Author: michael raven

  • sewer

    erase my stain
    and wash me
    down the drain
    sell me down
    that river deep

  • absurdity bear

    brown bear in the river
    Photo by Francisco Cornellana Castells on Pexels.com
    i will crawl into my cave and
    pull the hole in behind
    i will growl at passers-by...

    for—
    i have feasted upon absurdity
    i pass on consuming more today
    bad drivers and misbehaviors
    and far too much OCD
    i feel bearish of personality
    and at all this absurdity

  • tryst

    Photo by Cornelia Munteanu on Unsplash
    barefoot of skin
    etched spidered line thin
    phantasm and trysting
    she slips through at
    the old wytchingtree
    waiting on the moon

  • tossing a rune — 09may25

    The Elder Futhark rune “dagaz“.
    one foot in her river
    one foot on her banks
    waiting as they did
    following old ways
    for her rushflow to
    pour across my legs

    Another of my rune poems for a Elder Futhark rune selected at random. Today’s rune is dagaz, whose core meaning is “daybreak”, often interpreted to be a time or place of liminality, or conditions associated with imminent change or transformation. Cusps and thresholds are further examples of ideas that dagaz represents.

  • mine november

    conceptual portrait of hands with red thread
    Photo by Amirhossein Kianbakht on Pexels.com
    her embrace mine november
    the only real remain
    slender pale her fingers,
    hair her ebon black
    her crimson at my throat
    here, only sleepwalking
    dawns the midnight sun
    only slowtalking brings light
    whispers,
    you cannot begin to know

  • Clair Obscur impressions

    Time permitting, which is not as often as you might think, I’ve been settling down and started playing a recently released game called Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

    In a day and age where games either seem just, in general, overpriced at $70 for some AAA titles which are often bug-filled things with uninspired gameplay, I do tend to sit up and pay attention when the rumors go around that an AA title comes out from an up-and-coming studio that tries to do something different from the the copy-pasted games out there for less than $50.

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  • this spellbound

    Photo by Connor DeMott on Unsplash
    i eigengrau glyph my skin
    sun-pocked stained within
    carve nails with needles
    set quill to down & begin

    mutterchant words forgot
    shuttled off to fen to rot
    leeched a heart of taint
    spirit thorn reflect of elf-shot

    so, this spellbound
    sworn to the stone
    so, this spellbound
    ash, thorn and bone

  • Towards the Within — New Bible

    Confession time.

    Back in the 90s, I had completely fallen in love with Ani DiFranco based on a single album, Out of Range. If I were to be completely honest, I actually fell in love with her over a single song, The Diner, and I did so while I was sipping over-roasted coffee in some bohemian-styled converted warehouse with the brick walls and exposed support timbers in the Lowertown neighborhood of downtown Saint Paul. I fell hard for her before the song was even over.

    Ani DiFranco; Image source: Rolling Stone

    My conversation partner had gone off to take a piss, as you are prone to needing to while drinking far too many over-roasted cups of black coffee over an afternoon spent doing largely nothing in a very bohemian manner, chain-smoking cigarettes in a very artistic way in the artist quarter of a revived downtown area.

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  • everyone driftboard

    Photo by Greg Johnson on Unsplash
    everyone driftboard skates past
    these hoarsewhisperered screams
    percolating out eggshell cracks
    growing back between the grass
    wiltgreen hairs of tarball sheen 

    glide tinnitus, that heartbeat
    shattermouth glass wrapped in
    barbedwire dreams as the
    everyone driftboard skates
    with only an "oh, bother"
    on lips to greet

  • at twilight

    i invite the night
    to kiss and send
    to drift my body
    down her river flowing—