No Title No Leash, the new hybrid chapbook Donnie Hollingsworth, featuring poetry and art is now available. Check out the link below where you can read three poems and an art selection. Below that is a link to the paperback.

 

 

 

From the first page of this collection, Donnie Hollingsworth sets the pace with a rockabilly rhythm, unwavering and direct. It is clear that we are in for a ride behind the veils and complacency of popular identity.
    The voice here is direct, without being brutal; it is truth defined through perspective. In turns, these poems reveal a psychedelic glow, only perceptible alone and in the dark.
    Some mountain cultures of the southwest consider the owl dark and powerful medicine.
    October beer, October ink, into February snow, that medicine remains in your system with each poem, The poetry pulls us through semesters and into each new oblivion.
     Hollingsworth presents us snapshots far from final – the poet teases and contorts time itself trying to get us to see through their skin, to understand the angle they find themselves set at against the seasons.
     There is an ever-shifting point of voice that travels with these poems – and it is that curious clarity I found most engaging as a reader, especially in its many returns to the inevitable questions, that come in waves and pulses…questions addressed if not answered, never finished, by the ever-singing poetry of OM.

 

-P.W Covington (Beat Poet Laureate of New Mexico and author of Vintage Denim) 

 

 

 

Somewhere between Tossa and Lamar

The white caps bounce back like inescapable shadows
the night life of Catalans
the unceasing movement
blank dry-wash patterns the blue mist sunsets of Colorado
landscapes are the means to my creation—even the liquor store’s neon glow
even the erasure marks even the wrinkles the hair thinning
because at some point you have to let go
into this vein of black ink pulling beneath
to be at peace

We think of ourselves as offerings to the sun
…there are some creatures in the forest
that walk upright only at night
held aloft
by the curtain falling
by the play being done

I think of dead friends each night into the fade memories coil on and on
unsaturates color into bones, untangling the wildflowers
the lights were taken down and the scene rolled away
simply growing apart decayed the stage
stifled the link, this is when
I lick the light until my tongue turns black

This is when I worship the pressure I’m suspended by
and my roots start dancing

I dreamt of us speaking in the Gothic Quarter
a Catalan song on the guitar
you were laughing over the guitar at my broken Spanish
(a wink towards the camera because I know you know)
pieces of the night in pentameter after the fifth song
your hair in the wind like wild tendrils
touching
stitched in empyreal sacred heart of Barcelona

Morning now, answering titanic waves all night knocking
crest and shatter the ebbing inhale everything rooted in breath
refocuses its attention into one
erases into the entirety of the Mediterranean
against this rhythm all thoughts and idols revert to sand
everything’s momentum dominates its
energy with enough time

No cold grey stones slack-jawed and drooling, freeze frames and silos
a million slings teaching in the high plains winds
skirt the flames of stupefied teenage vegetation
raise the glass
it’s the weekend
I wait to drown

Sense límits sense finals
I chase your words in my head like guitar licks strumming
how our whispers kissed the air
hummed into silent hymns
and by these depths searching
with bare arms reaching like roots crawling through each other