Chase Owens is a 24-year-old college student attending Southeastern University, an evangelical Christian college. He spent the four previous years as a foul-mouthed, whiskey-guzzling sailor with a propensity for receiving and handing out black eyes and bloody noses. Both of these worlds are absurd, beautiful, and sincere. Each shapes Chase and by extension his writing.

Three Poems (January 20, 2012. Issue 34.)

Outlaws

You and me,
let's be outlaws.
Fasttalkers, swindlers, grifters, and conmen.
Crooks, bandits, and pirates.
Let's go on the run,
with model white smiles on our most wanted posters.
I'll get a black leather jacket
and fill its pockets with cans of beans.
We'll trade sunrays for moonbeams
and the steady marching suburbs
for brambled back woods safe houses.
Let's head for the Sierra Nevadas
and carve outlaw creeds
in sequoia saplings so in a hundred years
they'll sit with the stars.
We'll run from this boredom
that settles in bone,
the apathy that weights heavy
like dirt on the coffin.
Let the good people slam closed their shutters
at the sound of our step.
Let's be young and irresponsible,
find Atlas
and shove him over,
until this world rocks and rolls.
When they have us surrounded
we'll embrace and never let go.
Let's be
cheaters, smugglers, and thieves.
Hustlers and scammers,
on the run from a culture
unwilling to do what it takes
to make love last.

A Prayer

These days I pray for poetry.
Poetry for the weathered wanderer
with a dust soaked cloak that marks a true rambler.
Poetry for the wind burned sailor and the starry-eyed storyteller.
For children wrapped in bedtime blankets
and mothers and fathers giving out goodnight kisses.
For those alone and those together,
God give them poetry.
For the disenfranchised,
the disillusioned, the unwanted abortion dodgers of failed evolution,
with lotus stains on their lips.
God give them poetry.
For new idealists camping under city lights
and an old puritan who had plans to put a city on a hill.
God give them poetry.
It's a small gift but it may keep us sane,
while we're working with callused hands and kicking up the dust of men.
It's a small gift but we all need to see words stretched
and pulled, until they fit around the supernal truths
we've always suspected.
For my generation,
the vainglorious, loquacious, bombastic, erotic and neurotic,
all sympathy with little empathy,
crowned kings and queens of triviality, slouching on thrones of apathy,
God grant us poetry.
Write it on our bones,
so we won't forget how to live passionately.

For My Sleeping Beauty

Go to bed with stories.
Go to sleep with songs.
I've strung my heart tight
for you, a harp
I play while your eyes are closed.
Dream of dragonflies,
of forgotten seaside coves,
of poking clouds fat with rain
and laughing with the sudden shower.
And while you're there,
empty your pockets
and find the kiss I left you.
I have another
waiting for you to wake.