swifts  &  s l o w s · a quarterly of crisscrossings

star burst faded in the midst
Raymond White

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I am a phantom

Dear Freedom, will you continue to
leave me,
stranded inside a dark-realm of
chaos and insanity?

I am entrapped inside my own
pain and grief,
and it’s so sad to see the
lone-winter nights of mourning rains
and mopping storms,
not distinctly seeing but hurting
and fearing the worse that could
possibly happen.

I am a human without shape
and form.
For ten years, my blood has
flowed dark.
My heart has been cold.

I am a phantom.

My soul travels misguided among
violent winds of the coldest snow,
unfound, due to my disobedient
visibility.

Dear Freedom, will you continue
to flee from me?
No one can see me.

I am a phantom.

Where Do We Turn

Where does the journey of the soul go, after the touch
And life of a mother’s hand becomes lost in the midst
Of perished winds?

Where does the heart beat, live, purely content and undisturbed?
After all the tears that we grieve drift into long – lost oceans

Once upon a time, there had been a beautiful mother
That we learned to love so dear all at sudden fades away
beyond our caring grasp, tragic memories too complex to
retain, Why!

Does the life cycle of nature’s course have to be
so cold and cruel? When hurricanes smash there, drowning
wails among our flesh, smashing billows we can’t escape,
From the existent turmoil dealt from a passing mother,
That never seems to fade from the heart’s memory,

What now! Is the significance of moving on,
When all that we have lived to love is suddenly taken
From us into looms of paradises that we fail to see,
The light of our mother’s eyes that shines upon us,

Here golden spirituality that blazes from the watch field
Of the skies, Tell me! How does humanity decide to move on?
Do we grow wings and travel into the mysterious winds,
Or let our tears bring life to dying roses – reborn by inevitable
seeds – bloomed by the souls – reincarnation, our new heaven –
new earth passes into the soil of our dear mother’s flesh,
forever streams, ancient blood of genetic relevance,
f
lowing – endless currents of relative love, dark – rivers
Of a mother’s life that never ends,

When and where do we turn again?

Human or Animal

I wander among the dark depths
of these shallow opening pillars
that entrap me in its four-sided
stone wall of savagery.

Violence surrounds my innocence.
I become suffocated from smoke bombs
thrown from inmate altercations.
Darkness and pain linger in this
sweltering heat of chaos.
My visual senses are disrupted.
I become a paralysis of many structures,
movement without moving forward.
So, what is my motive in life?

Is it meaningful as the purpose for which
my inner-humanity was received,
extracted from the dark-womb of my mother?
I hear her screaming shouts of
anguish as she delivered me into
this world. Am I a star child or
star burst faded in the midst
of overcasted dusty clouds?
My roots are thorns slanted against the
concrete pavement from where I stand
that consists of no flowers.

My heart blooms only black roses in spring,
endless winters blistering my soul
in traumatic coldness. And again and again,
a fearful reality takes over my visions
where I exist inside a stone-realm around
thousands of captivated imagery.

AM I HUMAN OR ANIMAL?

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As a writer (poet), Raymond White’s sole devotional purpose is to spread the literary message of how he perceives life based on personal experience and to make profound and authentic connections throughout the hearts and the entirety of the world for what he feels the essence of poetry consists of. He found the desire and inspiration to write around nine years back, three months before his current term of incarceration. White’s poems have been published on Minutes Before Six, The Beat Within, Critical Resistance and the prison journalism project. His commentaries can be heard on Prisonradio.org