frozen river of our fleeing time

*

They hugged me but the walls did not budge

No one can help me find a way out in a room without doors

The silver of the air sneaks into the auricle

The pupils of the eyes teach cracked lips the wind of the future

Water flows down your cheeks in the middle of winter

Red fingers are frozen into the icy heart muscles

*

I won’t come to you in the evening with flowers

I won’t confess my love to you

You will think that we are just nice conversationalists

You’ll think I’m kind to all people

We won’t meet each other on a date

We won’t know the greed of our lips

It’s better to deny yourself the pleasure now and say no than to suffer twice as much in a future that will never come

*

Love is frozen glass

Love is frozen grass

Sun[?]

Life is not an Instagram photo

Life is just the beginning of death

Sunset[?]

*

Our 

Footprints have never been in the snow

Separately 

You could see the footprint of your boots

Separately

A blind person could notice the prints of my love-hungry heels in the snow

White on white

Red on red

My body in the snow

My heart is in my chest

The snowstorm is crying about the air bomb that didn’t kill me

Winter believes that death is better than love

*

Tears flow for the living

As if no one had died

The sky runs away from me into the night

I’m out on the hunt to find you

But first I would like to find myself

[Besides can’t be found at the old family estate that no longer exists]

*

Birds crush silence in their mouths and 

I swallow my own silence

Drops roll down from your face 

Snow accepts bitter moisture with humility

^^^

The fish caught/The trees were/Good God/I’ll lay the sky for the seagulls/Glass with drops/Nobody picks was published in Gorko gazette.

Surveillance

They keep a constant surveillance on our lexicon,

processing every content pattern,

every sound and stimulus,

intending to detect any intimidating competence.

They monitor every word of our utterance,

targeting the sense inherent

in the radiating features of our crafted letters,

scanning every idiosyncratic figure of speech

with unremitting reconnaissance.

Clairvoyance II

He sees humanoids dating the human species,

Aliens sunbathing on terrestrial beaches,

newlyweds booking rooms

on the overpopulated Moon.

He hears the throes of a newborn era,

free of -isms and hybrid terrors,

the jubilation of deer and fowls

over the ban of hunting on every ground,

including the Crown’s.

Ephemeral

Ephemeral is this stillness of five at dawn,

when what would follow is sheer turmoil.

No wonder suspense has become a much-dreaded foe.

Illusive is the silence that aspires to lull discourse,

since a torrent of abuse

will be blighting our morns,

seducing with the semblance of a dialogue

our entire afternoons,

only to then burn the midnight oil.

Frail is this temporary cloak of warmth,

the coziness of lying snug

inside a breath-warmed home,

with curtains fortified against wind and storms,

but cowering before a psychological cyclone.

Milieu III

I see carcasses everywhere

of birds and abandoned pets,

of a pigeon lying supine,

hit in the middle of its breast,

of a cat, its mouth wide-open

with the last throes of death,

and each daily walk with my discerning dog

is more than any living soul can bear.

Littered with the hookah’s remnants,

these streets abound with burnt-out coal,

some scattered cones,

and the residue of incessant gossip

that sheathes pavements, street corners, 

and the auras of pedestrians,

whose breaths still linger, 

weaving webs of indelible distress

where the moon moth spent the night




back to the house, the same germline in every brave smile




temporal shifts of fruit flies on a rotten banana




sun shower loosening the tongues of lavender




in a Faraday cage of his own making




a species that applauds and weeps for one another




old men and kids staring down into a rainy sinkhole




finding space for a star on the boy's torn and wrinkled paper




his second-wind dandelion wish




playing army, the dying heroes of S.Vogdes Street

Demand

They all boldly project

A responsibility they have

As if we don’t feel it either

They also possess it well.

The price that will be found

And will lead them

Remember it my friends

It will be their own west.

After they chose

Our children’s east

Let them erase it

From the sight of our eyes.

They left them helplessly

As if they were only

Their own people

And there they will look frozen.

A body that they wounded

A soul that they burned

And everything was destroyed

They made an altar of money.

 Without shame or hesitation

They blamed these

A supposed human error

And so they brought it down.

A responsibility that should have been theirs

Who should take it

After everyone learned

A mistake with the bow.

Their discordant sounds

All together they set up

An absurd theater

Innocent though they died.

But with the rhythms of the lyre

A tear of pain is shed

They shout from end to end.

2 .

They wanted me.

To sit faithfully and patiently listening

But my ears grew tired of the influences

Of irrelevant and heartless types to dictate

As if everything revolved around them.

My usual reward was patience

But my worst, as I realized

On my own authority, a simple

Simple and never ambiguous no, pure, clean.

They never wanted to see inside me

To see my sides and textures

As everything inside me, they tore

The garments of my soul and burned my entrails.

 Besides, who would be 

Right and always true

To see and cast even a glance

On my own dreams, I want to, but no.

I was to blame for all this 

My magnanimity was in a superlative degree

And it was not fitting for them, unsuitable for immoral and ungrateful people.

But I would always have a good reason, which they proclaimed within themselves as a given.

But the worst and most unjust thing was

Not for me simply and naturally

But for those who wanted to crawl

To accept and accept foreign inhospitable layers.

 Now I knew, I suffered, I learned and above all

For my own good, I would never be a giver

Where it was not worth it and more, where it caused them

Fear, terror, insecurity and imperative, removal.

No matter if they wanted me according to their own standards and measures

I chose my own bar 

Without regretting it at all 

And to finally face that view.

Which does not come from riches and palaces

Parents’ parchments and not only

Despite life’s narrow streets and its steep sides.

I deal with all types of poetry. My writing has been awarded and has participated in various anthologies. I have published four poetry collections and a short story and am a radio producer. 

Caroline

for a while 

every poem i wrote

was my way of imagining

that we were making love

in the grass 

or the alley 

by the candy store

or just about anywhere

i could remember 

ever holding your hand

i imagined the summer breeze

& an armful 

of red haired babies screaming

until we took turns 

rocking them to sleep

& you gently 

placed flowers

in their hair.

The Marrow of Blueberries

i dream you 

are the marrow

of blueberries

& the roman spike 

of aging rose bushes

& you say

i am living proof

that the sun

will make 

you bleed.

Poem for Katie Teagarden

all through high school

i don’t believe 

we ever exchanged 

more than a few words

you always looked nervous

standing by the swimming pool

waiting for the whistle

the sun always brought 

your freckles out

while the quiet 

kept you pure

on your the final morning

i think it rained.

John Dorsey is the former Poet Laureate of Belle, MO. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Which Way to the River: Selected Poems: 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020), Pocatello Wildflower, (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2023), 100 Mornings, (Sacred Parasite, 2025), and Trump Stamp, (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2026).