Ovi poetry

When the mist parts away reveals panoramas of horror,
in its place stretches an infinite expanse of crimson,
a river that writhes and pulses with an otherworldly verve.

Crimson Dawn, once a proud vessel,
now a spectral silhouette adrift on its infernal aquatic.
The compass spins like a wounded dervish,
the peak of its needle seeking a nonexistent north.

Terror, cold and absolute, seized the face,
a mixture of disbelief and despair,
mirrored the crimson hue of the river.

A world turned upside down,
a maritime nightmare where the only constant
the endless, creeping current.

Captain’s weathered face bore the lines of countless storms,
stood at the helm, his grip on the wheel white-knuckled,
grappling with an enemy beyond comprehension,

His kind of terror.
A terror that seeped into the soul,
a dread that chilled to the bone.

“Ahoy,” his voice, a hoarse whisper in the eerie silence,
“we’re on the River of Blood, The charts say there’s no return.”
A murmur, like the wind through the skeletal needle,
ripple through watered bones.

Crimson Dawn is no longer a ship,
but a coffin on a liquid funeral pyre.
in the currant of the final spree.

And the captain, once a master of his fate,
now a captain without a course,
a pilot charting a voyage into the indefinite,
perhaps the unknowable,

definitely the known.

The ochre liquid swirled in the glass,
catching the dim light of the TV.
Sunday night, the sanctuary of the week,
was turning into a familiar grim scene.
Adrian and I silent spectators
of a world gone awry,
our shared cynicism a bitter form of companionship.

The anchor’s voice,
a monotone counterpoint to the escalating chaos,
reported another shooting in Malmö,
the usual suspects, said the police chief, a man whose face
held a mix of weariness and condescension.
Adrian snorted. “Same old story, different day,”
he muttered, his eyes fixed on the screen.

I nodded, my mind wandering to the countless faces
that slipped through the net of the order.
Young men, in a society that had failed them,
becoming statistics in a never-ending cycle.
The police chief, a man of privilege, could afford life.
But for those trapped in the crossfire,
life is a high-stakes gamble.

“but when they see us,” Adrian said, breaking the silence,
“they think, ‘those guys, they’re safe.’
they don’t fit the chief’s picture.
Funny how that works, huh?”
His laughter was tinged with bitterness.

I raised my glass in a silent toast.
…to our eyes,
our blue eyes.

Lars stared at the dashboard,
the silence from the engine
a heavy echo of his own sinking feeling.
Doomed from birth.

It had been a bad idea from the get-go,
fuelled by desperation and cheap whiskey the night before.
No plan B, just him and a rusty prayer that
the old Volvo would cooperate.
He slammed his fist against the steering wheel,
the worn leather groaning in protest.

The liquor store, across the street,
was bathed in the harsh, white light of its open sign.
Lars could almost feel the warmth of a stolen bottle against his palm,
the burn of cheap liquor erasing the gnawing worry in his gut.

But the Volvo… it just wasn’t built for this.
The sunshine yellow paint, faded and peeling,
screamed family car, football  games and grocery runs,
not an escape vehicle.
The backseat, crammed with deflated pool floaters
and a forgotten Happy Meal toy.

Heaving a sigh, Lars got out.
The July air hung heavy,
the stillness broken only by the distant drone of crickets.

He walked purposefully across the empty street,
the weight of his desperation growing with each step.
Reaching the glass door, he hesitated.
A flicker of movement inside caught his eye.
A young woman, barely out of her teens,
was restocking the shelves,
her face illuminated by the harsh fluorescent light.

But Lars needed the money and most the liquid in his veins and his brain,
Lars needed to numb the thoughts, the dreams and the hopes.
the girl screamed and the man in the back said something
Lars could not hear.

Focus man, there are bottles next to the register,
focus Lars.
what was that ‘bang’?

Then they said he was a policeman off duty in the shop,
but Lars never heard it.
he was somehow happy,
no more thoughts, no more dreams, no more hope.

“Downtown,” she’d said, the word clipped and hurried.
But the truth, etched in the tremor of her voice,
was the space behind the train station.
There, amidst the forgotten echoes of departures and arrivals,
a different kind of rendezvous awaited.
The air hung heavy with the tang of metal
and the musky scent of discarded dreams,
a fitting backdrop for the news she carried.

Tears welled in her eyes,
glistening like misplaced diamonds in the fading light.
Her daughter, she’d confessed,
a revelation that shattered the carefully constructed facade I’d known.
My question, a clumsy attempt to bridge the chasm
that had opened between us, hung heavy in the air.
“Did you speak to her?” it tumbled out, the “her” left purposely vague,
the vein of desperation in my voice betraying my flimsy pretence of nonchalance.

The foolishness of it all washed over me.
Years had passed, a lifetime etched in unspoken words and the slow,
steady erosion of connection.
My own sins, a tangled web spun from choices and regrets,
mirrored in the storm brewing behind her eyes.

And then, as if by unspoken agreement, the dam broke.
Tears, raw and unadulterated, streamed down both our faces.
The weight of the unspoken, the burden of lost years,
dissolved in the cleansing rain of shared grief.
We sought refuge in a dimly lit bar, a haven for the weary and lost.
The air, thick with smoke and the murmurs of strangers,
provided a strange sense of solace.

I did many mistakes,
I lived like a whirlwind of passion
a tornado of missteps
and a tempest  of failures.

Haven’t exactly followed a well-lit path,
more like a series of flickering flames
each igniting a new path that seemed electrifying
to lead me in the into dark tunnels
with an unsettling lack of exit signs.

Yet I manage somehow to stand, broken,
a testament to the stubborn resilience
that keeps propelling me forward,
even if it’s towards another passionate mistake.

The scars are there, etched deep failed ventures
driven by a burning desire that ultimately fizzled,
affairs that imploded disgruntled
under the weight of misplaced fervour.

Each wrong turn stung,
leaving me in the cold embrace of disappointment.
The darkness felt suffocating,
the air thick with the weight of “what ifs.”

I sift through the wreckage,
dissecting the choices lead me astray.
Was it the passion itself that was flawed,
or the way I navigated it?

Rain lashed against the plastic cover,
a relentless counterpoint to the gold of the sun,
the kind of day that mirrored the mayhem inside me
a tempestuous mix of despair and fleeting hope.

There, across a chipped table at the damp park, sat her.
Tears, glistening like shattered diamonds,
traced paths down her porcelain cheeks.
my insides twisted with a pang of something akin to shame,
a foreign feeling in the wasteland of my mind.
My own thoughts were a polluted river,
choked with the debris of self-pity and denial.

“Poison,” she rasped, her voice a mere whisper lost in the drumming rain.
“Coursing through my veins, a sweet, seductive melody promising oblivion.”
Her eyes, the colour of a stormy sky, locked with mine.
A flicker of recognition, or perhaps a shared understanding
of the abyss we both teetered on the edge of.

I scoffed, a dry, hollow sound.
“Polluting the last dregs of my brain with cheap aquavit,” I muttered,
watching the world through the transparent liquid.
The truth was far more damning
I was trying to drown the reminiscences, the doubts,
the suffocating emptiness, the wishful end.

“Good day,” she said, her voice barely audible yet strangely resolute.
A ghost of a smile played on her lips.
It wasn’t a joyous smile, not by a long shot.
It was the bitter grin of someone who
had stared into the abyss and found a twisted amusement there,
a dark echo of the despair that gnawed at my own soul.

We both laughed, a harsh, brittle sound,
that scraped against the already frayed edges of the day.
My laughter was a bitter cocktail of self-loathing and regret.
Hers, a sour note laced with a desperate defiance.
It was a symphony of broken things,
a duet sung by two lost souls clinging to the wreckage of their lives.

To Olof Palme,
leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party
from 1969 until his assassination in 1986.

Lars, remember those nights in the park,
huddled beneath the stars,
fists clenched against a world
rigged against the powerless?
Remember Lars?
Please, don’t laugh Lars.

We were young then, Lars,
naive maybe, but we believed
and change was possible.
We fought against the tide, Lars,
against the rising hate,
the widening chasms,
the fascists and the nazis.

We thought the older generation,
steeped in their apathy, were a dead end.
We were going to be different.
That’s what we thought, Lars,
Remember Lars?
Please, don’t laugh Lars.

Look at them now, Lars.
The very ones we swore to fight against,
draped in the flag of democracy they mock.
They call themselves champions of the people,
Remember Lars?
Please, don’t laugh Lars.

The very monsters we railed against, Lars,
parade inside the parliament,
 trophies of power in hand,
oblivious to the struggle below.
all kinds of hysteria their shield.

And Lars, be careful.
Don’t let their eye catch you
They don’t understand what being human means,
dissent is a disease,
a threat to their gilded cage.
do you remember Olof, Lars?
Please, don’t cry Lars.

He was sitting there alone in the dark;
the only company the shadows dancing on the wall,
lost kingdoms and neglected Cinderellas
swirled through his mind,
fairy tales that glimmered like distant stars,
forever out of reach.

A familiar ache bloomed in his arm,
a dull throb that signaled another failed attempt.
He squeezed his eyes shut,
willing the borrowed courage,
the fantastical escape,
to take hold of what Malmöhus Slott had left for him.

But the liquid coursing through his veins
held no happily-ever-afters,
only the bitter tang of disappointment,
no charming princes or glass slippers materialized.
Instead, grotesque figures materialized
from the inky blackness,
their laughter echoing in the hollowness of his mind.

He gritted his teeth,
the metallic tang of blood
an unwelcome counterpoint
to the fading dream.

The spike, a constant companion these days,
offered no solace.
It was a cruel reminder of the real world,
a world where magic was a fleeting illusion
and nightmares the harsh truth.

With a sigh, he slumped back,
the echo of his loneliness
a stark contrast to the fantastical
tales that taunted him
from the recesses of his mind,
from Malmöhus Slott,
Malmö castle!

The train hustled over the bridge,
escaping the twisted tower of Malmö,
a fugitive’s exiting all the way
to Copenhagen’s mermaid.
I watched it recede, red taillights disappearing,
another sip from the blood poison.

Beside me he remained silent,
his gaze fixed on the churning sea.
“Another train gone,” I muttered,
“another chance to leave.”
He turned, his eyes glinting in the dying light.
“There wouldn’t be a chance. Not anymore.”

I remembered his words,
spoken years ago on this very spot.
We were just old then, still defiant.
“We’ll go there one day,” I’d vowed,
clutching a vial filled with a vibrant red liquid.
“This town can’t hold us.”

The train’s mournful wail echoed in the distance.
“Times change,” I’d argued,
my voice laced with the bitterness
of years spent drowning sorrows.

He shook his head,
a single tear tracing a path down his pale cheek.
“No, dude. Times are a river, always flowing.
It’s us who build the dams,
who choose to stay stagnant
or let ourselves be carried forward.
We chose the crimson dam.”

He offered a last,
a ghost of a smile.
“Maybe,” he said,
“maybe one day,
we build a new bridge.”

In the silent aftermath months,
where shadows stretch
and memories sway,
a friend, a soulmate, has drifted away,
leaving me with echoes .

Decades weave a tapestry,
threads of joy and misery,
it was the 70s when the first went away
dawned within smokes embrace,
spikes in bruised veins.

Seeking solace, feeling pained,
the world was wild, a spinning top,
we’d rise, we thought
we’d fall, and it never stopped,
we lost ourselves in fleeting lights.

Time marched on, the 90s came,
with passion’s fire, a different flame,
bodies tangled, souls entwined,
in moments brief, we felt divine,
two friends left with the kiss of AIDS

But life shifts, a fickle friend,
brings heartache that we cannot mend,
cancer came with ruthless hand,
a battle neither of us planned.
I survived, you left.

Memories play on fevered minds,
ghostly echoes, faces that never fade,
in dreams, they visit, spectral light,
keep me company through the night.
and I’m so lonely and so afraid.

The 70s haze, the 90s fire,
the 2020s rock and roll,
these moments etched upon my soul.
So here I sit, as twilight falls,
echoes dancing on the walls.