Rearward
Poems like this win big
🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Incongruous rage eludes me, “lover boy”
it snared you like quicksand, I quavered
you’re quelled and qua
biding behind my alacritous antichrist
our antagonistic future, implausible now
on the glaring surface, you radiate with
peerless perfection, testimony speaks for
superfluity of flamboyant self-destruction
and yet, your blameless cHeRuBiC fAcE
is sensed by my sixth serenity
how can I hate your Hellenic skin?
🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Fault lines of unrequited fury, an animus
the wrath within you awoke something
dark in me
yet, my enmity is unnatural and aberrant
it’s borrowed, contrived, an ire imitation
only now do I recognize myself as you
mimicking such crimson chaos from afar
at best... what’s worse?
watching, waiting, scant seen nor believed
yet I want you, I want your nocturnality
knowing erst unrest and Faustian largesse
🩸🩸 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Desideratum knowledge bows to ¿ hearts ¿
and yours, my Goethe, is ice
vices claw-mark your supererogatory soul
and as sickness seeps unto some pool of
heartbroken, crestfallen, vitiated
men wading through your wicked water
I veil my Valentine eyes
the seduction, the surrealism, the synergy
sight was a false prophecy, I know it now
YESSSS I feel it now, consequence is king
🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Sequences of my Mephistophelian acts (!)
play by beneath play-by-play paradise yoke
no longer a lone voyeur
you notice my enkindling as our flame
incinerates inflections of innocence, we
bind, licentious linkage, love?
kingdoms of blind rivals kneel before us
you yearned for this, I learned for twine
so be mine
seraphic-shaped puppets never tell-turn
around as we P-U-L-L
their
⠀⠀⠀pretty
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀little
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ strings.
© Edward Swafford 2026 - Originally published on Vocal Media.
Rearward was my entry for a Vocal Media challenge, and it won outright amongst over 500 entries. My “reward” was $200, alongside the 2nd-5th placegetters.
Though the real reward? Recognition. Knowing that my pen has power, and if you’re reading this, yours does too.
Imagine a platform dismissing fiction and poetry, and not including them in their definition of "writing"...🙄
Recognition is everything. This obviously deserved it and more.
Edward! My God. How many things have you won now?
Prodigious and phenomenal--parchment--poetry-pop--prose-paean--penillion--
Proud of you ny friend
Mimi Bordeaux