Ovi poetry

The alley yawned, a throat of shadowed stone,
where streetlamps coughed their amber, sickly light,
and there he sat, a man of flesh and bone,
a specter sipping silence through the night.
“Man, this is lonely,” I called to the air.
He laughed, “man, this is life, and life is bare.”

His voice, a rusted hinge on time’s old door,
creaked tales of roads where laughter once had trod,
of loves that burned like stars, then burned no more,
and dreams that drowned beneath the weight of God.
The bottle wept its amber tears for him,
a sacrament to sorrow’s shadowed hymn.

The night stretched on, a beast with breath of frost,
its teeth of wind gnawed bones of broken men,
and Kris, he drank to all the hours lost,
to every “never” and each “might have been.”
“The world,” he said, “is but a fleeting flame,
and we are moths who dance, yet bear no name.”

I left him there, a king of empty streets,
his throne a crate, his crown a tilted hat,
the echoes of his words, like drumming beats,
pursued me through the dark where shadows sat.
For Kris had shown me life’s unvarnished face,
a lonely alley, time’s unyielding grace.

No doubt the prospect of an infected thought,
seeded by a microbe’s lack of truth,
conjures scenes of horror and dismay.
It is easy to imagine pristine sentences
once vibrant and whole
twisting under the weight of contagion,
their meaning splintered,
their coherence rotting like fruit abandoned in the sun.

Such an infection does not announce itself with fever or rash.
It seeps quietly into the spaces between letters,
into the breaths between syllables.
At first, the changes are subtle.
A word becomes slightly misspelled,
its shape unfamiliar yet still recognizable.
But then the infection spreads.
Adjectives swell beyond their purpose,
swollen with exaggeration.
Verbs decay, losing their action.
Nouns fragment, sprouting contradictions like mold.

In time, entire sentences collapse,
their structure dissolving into incoherent babble.
Once-healthy paragraphs stumble
under the weight of distorted syntax,
reduced to gibberish.
And those who read them
those unsuspecting minds who take in the corrupted language
find their own thoughts infected, warped into mimicry.

It began in the libraries.
A single phrase repeated across volumes:
Truth is fragile.
Scholars argued over its origin.
They whispered that it had no author,
that it simply appeared.

By the time the infection was noticed,
it was too late.
Essays turned to riddles.
Instructions became circular.
Warnings faded into ambiguous riddles
that no one could interpret.

The evening had taken a sour turn.
My pockets were empty,
my bank account even more so.

I’d accused him of theft,
my anger a tempest brewing within.

But as I rummaged through my belongings,
a revelation dawned,
the last drops of my drink had spilled,
creating a chaotic dance in my pockets.

My three hundred kroner, safe and sound,
had simply been misplaced.

Guilt gnawed at me.
I’d been so quick to judge, so eager to accuse.
An apology was due, a gesture of reconciliation.

But my bottle, once a source of comfort,
was now empty.
I couldn’t offer a drink, a small token of amends.

Defeated, I turned away and drifted off to sleep,
haunted by the weight of my mistake.

A sea of fears and regrets,
she called her dreams,
to later add that no regrets in her life,
only doubts.
Was she right or was she wrong?

She folded her personality into ripples
of translucent cheap vodka
and cursed all the potatoes
and the sugar of the world.
They made her fat, she said.

She took a deep sip
and then she blamed
universe and nature
that gave her such an elusive body,
obeying its own rules.

Indefinable, she called it
and walked away,
into a sea of fears and doubts.

Her face etched with lines of time,
she sat next to us on a bench,
the breeze whipping through her thin skin.
She clutched a bottle of cheap vodka,
taking long, comforting sips;
eyes, filled with sadness and a hint of defiance,
drifting towards the overcast sky.

“He was so fit,” she murmured, soft and low,
a tiny smile, a flicker, a fleeting glow.
“Vietnamese, Thai or Taiwanese. I think,” she said,
“But he was so fit, all muscle, all ahead.”
she said taking another deep sip.

She recalled the young woman she was,
all life, no care, some hope.
A woman captivated by the allure of a strong,
magnetic male. A man full of promise
who had lived the harsh realities of life;
she thought she was where she belonged.

“And I was young. Damn young. And a fool!”
she continued, her voice filled with regret.
“He saw it before anybody else,
‘Darling, if you want a future,
you have to leave this in the past.’
And it was that time the prick
was becoming my shared present!”

“Oh man,” she said, her voice breaking,
“you said you loved me.
One more time, just one more jab.
Here, the last one.”

He left
no word behind
no trace, no sound,
her heart shattered, lost and unbound.
And he became a woman’s tale,
of love and loss,
a bitter memory, a heavy cross.
One more stab!