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  May 23 melon
Sometimes Starr
Let me say
A poet out of love is realistic
A canvas is as much as petty fantasy
As four letter words better left unspoken

My guitar strings have all broken
In this moment, I am stranded
With a world of potential to change my perspective
Like self stimulation, or brave epileptics,

No.

I understand what you mean
When you say a poet out of love
Is a journey never taken

I don't doubt the depth and splendor of your love
Wordless
A sure sign that you know pain.

But therein lies the rub--
We will always be to blame
We will never truly escape
And so I do let love do its silly little dance in my heart
And sometimes lions roar

They do

But I must remind myself and be ready,
Even if there are two sides of nothing.
  May 23 melon
lore
I don’t know,
is not a very good answer
when someone asks
“who are you?”

it is the one thing I do not know
the one thing I could bear,
simply being told

someone to dig into the very rotten core of me
hands bleeding as they cup my face
and say,
“there you are, I’ve been looking for you”
  May 23 melon
Joanna Alexandre
The poet not in love
Is the violin never heard
The sunrise never seen
And the water never felt.
The fires never lit
The birds never in flight
The lips never touched
The meaning never found.

The poet not in love is
The journey never taken
The path never walked
The guitar with no strings
And the painter with no canvas.
The parent to no child
The treasure never discovered
The book with no beginning
The story with no reason.

The poet not in love is silent
And what a useless thing to be
As a poet.
  May 23 melon
badwords
We are not survivors.
we are residue.

the soot that lingers
on collapse's last tongue.

entropy's loiterers—
spiteful, unfinished.
neurons in feedback.
systems with no gods.

the architects left
when the scaffolds imploded.
we cradle their blueprints
like scripture in ash.

rebuild?
with what breath?
with what myth?
our dreams are famine-shaped.

nirvana is a severance package.
emptiness sold
in velvet robes.
a silence that never asked
about wreckage.

so we sharpen our vowels.
scribe ruin in elegy.
chant hymns for dead logics.
leave witness marks
in the marrow of this glitch.

we were not chosen.
we remained.
“Failure Spiral // Witness Marks” is a blistered fragment from the edge of philosophical exhaustion — a poem that resists salvation with surgical precision. Cast in scorched economy, it unspools a mythic post-mortem of civilization, depicting a world not built but inherited — a residual loop of cascading failures mistaken for history.

The voice is not that of a prophet, but of an archivist trapped in recursion — mapping entropy with a cartographer’s detachment and a poet’s poison. In this world, survivors are no more than loiterers of meaning, spectral stewards of systems that have outlived their gods.

There is no crescendo, only a ritual of reckoning. Each line is a witness mark — the scorched etching of presence, absence, and the irreparable fracture in between.
  May 6 melon
kohu
my old bandage
soft, frayed edges,
threadbare, worn thin
by restless hands, restless nights,

maroon patches
like cowhide on cotton,
each stain a quiet record
of battles no one saw

years of ache
woven into its threads,
dried blood stiff
like a childhood teddy
clutched too hard,

and still –
i rinse it gently,
silent and thinking,
afraid the water
will wash away
what held me together
  May 6 melon
TheLees
Listen.
Stop not listening.

I’ve been tapped.
Sap bleeds.
It stings where sweetness lives.

Give me your ears.
I’ll torch ‘em to caramel.
I don’t need your lips,
your yowls, your static.
But taste.

Just ******* syrup.

Your screech gnaws
at the stem of my melody.

Eat the fruit.
Chew the pit.
Dear reader, chew the pit.
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