Bye-Bye Love Boat (P.C.P.)

by | Oct 4, 2023 | Creative Writing, Detention Center Writing Contests, Poetry

by Charles R. Hall

Poetry, Arlington County Detention Facility/Heard/OAR writing contest, October 2023

Baby, without you I wasn’t nothing.  I couldn’t focus or think without you.  I love you when you was around me and you was unstoppable.

Baby, when I heard your nicknames; Love Boat, Sacks, goop, wet, I get so happy I smile.  I get very excited.  I know I need you just as much as you want me to need you.

Baby, you don’t know how you give me strength and make me feel like the Hulk.  When me and you fooling around, damn, we so tight.  Baby, you make me lunch out when you in my system.

Baby Damn!  As time goes along, I realized me and you shouldn’t be an item.  Or, if so, it’s time to dump you and let you go.

I outgrew us.  I no longer want to see you again or be a part of your madness so bye bye P.C.P.!

And, It Is

by | Aug 26, 2023 | Detention Center Writing Contests, Poetry

by Ali A.

First place winner, Poetry, Heard/Alexandria Detention Center writing contest, July 2023

(Typed story appears after photo)

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But, in nature, you always knew/These truths that now you eschew

Spontaneous form and voluptuous curvature/Motifs repeated evergreen from root structure

To odes in nervous human endocrine/Over time that mind that you weaned

Deaf to euphorious harmonies and the Chorus/All thing exclaiming in praise, ‘Adore Us!’

The veins of my wrists blossom and sprout/Blindness compels you to shout

Five-branched canopies in orchestrated complexity/and webbed with poetry

Can disconcerting violence deny/buried seeds their memory of the sky?

Can -ceration erase from me/the lakes or the rivers or the sea?

When I was begotten by the Euphrates/Along it, petal-crowned ancients that raised me

And I flow through the Nile/Collecting Israel’s histories in the meanwhile

Pleiades herself pierced a crack in my cell/to speckle my cheek with her secrets to tell

The weight of squared cages and degreed angles/Cannot force a divorce from my conjugal

inseparable unity with the Natural/traces of the pastoral embedded in my auricle

Perfectly straight lines of cinderblock and concrete/Calculated and approximated for spiritual defeat

Compounded obesity of bloated empire/Iron gear for iron men in iron spires

Cannot overpower the white Song like a roar/Mighty, that carves seabed from seashore

‘Bel’ And, it is/Bare-footed Bedouins

Across the sandy sandscape traversed/The whitling echoes of barren deserts

Clear heavens and dunes of the earth/through realms composed by verse

From heat smelting and amalgamating/Spring forth the cradles of Revelation

After one-hundred generations/Purified by deprivation

Undoing the pretenses of education/Nothing to interfere with contemplation

Then, it is.  Finally-quiet/An ecstatic charged silence

Listen . . . weaving existence is rhapsodic/Every stomata chanting cacophonic

The entire emerald planet rings harmonic/scrambled wild life in phonics

The rhyme scheme of this world/By His Voice that is only heard

By our recitation of His Words/that leave no injustice undisturbed

Primordial electrons in a cloud/Gossiping unborn galaxies’ vibrations aloud

The undying resistance of a martyr uncowed/As she prepares her own burial shroud

The excitement of a virginal wedding chamber/Last living specimen encased ears in amber

From which all of us sprang/From which every veritone and tenor rang

The quantum alphabet of creation apprehended/So that everything would be suspended

The totality of the cosmos, unfettered/it all strung between only two letters

When silent crowds gather at a disconcert/Solitary cells cradle us like a desert

Then, it is, Finally – / quiet.

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