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Odin odin@aflx.com

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Books
· Perceptions

· ECHOSIS

· Prosetry at Work

· Said and Unsaid - Vol 1

· 3 WAY MIRROR


Short Stories
· Patience Waning

· Ladle Lines (A prosetry memory)

· A Gentle Man

· Pacing Love's Journey

· Gratitude

· A Sticky Conversation

· Blazing Now and Then

· Vulnerable Captivity

· The Kite That Would Not Bow

· Time


Articles
· War and Peace

· Desperation Breeds Desperation

· Preference Manifest

· Innocent Guilt

· Barbed Isolation

· A Place...

· Sanity's Loss

· Organs Anonymous

· Fatuous Beyond Absurdity

· Truth is One


Poetry
· The Life-long Pernicious Evil

· Cherishing Sounds of Silence

· Understanding the Unexplainable

· Reality of Another Kind

· Finding Trust Again

· Aromalicious Memories

· A Jungle-rain Pastorale

· Sediment Within the Soul

· Life's Enormous Green Chest

· Roadkill Memoriam

         More poetry...

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The Sleepless Abyss

by Odin odin@aflx.com — Read all 3,869 poems by Odin odin@aflx.com

“My whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm, jumping from stone to stone. Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path and join the swirling mainstream of life, but I always find myself drawn inexorably back towards the chasm's edge, and there I shall walk until the day I finally fall into the abyss.”
― Edvard Munch. (Image by zo. utexas.edu)

Monday, July 28, 2025


Poem Artwork

 The Sleepless Abyss



Ancient soil exhales
it's encrusted breath.

We…

Elastic silhouettes,
curve and coil
in the illusion of escape.
We dance in the margins
of a coming quicksand collapse,
believing ourselves nimble enough
to sidestep the end.

Where rivers once sang,
a silent weapon waits,
forged in hubris,
It's a hungry patient,
its purpose final.

The sun…

Once golden,
now a bruised gray eye,
watches over the shoulder
Of time’s infinite edge.

The brightest star remembers
what we choose to forget.

Pollution…

The quiet stealth creation
we never named marches on,
undaunted,
unseen.

Glacier’s weep…

It's tears constant
into rising tides,
while deserts crack beneath a sky
that no longer listens.

The land…

Becomes puzzle pieces
of ruin and regret,
a mosaic of neglect galloping forward
on hooves of greed.

Black becomes
the echo of white,
life’s palette drained
to a stillborn hush.

We suffocate
in the shadows
we cast ourselves—
a requiem
written in carbon
and silence.
 

 



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Reviewed by Diana Legun
Reviewed on July 29, 2025
Language Arts teachers would ride the train on Ron’s thought track. Comprehension uncomprehended. If I’m not mistaken, Odin, I think I recall this image on a previous writing of yours. The image wails its concept in wicked harmony with The Sleepless Abyss — this post. The bare figure exudes the ‘elasticity’ in reach, in folding in half, in partial-silhouette, hypertrophically out of proportion, {as humans have made ourselves}. I like the sky “that no longer listens” As we have fouled it, so it now fouls us. “..stillborn hush,” conveys a gasp of that description. Very powerful pairing. Also, “on hooves of greed.” That gives a pounding sound to the hammer of neglect; quite fitting. This whole piece effectively portrays our self-inflicted pain, and the closing stanza finishing in ‘carbon’ and ‘silence’ reads truth-telling the accuracy of our “requiem.” Those who see plainly and sorrowfully need forgive ourselves, for all ‘we’ can do is ‘tell the story’ and the telling feels necessary. Thank you. ~~ djl

Reviewed by Ronald Hull
Reviewed on July 28, 2025
Another rendition of the Inconvenient Truth that has been known for nearly 50 years now but swept under the rug like all of the single use plastic that we find so convenient and throw away with glee.

My worry is that the IQ of the average reader will not understand a word of what you wrote.

Ron


New Poetry by Odin odin@aflx.com
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