Nia Owen Strong
Untitled
I was laughing to conceal my weeping stomach
churning uncontrollably.
Where do those smoke rings go?
Cherry half cracked and ready to drop,
on the sick patterned carpet.
Your grandmother, so proud when they installed it.
Forty hours of sweat and skinned bone "sold"
for that soft footing.
Your cherry takes it's leave and smoulders,
a modern meteorite and its plastic crater.
And now who's proud? You?
Not to give a fuck about fuck all,
To have abandoned thinking, each event is just another
attempt at using a little less brain power.
Disaffected
You reek of death for in you, life rots.
To depict you as such a unique creature
so black and white.
Would make this a birds eye's view,
and I am not that blessed.
Like you my eyes see less than there is, but
you smile unexpectedly and your eyes,
sarcasm and criticism, stare at me blankly
for my mere existence.
Maybe I drowned you one too many times in a past life.
Like two bullets ready to engage at the slightest sign of
weakness.
To dig in, wrench, and pull out any remaining particles of
surety,
and toss them, helpless and wasted until,
you tread them
embed them,
in the carpets thick face,
So I say to you.
Time is not wasted on the young
but on the dead.
So be gone.
Be gone and hold sway over me no longer.
When fear is no defender.
Fear is the ropes and the chains and the muzzle,
it is the mighty suppressor,
With death on my shoulder,
what have I to fear?
Except life itself.
Page(s) 26-27
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- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
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- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
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- North, The
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- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
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- Poetry London (1951)
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- Poetry Salzburg Review
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- Private Tutor
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- Quarto
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- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
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- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The