Eviscerator Heaven

fool moon piano

2011-12-17T10:54:00.000-08:00

I would like to invite all poets and readers of Eviscerator Heaven to my personal poetry blog, http://foolmoonpiano.blogspot.com/, which, in time, should become an interesting place to visit. You can also listen to the music from my debut album, "Second Hand Man" at http://reverbnation.com/ajkaufmann - and even though it's only available on CD and vinyl in Poland, my friends can always send me an e-mail and we'll work something out.

Your busy editor,
A.J. Kaufmann

The decision is yours

2011-12-15T06:22:00.001-08:00

This blogzine is, as you all can see, mostly dead for most of the time. Should it stay here for archival purposes, or should I just delete it? The decision is yours...

I only wish to thank you, dear poets who used to submit your work and people who used to support this zine back in its glory days. Those glory days are apparently over and editorial changes were not always wise choices - in one case, the choice was destructive, and I'm not afraid to say it. I think this explains the slow, inevitable death of a once prosperous zine full of mind-blowing poetry from all around the world.

Your editor,
A.J. Kaufmann

6 poems from Robert D. Lyons

2011-09-12T07:17:00.000-07:00

Robert D. Lyons is a fresh poetic voice of Illinois.

Bathtub Gin

Sitting in a rusted over, dry moldy bathtub;
My mind wandering aimlessly through barren drought,
Reflecting in my dry eyes,
Dry skin,
Dry scars,
And dry blood,
Everything that is left is dehydrating and decaying
Into the lining of the tub.
My only blood
Is shed,
And wasted,
As ink
On cheap paper.
As I go pail,
Bloodless,
I can feel myself drifting away,
Being sucked down with a voracious current of air and opiates
Through the filter clogged the drain.
I wonder
What remains,
If any,
Will be left for the vultures to devour?

Blue Eyes and Bright Lights

The stage creaking as I walk to my stiff fold out chair,
And light burning my face and eyes,
Blinding me like a star.
I crack open my beer,
And light a cigarette,
Look up from my papers
To a concert hall jammed tight
Like a Chinese subway.
These people came to hear poetry,
But I don’t know what to tell them.
I imagine she is amongst them,
Drinking a bottle of coke and watching in silent attention.
I imagine that this is one chance to tell her everything
I never could before.
I begin to read,
And I see her crystal blue eyes in my head.
I can see her smiling in satisfaction,
And crying tears of resolution and joy,
For battle torn lovers.
But then she is gone,
And I don’t know where I am.

Freeway Blues

On the road for vacation,
And with each mile I move further away from you,
A piece of my heart breaks off and crashes onto the freeway,
The sound of metal clashing carries through the interstate wind,
To be carried off across the asphalt web of the world
By semi’s and the back of tourist’s minivans.
Pieces of me spread out from truck stops in Arizona
To bargain hotels in Florida.
I can see you fading away outside my window.
I can see you hidden and drifting farther away
In a maze of corn fields and bean sprouts
On the side of the road,
And imprisoned in runny condemned buildings
On the outskirts of bizarre and foreign cities.
Homesick,
But it’s not the eroding wood foundation I miss.
Home is wherever I am with you,
And I have been away for a long, long time.
I stop at a rusted over gas station in a godforsaken small town
To piss a bottle of straight whiskey without a chaser.
Pissing the blood of a coward.
Elton John comes on the radio and sings.
The suppressed tears start pouring out like wild horses over the hills,
In this shit stained restroom.
Filth lines the walls,
And flies line the filth.
He sings to me,
And I curl away inside of a urinal.
He sings,
“I guess that’s why
They call it the
Blues.”

Wine is Fine, but Whiskey is Quicker

I killed myself today.
I had too many lives.
It was the only way to survive.
But somehow,
I’m not dead.
Bottles and Bottles of cheap death at my feet.
Orange tubed bottles with long labels.
Long tube bottles oozing ruby read with the stench of decay.
Drinking is the act of suicide.
Dying each night to be born again in the morning.
Resurrected.
I killed myself today.
I did it in a crowd.
I blew my brains away on the cigarette but sidewalks.
The echo raced through darkened and lonely allies,
Past the bums and the whores.
Remnants of me
Littered and scattered across all the rusted dumpsters of despair
In the allies of cities damned or forgotten.
Opiates drop from my fist like hail.
I swallow them all at once
And can feel the snow ridden mountains erecting in my stomach.
Ecstasy in my veins,
Filling my head like concrete
And burning out my eye sockets with violent colors of disregarded beauty.
The room is spinning,
But it’s always been.
As I stand outside eroding bars,
The world passes me by like a fast forward street camera.
The flashes of the lights and the crowd warp around me,
As my life plays out in front of my eyes.
My eyelids way me down like chains,
And I tumble to the ground to drown in my foamed vomit.
To drown in my guilt.
To drown in my fears.
It’s getting dark,
Too dark to see.

Expiration in Woodriver

Woodriver,
I’m falling into the cracks.
I’m lost in the slums of toxic bog
Hovering dense above,
Blocking out the sun,
Like my sorrow,
Like my cigarette smoke.
The coal plants my only company.
Destroyers.
Destroyers like me.
Flame sprouting from our mouths,
Burning the o-zone.
Dealers of death and black lung
On a doomed, cloudy Sunday morn.
The smoke kissing the ground,
Hiding the trees,
Keeps me lost
And running in circles.
A glance over my shoulder reveals a rusted dumpster
Filled with broken beer bottles,
Shattered,
And a decayed piece of parchment, half buried,
Half buried,
That reads,
“Love.”

Whiskey and Beer for the Haunted

Bukowski,
Your record is playing
In all its dusted grainy glory;
A desert of misery,
Oasis of tears,
And it almost feels like you are here.
Your slow voice vibrates my chair,
Massaging my black lungs and whiskey burnt throat.
You can have my chair,
I will sit on the bed.
I’ll share my bottom shelve whiskey,
And you can bum one of my cheap cigars,
Like you used to smoke at City Lights.
Hank,
Come sit down.
The drinks are on me.
We can shoot the shit about Hemingway,
And play the video poker across the street.
We will put all our chips on the table,
And think of our angels,
While drinking warm and stale beer
With our demons.
Talk to me,
Bukowski,
You are the only friend I have.

5 poems from Richard Wink

2011-07-27T12:21:00.000-07:00

Richard Wink is a writer and raconteur from Norwich, England.

Two years ago I was a dead man

Driving fifty miles an hour down Cromer Road
as crows circled in the fevered skies.
We had no vultures around here
only striking black crows,
that were ominous all the same.

This time was a period of abstinence.
I was cursed by a woman who I never loved.
Her curves I could recall
through muscle memories.
Her voice
and scent
long forgotten.

I parked by the engaging North Sea,
busy small waves
pinched the shoreline.
I had enough coins in my back pocket
for a can of coke
and a portion of chips,
most of which I ended up
throwing to the seagulls.

The gulls were privileged birds,
quite unlike the inland crows.
The sea birds were fattened by greasy fried potato
freshened by a ceaseless coastal breeze.
I watched them
rise and fall.

Shivers added me on Facebook

and I accepted his request.
It doesn’t matter that in a few years time
this Social Network
would die like all the others,
and a movie will be made about it’s death.
I’m sure another place of distraction
will emerge from thin air.

It didn’t matter
that me and Shivers hadn’t spoken
in over ten years.
We were never friends,
at best we were acquaintances,
one time classmates.
Two boys that used to kick lumps
out of each other most lunchtimes
playing football
on the playing fields.

I remember Shivers looked a little bug eyed
with short brown hair.
His profile picture suggests he looks similar now,
only older and fatter in the face.
He wasn’t very smart,
Then again neither am I.
I just give off the impression
That I know what I’m talking about.

Shivers, my new friend
who isn’t a friend
or never really was one.
But when I think
about friendship
I wonder if I’ve ever only known people,
yet never got close
enough to become
a friend.

There’s less pressure that way
keeping people at arm’s length
part of a database.
A social network where the wires have been severed
and the connection is weak.

Slow climb back up the mountain

Dead End Road
was critically well received,
the reviews were mostly generous.
However it was also commercially
Unsuccessful.

After the book was finished
I wrote many messy words
That made no sense.
I navel gazed
and found only fluff.

My publishers only ever sent me one
royalty cheque.
I still have it somewhere,
it wasn’t much,
not even enough to buy a sandwich.

The royalty cheque told me a lot
about whether or not I was good enough
to make a living
as a writer.

Realisation

When the reaction is lukewarm,
and neither a compliment
nor an insult is shared.
You know it is time
to put down the pen.

I’ve tried to prize open my fingers
and release the pen,
prevent it from leaking the ink
that will damage my reputation any further.

Trouble is,
the grip is tight.
It’s like trying to wrestle a syringe
from the paw of a dead junkie,
rigour mortis has set in.

The dead writer
Is showing signs of life.

Two bonsai trees sit on my window sill

One of them is exquisite,
proudly green.
Open to touch
and manipulation.

The other looks weak,
With curled leaves,
a scrawny trunk.
It grows with reluctance.

I water the trees
each morning,
and in the evening
before I sit down to write
I look at the trees for about a quarter of an hour
in the hope that I might witness some growth.
I never see anything.

It reminds me of when I look in the mirror.
Apparently I’m changing.
But I just don’t see it.

5 poems from Amit Parmessur

2010-12-14T17:42:00.000-08:00

Aged 27, Amit Parmessur has been writing for the past 8 years, being more serious this year. He has appeared and been accepted in Shalla Magazine, The Short Humour Site, Orchard Press Mysteries, Postcard Shorts, Long Story Short, Golden Apple Ezine, Calliope Nerve, Carcinogenic Poetry, Catapult to Mars, Eunoia Review, The Houston Literary Review, Puffin Circus, Ann Arbor Review, Damazine, LITSNACK, Burnt Bridge and Heavy Hands Ink among others. He also speaks French, Creole and Hindi and is always very close to the land of his ancestors, India. Hailing from the lovely island of Mauritius, he intends to keep on striving despite the lack of literary scope locally.

Paradox

like a ladder that cannot bear your lanky weight
an expensive crown that does not emit any spark
a paint brush
resembling a dusty broom that bruises paper

my body is a secular sun
my mind a sharp religious light

my skull is a bottomless vase
my brains an assortment of scintillating flowers

my ambitions a climbable Mount Kailash
my past a cool and collected Kilauea Volcano
I have a heart that needs coffers of energy,
lungs like coffins that hate oxygen

I have a stomach growling all day long,
a palate allergic to the fragrance of food

A white person filled with
black gall broke my teeth,
giving me Royal food to taste every second.
Sisyphus-like life seems different every day
with different degrees of doom and gloom

I have a lively cadaver that’s dark,
a shadow that exhibits the colors of my clothes
There’s a fierce fire burning in my wet eyes
Hope, of a third set of teeth

For now, each night comes
like an ox falling on my brave stomach,
parading along it till sinister morning

Golden Apple

This apple is not an Edenic forbidden fruit.
This apple is not the poisoned apple

offered to Snow White. It is not
any Desperate Housewives Apple Mug.

This apple is one from
my own garden of the Hesperides, a sleeping garden
that supports nothing more than an apple—

a garden never blessed by any elegant Eve.

This crimson apple
is golden in what it signifies.

This golden apple consoles and
reanimates its prelapserian Adam
deluded and maimed by the trenchant nails of love,
for whom life is poorer than popular Sisyphus.

This apple is the solid symbol of a weak man
who never concocts or tastes any evil soup,
bread or wine.

Modesty will force this ascetic man to joke
that he stole the golden apple

from a jewel shop or it is
a fake crown brought
to his garden by a waterless whirlpool.

The modest man might cut—
or even slash, and share the apple
with the whole world if only an apple

is what remains as eatable one sunless day.

Bermuda Leaf

on the crumbling scaffold there,
the rancid rope was shrinking
a string of pearls, shrouded in the skin
of sorrow, blanching
like a morose girl about to lose her virginity

the rope resembled a fallen matador
of the dusty arenas of a distant past,
now unable to fight anymore

I ambled among the pieces of forgetfulness,
rampaging that exhausted field,
the whispers of a familiar voice
disturbing the harrowing shadows around

the leaves slept, dead, upside down on the rocks
turned into partial statues of dried sap
one fallen aspen leaf reposed on the scaffold,
as a Bermuda triangle that had taken you away

the leaf, as green as the lightning searching its body
was where I had lost myself too
bleeding, crying, dying, tortured
we shared a bond, now a string of blanched fortunes

Female Forms

I feel so awkward and despondent in this city,
like a star in the midst of condescending bulbs

where I stay is a place embellished by slavery

through the wooden window of my modest room
I see a tree trunk resembling a naked woman
holding a hundred branches and infinite twigs,
which are always waltzing proudly,
relishing security, oblivious of the woman’s perpetual pain
I’ll be ashamed to admit that I’m so desperate
that I even get ideas looking at the naked woman

when I go to work each dewy morning
I see that enormous rock, with vivid cornflowers
leaning against it, near the elegant bus stop
it’s like a crouched woman, one who has just been
beaten black and blue by a promiscuous husband
as I go away in the bus I cannot stop looking at her,
praying for more tolerance and sensibility

when I decide to spend my evening under the bridge
looking at the blissful swans transporting their
joyous bodies from one corner of the river to another
I feel your presence in the rhythmic ripples
I feel your rustic face like
a tiny flower blossoming in my broad thirsty hands

and at night, along the ceiling there is always
that workaholic carrying a heavy basket on her head
a rare friend once told me my ceiling is a canvas
paying tribute to slavery

why couldn’t we be as rhyming swans in a river
why couldn’t we be carefree twigs

I have bought some paint but it would be sad
to erase that woman who reminds me of you,
back in some faraway village

In the Prayer Closet

I entered the solemn prayer closet
A cute padded kneeler
a basic altar-like area with a shiny cross on it
a pair of soft-seated pale green folding chairs,
occupied by a passionate young couple

They were chaste and innocent souls
lost in profound thoughts of God
Still standing in unprecedented awe
I lit a stout candle and
put it close to my rejuvenated heart

I folded my hands near my bruised chest
and closed my emotional eyes
The candle burnt and
its pure fire soon seemed to invade my heart
God would see my deep secret
desires now with so much light
in my heart, I thought
God was now here
Then an evil wind blew
and the religious curtains rose violently
I protected the candle, clinging to hope
I soon felt very uncomfortable as my heart was
beginning to burn
I opened my hopeful eyes
God was nowhere
The couple was lying on the ground
burnt down to ashes

In the end my heart was burnt down to ashes too
I collapsed onto the floor,
near the unscathed green folding chairs

4 poems from Zack Sternwalker

2010-12-08T03:10:00.000-08:00

Zack Sternwalker writes and draws. He has work at www.debutantehair.com and a blog at www.debutantehair.blogspot.com.

To be here and suck summers again

I know a paper dealer whose hands just want to say you’re still a connection calling out on my face down a lump of actual charcoal
and I know that the smell would never be combined with the feel of our beautiful flesh
when I don't even want to get inside and say I'm immortal feeling
like some kind of sock laying over a desk
in the middle of the place where normally at least the last few cars find some solace.

The real nativity of the distance like some field or suddenly brewed naked release

I saw a set of easy flowing star shaped knowledge
its belief of pure adrenaline pumped through a thousand forests
for lovingly held bosoms and at a creek’s reach or crib’s napalm anus
a shingle that at least could be the same as my night
with some pink asteroid sofa in his wheeze feature
still more emblematic of the gravity on a beach wanderers skull.

Counting gristle splinters in the unsheathed lightning of cereuses

Just look at its various lights probably from the soft splashes of a few digesting kernels
if I could find the cool workings of a request for larger and more thrice
like a drippy north closet floating for some secure bubble steps
deposits where a giant of some roadsters look like oh we forgot
but even with a cheese shaped warmth they fall together to insist on actual rabies.

The long held out song of my string going over the skyline with some sunsets

Growing floating feather bubbles of escaped brain penises
withered in castles of armpit orchestra tunnel sky
knees like bloated windows watching dark while the morning takes
in porches
lowered go to shielding in his half imagination past
the realness of death with a sleepy drone arm bristling to scrape up asteroids.

5 poems from Levi Wagenmaker

2010-12-04T00:33:00.000-08:00

Levi Wagenmaker (1944 - ) is a retired journalist, living in the Netherlands for most of the year, and in France for some of it (in spring and autumn), with three bitches, two of whom are dogs.

'scented candles'

lighting a fat squat candle
set in an ornamental lantern
made to look like pewter
making an open and shut case
for a glass the size of a large beaker
but open at both ends
to allow access to oxygen-rich air
and let wax and wick rest
on a metal base
(made to look like pewter)
(like the rest of the metal
embracing the glass
meant to shield flame from draught)

lighting such a candle
as recidivism tends to entail
slanting a burning match
down into the glass
and scorching the threadbare fur
growing from fingers' hand-bound digits
not all that much hair
but giving off the unmistakable stench
of singed skin
familiar in spite of burning at the stake's
having become unfashionable

furry attributes decorating items
of clothing
are with real or feigned conviction
declared to be synthetic realism
by optimistic retailers
optimising profits by going for
temptingly cheap imports from China

it can be very tempting
to light a match and test the fur's
convincing realism

supposedly a trained nose
should be capable of distinguishing
between the scent of burnt to ashes fur
from suspected
rabbits
cats
or dogs

the incentive to test
smelling a rat

'Eve = First'

touch when we touch
a double entente
per se
you feel me touching you
I feel myself touching you
your touching me with what and where also
registers with both of us
possibly synchronously
but as part of processes separated
in space if not
subjectively perceived
as separate in time
yet
given that received wisdom holds
space-time to be a continuum
our synchronicity of perception
(if taken at its word)
should have us coinciding in place
(space)
just as well

but since the situation belies
that very romantic concept
our being apart together
must be based on our being separated
in time as well
(however fractionally)

I should have kept my thoughts to myself
of course
the bickering has started
as to who felt who and what and where
first

'nanoing'

the nanopoem characteristically
has a length of less
than a single word
a poem completely lost for words
might seem to the ideal form
for nanopoems
but poets' fixation
with getting published
would keep any nanopoems
from getting written at all
(although book dummies could hold
any number of wordless poems and
they would make easy reading even
for illiterate min or maj orities)

(a population limited to one individual
would count as a nanomajority and
a population of none as a nanominority
and in time the former would merge or shift
into the latter ority - the way of all orities)

nanopoems of less than one word
would ideally consist of half of one
of more than three letters since
half of at least one two-letter word
might constitute a personal pronoun

HI

so four-letter words as long as
they cannot be separated into
two sequences of letters constituting
words in their own right

MaMa PaPa

sh
makes a perfectly consistent nanopoem
and so does
ck

'simulacra'

considerable time and effort went into
developing a biomechanical simulator
to learn how elderly persons come
to fall and break bones or otherwise
injure themselves at considerable cost
to healthcare budgets in case of
required hospitalisation not of course
to teach the elderly on how better to fall
but on how to advise them on how to walk
run skip rope bunjee jump without injuries
if they won't just sit tight until they die
(perhaps another simulator is indicated)

'whangdoodle'

G-string theory is also and otherwise
known as jockstrap theory or
thong theory which as a term suggests
the theoretical taste events at the tip
of the tongue of an inquisitive linguist
researching related aspects of etymology
following thong from where it springs
to where it leads an in-depth investigation
bringing up thwang the archaic word believed
to be the source for thong as well as wang
the latter slang and at an earlier stage
rather longer as whangdoodle and denoting
something for which the correct name isn't known
wang names what is known but not mentioned
by name or not correctly other than in a medical context
song lyrics partially remembered mention band members
ready to play 'that wang-dang-doodle' for the duration
of the night a kind of R&B monoculture one must
suppose or a bunch of offbeat etymologists possibly
to hold true G-string or jockstrap or thong theory
must be falsifiable according to a scientific paradigm
wholly unrelated to beaches or wrestling or sandals
or any other whangdoodle of whatever nature

3 poems from Panos Panagiotopoulos

2010-11-24T18:05:00.000-08:00

Panos Panagiotopoulos is a Greek writer whose themes range from erotica to social criticism, all dressed with free verse, text which is meant to be spoken; verses of cynical flavor but little cynicism. His poems have also been published in Carcinogenic Poetry, Orion headless, Gloom Cupboard and amphibi-us. He currently resides in Athens, Greece, and is passionate about writing and his son.

spinal tap

so bring your wings on me
make each flutter meaningful,
make it matter to yourself,
it's possible that I am one who should not
be trusted or relied on,
[no]
I am not your friend nor lover
but still, talk to me, pretend I am either
talk to me, I'm fed up with all this crying
all I read about is tears and hearts enduring
bodies under word and dot stampedes
[space]
I'm tired and I need to see
a crack, somewhere,
the foramina of days
as they press their patent grim against my skin,
[available]
the sun retreats and I'm more or less sitting
by my self,
writing radioactive verses
[for us]
on my self
I wanted to be the book you'd read one day
handed to you by a friend or lover
or sometimes both, you'd lick your fingers and
rummage through me
[lover]
because your life is the party I'm crashing
observing your guests from the coffee table
until their rude potential sits on me
so quiver and make it matter
make it meaningful, if only
to yourself

I am

I don't wish to have my name printed
on paper that ages and withers at a rhythm and pace
slower than my own.
not known or whispered from mouth to mouth in fame
not even slightly recognized by a photo, a companion to
words that have a grasp on truth
firmer than my own.

I want to be the phrase, the anecdotal quote
he reads on the door of a toilet booth,
in the back restroom of a highway bar,
somewhere, on the way to somewhere else
and as he walks out, relieved, and speaks
I am there, on the lips of the traveling man
shared and appreciated and imagined but not mentioned
by a name of my own.

I don't wish to settle on a shelf and gather the smoking ruins
of broken minds, I don't need to feel their eyes on me,
not their eyes on me, not by identity,
but I want to be the everyman who seduces a fox with red toenails,
as they both watch the sunset from the porch of a cabin
up the mountain, they watch the sunset and he whispers the phrase,
the quote that I am,
the one I call my own.

Reprocess

I am born again, when the alarm clock goes off,
I am born again and the day is a hostile womb,
made up of chrome and scrap metal.
I come forth from fire
into the icy arms of an undetermined future,
the incandescent blade of a scalpel, cutting through
the frozen limbs of every day until I'm smothered,
I'm born again each wet and cold morrow.

I ride a caterpillar to work, a stretch of wheels
and orphaned prayers,
fused into a single body of chrome and scrap metal,
the day is rust on the creases of everything perceivable;
I ride a caterpillar to work leaving trails of rust, chrome
and piles of scrap metal at the sides of the highway.

Reality looks distended through raindrops
on the windshield, red lights from cars in front,
green traffic signals, wet and wide like floodlights.
Wipers collect galaxies that settle on my windshield,
bearing an internal swirl, I am looking at the universe
forming on my windshield and my eyes,
my eyes become the colour of rain.

My eyes are rain, they follow kamikaze messengers
of heaven to where the elder clouds conspire.
Converging over cities to observe larval thoughts, words,
the short lifespan of dreams, the rise and fall of vanity,
clouds are clusters of history, thunder is the groan of
primordial myths meeting head-on over cities as

the rain falls; clouds are
history receptacles and raindrops are
stories lost or whispered too softly,

myths expressed in the tears of
could-be skyrivers.

It's raining years on our heads;
we are born into the day to best our fathers,
every day,
to climb a little higher, to go a little further,
to feel a little more and dare to realize that
it's raining years on our heads,
every day.

The day is a hostile womb,
brooding over an undetermined future and we,
we are born again each morning,
brought forth in rain
to labor under nuclei of recycled history.

2 poems from Gail Gray

2010-11-16T15:22:00.000-08:00

Gail Gray, grew up in Lowell, Mass but now lives in Greenville, SC, USA. She is the author of five books of poetry, The Hazard of Waking Up, Spirals in Copper, and Planetary Tension; with Eye on the Universe ( online at Differentia Press) and Storms at the Edge upcoming from Virgogray Press. She is the owner of Shadow Archer Press and editor of Fissure, a magazine of experimental art and writing. Her poetry has been published in The Asheville Poetry Review, Counterexample Poetics, Cokefish, Exquisite Corpse, Eviscerator Heaven, Being, Big Swollen Toe, Sisyphus, Zygote Abstract Libertine, Gloom Cupboard, Main Street Rag, sein und werden, Clockwise Cat, Shoots and Vines, ditch, Deep Tissue, Troubadour 21, Anastomoo, Full of Crow and the So It Goes Anthology She is the author of a magical realism novel, Shaman Circus.

The Trail of True

A series of realizations,
eerie unfoldings
the facts laid flat like Morgan-Grier cards
the tableau vividly colored.
No sepia tones, no misty dreamshades.

The shocks delivered in handspans,
as if strung on a necklace,
each attached with precision
to it’s individual ring.
Final. Hammer on anvil
or clack of typewriter keys;
jolt of the carriage flying,
slamming
stopped
locking each line.
Yet linked.
Linked so perfectly together
no denials of truth remain.

Guarded, sacred images, redolent of autumnal lakesides,
swept away. The opening of a rusty-hinged door,
the figures inside, strobed
in passing shadows,
vehicles high on a wall.
An optical confrontation to
perception, as if the taunt of reality
is not enough.
The hushed rush of escape,
A sound, I never forget.
Figures: once only a name, or a passerby
viewed in peripheral haze, stand now, illumined.
The afternoon light, proclaims in sharp angles.
Accentuated, to tell the uncut tale;
render the misread trail
redundant.

Remembrances of last night past: Encouraged by a morning for the Sidh to yawn itself wide, mist rising in wraithy clouds, pocket ghosts erupting as the leaves hung wet and heavy –yellow the color of Dias de los Muertos mums, the color of sadness - orangered tears not yet shed, held back, unleashed in city lashings. The gods will have us huddle beneath their weighty emotions.

This All Hallows Eve I’m not a corpse bride but John Fowles’ widow straightpinning my dreams from behind a black widow’s veil, dotted with crystal tears stitching together the edge of a night fit for Ichabods and Lizzie Bordens. No Green ‘cept neon in Greenville tonight. Conchis, The Magus and Baron Samedhi back seat drivin’ we’re speeding the streets, Laurens then Augusta Rd. the asphalt bleeding streaming serpent’s kiss Aida Wedo stop and go rainbow colors, garish and stunning, reflected back from slickwet pavement, over and over refracted in fractal rainbows, the Fibonacci principle skateboarded alive washed up from too fast tires on unsafe twisty jack-knife roads, ‘cause everybodys gotta get there. Costumed crazies everywhere. “You going’ to a party?” The dude asks holding the door open wide, a blurry-eyed King of the night. That’s right gotta run the parties already started all over this wet but not damped-down uptight-except-for-tonight town. The rain offers release or subjugation, whatever your preference. Gives permission to let loose, let the wild jagged rippin’ it open darkside night toss you here and there, in and out of one reality, one dimension to the next, grimaces as grins and a new friend on every corner.

Take a right ignoring the yield sign down Mills Ave. Even here 973 miles away from Joan Fabrics and my meme’s house on Salem St., observer since my Faith Home Orphanage tenement childhood, Gilbride Terrace, Lowell, MA, the lit-up windows of textile mills make me look. Damn, almost a dead voyeur, miss that curve, slide through the stop sign slam the wheel hard left down McGarity down the hill, slip slopping through the ditch braking in deep wet grass the Gulf Stream air lavishing ravishing the night with voudou kisses and threats of El Nino all the South Carolina winter. Kilted LokiRake to the rescue. He hauls beer ‘cause I gotta fix that black veil.

Che’ Rivera, subtle maybe not so subtle herbal host-offering revolutionary. The temple’s where you take it and the Medusa queen waves her snakey hands ‘til the Ouroboros eats its tail and all’s right with our night, our sliced off night smack in the middle of a nation that pretends death doesn’t run the whole show. I’m here to remind them.

Let’s raise a toast and dance to dried blood cello sounds and Murder by Death.

Crunchy kills Cricket over and over. The cricket sings over and over. My mother taught me Never kill a cricket, they’re good luck. London superstitions or not, my good luck M… o.. H.. ee. t.. o Cricket deep boom voice from the bottom-of-the-well forgives me for waking him up gifting deep hugs and streaming jokes.

All around, kindred in the eyes on altered faces, five-year-old unreadable texting vampires, crazy cat ladies and Camis doubled, free and uncaring, what the hell go for it? Pour a libation over the railing of the high porch perched cornerwise on the crumbling sagging fringe of the West Side mill village, thanking the pantheon of pithy gods who hurl huge broken tree limbs, a synchronicity sign in our honor. It’s too wet for the Samhain bonfires and Tiki torches but not for the blackheat circle of macabre stories passing the black silk story stick, Bacchus, Morrison and Ozzy smiling from pumpkin flesh deemed it right. Doll yards and drowning Scots. As above so below. So shall it be.

Altered foods, altered memories, altered futures, a handful of pomegranate seeds and I’ve slid into that Hades comfy zone, where everything has ten meanings, layers on layers, mindstuffed: many pasts, some chugging beside me: inventors in gas masks, beauties in Geisha kimonos, green eyed gemstone-marked tragedy goddesses crawling in snakes, wild things in crowns and scepters because this night we’re all kings of the underground, trolling the River Styx for our futures, escaping out of the pit, erupting from the fissure in the cracks, the skulltoothed smile urging us on to crazier days ahead so we’ll be who we are not who they say we are. Tonight we just ARE. Crazy laughing giddy with each other’s essence pouring out because our chosen masks are in place, the old ones slipped and no one cares, forgiveness all around, passed like whiskey stashed in flasks, no need for big bottles tonight, we’re already drunk on the planet’s wishes as Saturn slides into dance position with the scales tipping my way. Neptune goes direct and Pluto smirks from its hidey hole. Uranus floats in Pisces to kick all dreamers into overdrive. All those chunky bits of rock methane ice iron linin’ up slo mo getting their hip hopping break dancing salsa twirling swinging pogo mosh pit slamming feet ready for that big party on the 12/21/2012 Milky Way slide but don’t collide, just coincide ride.

We will have power one day. If we’re dead, fuck it. Being around to see not so important when we are the creators, we leave the legacies, the stripped-down tales of our everyday clashes and crashes. The awakenings. The cravings driving us to more impossible collisions. It’s time to shatter scatter the stars even the physicists say so but words are power movement rivers running deep in the souls even those who don’t get it just yet. One or a thousand lives away they’ll get it one day. It takes 20 years to sepia-tone a memory, 50 to make it legacy when all the bits have been scattered buried forgotten burned. What survives is the stories the future wants to read. Everyone’s gotta know where they came from. The pit, man, the yawning devouring pit will spit it back out in time, the right time. Our time. Lets smirk between the lines.

5 poems from Jason Ryberg

2010-11-12T14:18:00.000-08:00

Jason Ryberg is the author of seven books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box of loose papers that could one day be loosely construed as a novel and a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri. His latest collection of poems, Blunt Trauma (co-authored with Iris Appelquist and released by Spartan Press), is available at www.prosperosbookstore.com.

EVERYTHING GONNA BE ALL RIGHT
(OR, TRADING BODY BLOWS WITH
THE GHOST OF VICTOR SMITH)

The night was thick, black and nasty
and my mattress was a raft, drifting down
a mighty Mississippi of memory-
a Viking longboat in which my broken
warrior-poet’s form had been placed
and sent downstream through the grey mists
of eternity and on to the far bright shores of my
forefathers and their fathers before them,
only to be turned away from those fearsome
gates for being “insufficiently deceased.”

And, lately, it seems like I’ve been waking up
in varying stages of dream-state, at all my
“former places of residence,” feeling around
the bed for some imaginary “former spouse
or significant other,” freaking out about
being late to some “former place of employment”
and whatever it is I’m gonna say (this time?)
to assuage whichever “former employer.”

I can’t help but believe if things continue
at this rate, eventually, I’ll bolt awake thinking
I’m late for my first day of kindergarten
(though, hopefully my mother will also be
on hand to say, “It’s OK, little man.
It’s only Saturday. Go out and play.”).

And then there’s that recurring one where,
in what some new age, metaphysical,
guided meditation counselor type might
call “a deep subterranean cave of me,”
some here-to-fore unknown (or merely suspected)
part of me suddenly cracks and snaps off
like a massive icicle or stalactite, morphing
on its way down into another more fully actualized me,
a new and improved me, you could say,
and hits the ground, running, like Jesse Owens
at the ’36 Olympics.

And let’s just say, for the sake of the poem
(and your brief relationship with it),
that this new and improved me is actually you
and it’s not a slimy or treacherous cave floor
that your feet have found but a cool, rain-slicked street,
late at night, in some industrial part of town
you don’t recognize

and, just over there, to the right,
maybe fifty, sixty feet away, at most, there’s
a freight train blowing out its big brassy basso profundo
as it slows down to take the curve and it's not
even an issue of nerve or wanting it bad enough
'cause you know you can make it, this time, man,
and you don’t even have a suitcase or bag or anything
but that shit don’t even matter ‘cause everything’s
gonna be different from here on out if you can
just catch that train, man, everything gonna be just fine
if you can just keep runnin’ and sayin’ it
and sayin’ it and sayin’ it:

"everything gonna be alright,
everything gonna be alright,
everything gonna be alright,
everything gonna be alright... "

THE UNIVERSE DOES PROVIDE
For Steve Bridgens

Even after the sun
has long-since gone down,
the raw, kiln-like intensity
of a day like today
(here, in this overgrown cow town
in late July) can still be felt
well into the night.

The sidewalks and driveways
and newly resurfaced streets
continue to throw off enough heat,
all our overgrown yards enough jungle steam
(due to a brief but mean little thunderstorm
this morning that not even
the weatherman had forseen)
that our clankity old window-unit
is forced to shift down a few degrees
into a lower, more determined gear.

Still, something has called us all out here
to the front porch, tonight;

maybe those recent reports of lightning on the horizon?
constellations of fireflies churning before our eyes?
the tidal pull of a fat, blood-orange of a moon?
or, just the inevitable madness of tiny rooms?

All we really need to know
(here on this not-so-disagreeable-night
in Kansas City, KS in late July) is
there's an hour of Mingus
coming up on the radio,
a 'fridge full of beer getting colder and colder
and a one-hitter already loaded up for you
and ready to go.

So, even though we all got jobs
that come calling way too early in the morning
and bills and debts that, over time, have become
highly resistant to our attempts at neutralizing them
and despite all the headlines and sound-bites
(detailing the latest home-grown inanity
or gruesome instance of international mayhem)
that appear to be conspiring to reinforce
the near-blasphemous notion that can
so easily lead one to believe otherwise,

from time to time

the universe does provide.

CONSTANTLY FLIRTING WITH PERVERSITY

Constantly flirting with perversity
and irrelevance, hilarity
and mayhem (and whatever
other furies, fates and/or muses
that may or may not come forth)
whenever he performs
his wickity-wack schtick
before the giant
disembodied bobble-heads
of the court,

the poet,
like the contortionist or alchemist
(though really more like
the civil war re-enactor
or HAM radio enthusiast)

must attempt to lasso the spotlight of world opinion
away from his fiercest rivals;
Top-40 radio and Cable TV
(with a golden, truth-revealing lariat
of his own weaving)

and all the while trying to kick ass
and look good at the same time,
maintaining a confidant smile
and not breaking a sweat or breaking
for a smoke or to take a piss or nothing.

For he is supposed to be
the super-duper-surrealist who must (of course)
do battle (via his art) with his arch-nemesis;
the man behind the man behind the curtain;

the Usurper-Realist;
he who hath conscripted and distorted
fair Truth and Beauty and pimped them out
to the lowest and meanest of common denominators
(for whatever nefarious experiments
and other lurid purposes).

So, good people of highest, lowest
And most middlest America,
let us take a moment of silence tonight
to drink one for ambulence drivers
and elevator repairmen,
for neurosurgeons and airline pilots,
night watchmen and day laborers,
high school science teachers and hostage negotiators
and all the Jack O Lanterns, Wandering Jews
and Flying Dutchmen, out there, far from home
and lost in night, keepin it real and fightin the good fight
(or, just tryin to keep a low profile),

but, also one for our anti-hero, here,
this little mighty mouse of a character daring
to triple-dog-dare The Great Dragon Of The Airwaves
(a.k.a. The Giant Spider Of The Inter-Webs)
to come down from its top-floor office suite

and step into the ring.

SOMETHING TO SAY

Consider a moment
those dank, primeval basements
and mud-flooded sub-basements of the brain

where the fish and lizards
and monkeys of our formative years
still wriggle and skitter and scurry about.

If we peer deep enough inside ourselves
we can see them, there, still completing
their respective lengths of circuitry,

still telegraphing up their two-cents worth,
from time to time, despite all our attempts
at processing and refining them away
down the spiral staircase of the spine
out into the Big Nowhere.

Look, for example, how the Gar
with their jagged, maniacal grins
are all lustfully eyeing the little pink toes
of our haplessly bobbing frontal lobe,

while the Catfish are fatly content
to sift and slither in the rich,
fertile muck of prehistoric memory.

And the skinks and Geckos and Chameleons,
all contoured and layered together
in their crevices, are dreaming of the days
when they ran the show.

And the Monkeys,
that coffee and smoke saturated
back-room gaggle of gag-men
and speech writers, all hunched and contorted
over their cranky, old Underwoods,
are up against a bitch of a deadline.

For the Alpha Male needs something to say,
something witty and charming,

yet, still somehow mysterious and aloof.

And he needs it

yesterday.

STORM A' COMIN'

There's a blanket of black wool
that's been pulled over the city,
over this little nameless hole in the prairie.

There's squadrons of orn'ry flies
buzzin' about and stingin' and the faded,
ringin' reports of car horns, here and there.

There's pages of splayed-open books
on auto repair and "Common Missouri
Wildflowers" whipping and flipping
in a nervous Missouri wind.

There's cats and dogs
conspicuously ducking for cover
and birds takin' the last bus out of town.

There's a heavy incandescent density to things
like the boiler-rooms of all the world
are just about to blow

and everybody, everywhere
secretly seems to know it

and even though it's only 4PM,
the only light to speak of
is the ghosted-out flourescent resin
of oxide lamps just now "ghostin' in."

And over across town,
on the far side of the train yards,
right next door to Big Maybelle's
Beauty Emporium,

there's two old boys sittin' on the front porch
of a boarding house, hootin' at all
the sweet, young things as they come and go,

sippin' on their whiskey drinks real, real slow
in sweetly calibrated synchronization
with the melting of the ice cubes.

Their bones are ancient humming architectures
of radio towers and tuning forks.

Their pop-bottle bi-focals peer deep into the future.

One of them leans over a little
and says to the other,

"Storm a comin.' "

"Yup."

3 poems from Ross Vassilev

2010-11-12T12:41:00.000-08:00

therefore...

walking
down the street
with the sun
the wind
the blue sky
God is waiting
for me to say
something
profound while
the white
butterflies dance
in my head
the cars speed by
and I remember
that day
in 2nd grade
when I got up
and exposed
myself to the girl
sitting in front
of me
I tell God
he doesn't exist
so I'm talking
to myself
therefore
I am God with
nothing but
these eyes in my
head staring at
my white hands--
I am alive.

dying state

there was a poet living in South Dakota
who used to submit his poems
to me back when I was running
Opium Poetry. they were long, honest
down-to-earth poems, no word-play games
or light-hearted bullshit. he wrote me
long, rambling emails that went
something like don't let them fool ya
stick with the real shit
and not their bullshit and kick their asses
every chance ya get and so on.
he told me about the never-ending pain
in his leg and how whatever disease he had
almost killed him the week before.
then he stopped submitting.
in fact, he stopped submitting anywhere.
I exchanged emails with him once more
but that was it. he musta stopped writing
his fine boots-on-pavement poems
and who knows why.
sometimes the drive or need or desire
just goes away, I guess.
R.B., I don't know if you're still alive
or dead. if dead, I guess all your
problems are over, including that pain in
your leg. but if still alive
then hang in there, buddy,
cuz the struggle is what it's all about.

vampire weather

white light
and naked branches

I turn on the radio
just to hear the voice
of the dj

the year is dying
in Ohio

1000 miles away
white pigeons strut
up and down
the streets
of the revolution

but here
there's an undefined
sickness

it's in the blood
in the eyes

so all I can do
is start a revolution
from my bedroom

while Fidel grows
old

and Che
becomes God.

4 poems from George Anderson

2010-11-11T15:13:00.000-08:00

George Anderson lives in Wollongong, Australia. His latest chapbook will be shortly published by Interior Noise Press. You can find his poetry blog here: http://georgedanderson.blogspot.com

Pocket Money

When I was twelve
my father got stinking drunk
every weekend
downing beer
until he conked out
usually in the early hours
long past midnite

early Saturday he’d awake
half tanked
brew in hand
& holler for another case

I’d run down to Harvey’s
‘the jew’ on the corner
& heave the 2/4 back
& place them
beside his double bed

he preferred them warm
he reckoned he got drunker faster
with the beer at room temperature

later at the kitchen table
his eyes sunk
he’d expect you to sit down
& listen to him tell you the same old stories

about how tough he was
how he survived a German submarine attack
how I knew fuck all
how I needed to invest in the stock market

‘Let me tell you something,’ he’d say,
raising his large fist
& then crash out

Often on Sunday mornings
he’d wake up thirsty
his cache consumed
the bottle shops closed
he’d put out a feeler:

‘I’ll give ten bucks to anyone
who can find me a beer’.

I’d go thru the motions
vigorously opening & slamming doors
searching under his bed
checking out the basement
& then uncover a well stashed bottle
& then another from the hall closet
the air full of my father’s quizzical exhortations

Elvis on the Factory Floor

For a time I worked in a factory
slipping tiny plastic sleeves on steel wings
& then shoving them on slow revolving wheels
under a hot lamp until they plopped into a box.

One day as the steel presses boomed, clanking
out steel bindings I heard on the radio Elvis Presley
had died. Heart attack. Aged 42. Wings every two
seconds free-falling into that greasy cardboard box.

Fuck You Mr Ford

The principal Mr Ford must have been a sadist
at heart. The manner in which he thrashed away
at my soft student hands. Neat suit and tie:
administering justice. Five of the best on each
hand. To teach me life’s meaning. The day
began innocently enough. Grade 5 group work.
Huddled around the table Pub tells us a crude joke.
His punchline is delivered as a practice fire alarm
sounds for us to leave. Decades later I cannot recall
Pud’s joke. All I remember is waiting silently in
line in front of the exit. I think of Pud’s filthy joke
and start laughing. I try to suppress my mirth,
but the more I think of his joke, the louder and
more hysterical my laughter grows. Miss Caulder
grabs my arm & shoves me into a doorway
leading to the furnace. I stop laughing. I sit outside
Mr Ford’s office for 15-20 minutes thinking about
what he is going to do. He asks me a few questions.
I tell him how Pud made me laugh. He slides open
a filing cabinet & takes out a thick black belt.
Afterwards, at home, my hands are burning. I place
them under a cold tap to sooth them. I feel shame.
Anger. I feel better the next day when Pud tells me
he copped the same. ‘I didn’t feel nothing’, he says.

Killers

On an Emirates flight
back to Oz
I listen to a recording
of Dostoyevsky’s
Crime & Punishment.

I skip to part 8
the murder scene.

While the toddler
shrieks two rows in front

Raskolnikov yields the axe
thrusting its sharp edge
deep into the forehead
of the landlady’s sister
splitting it like kindling.

Later that evening
I return to my flat
my landlady is waiting for me.

‘Where’s your rent?
You owe me three weeks,’
she sneers.

‘I’ll have it to you next week.’

‘I want it NOW, or you’re OUT!
she yells, the yellowed weeds of
her hair curdling.

‘I only just got back. I need more time.’

When she finally departs I begin my plan.

I know where she keeps her cash.
She doesn’t trust banks.
I can make better use of her dollars

She is a bludger
she lives off inherited money
she lives off white trash like me

I could use the brass to study medicine
perhaps help the sick children in Africa.

The following morning I knock on her door.

‘Who is it?’ she asks thru the keyhole.
‘It’s me. I have your rent.’

She opens the door.
As she turns to get her receipt book
I let her have it:

I put my notebook down
imagining the torn chunk of flesh
from her face & the quick
spurt of blood.

I make myself a cup of tea
& read the paper-

an ex-cop is found guilty
of pushing his newly wed
off a cliff
near their camping site
in the Royal National Park.

An emergency head nurse is savagely slashed
across her face & chest
in her doorway on the North Shore
by an ex-employee who had been sacked.

I find solace in the fact I am a coward
that I can never murder anyone.

3 poems from Andrew Rihn

2010-11-11T15:06:00.000-08:00

Andrew Rihn is author of several slim volumes of poetry, including Outside the Clinic (Unlikely Stories) and The Rust Belt MRI (Pudding House). He lives in Canton, OH and can be found online at http://arihn.wordpress.com

Disposable

It was a throw-away
job. We called it fast food,
but god, the time moved
so slowly. Those
non-refundable hours
between school and sleep,
tossed off slap-dash,
like pennies between
a robber baron’s fingers.
Every shift filled with single-use
tray liners, paper napkin
dispensers, and pre-packaged
salt shakers no one could refill.
The meat came pre-cooked,
the lettuce pre-chopped,
the eggs pre-scrambled.
A chimp could do our job,
we said, if it didn’t know better.
We wore disposable gloves
all day long, except when we
worked the cash register.
Their money was the only thing
we ever really touched.

Heart Shaped Box

I didn’t know about teen angst.
I was seven
when “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
was a number one
radio hit, but
I knew a good riff when I heard one.
What did I know
three years later,
at the age of ten,
when Kurt Cobain shot himself?
I knew my brother’s friend
left a message
on our answering machine.
I knew a tiny cassette recorded
the news. I knew my brother
covered his walls
in Nirvana posters
and suicide note headlines.
When he was out, I snuck in
to stand on his bed and study
that sullen expression.
I knew I had years to wait
for my own teenage angst.
Years before I would know
all the lyrics to those songs,
whispering them to an empty bus stop,
scratching them
in the back of my locker
with the pin of a compass.
Years before the exposed metal
would oxidize and rust,
leaving a hole where my heart had been.

The Graham Puff

It’s what every cracker dreams of,
a few words to separate silence
from tongue, substance from accident.
You dreamt that fighting Communists
would be like drawing a perfect circle,
but woke to little more than a cigarette
burn on the sleeve of your favorite sweater
and a ring of smoke hanging in the air
like a dusty halo. Ashes are never gray,
but at once both white and black,
like the tiny dots that make up
a newsprint preacher’s famous face.
The firefighter you never called might
argue that God owes Victor Frankenstein
an apology, or at least a promise
to pick up the check next time.
Consider this an apologetics of the monster,
not another stale ode to the center
of the monstrance. Consider this
a demonstration of your efficiency:
I’ll furnish the prose-poems and
you furnish the war. This is what they mean
when they say it’s a demon-haunted world:
the certainty of a predator drone
guided by our fallen, human hands.
A set of cross-hairs forced
onto a circle that can never be completed.

3 poems from John Grochalski

2010-09-09T04:36:00.000-07:00

John Grochalski lives in Brooklyn, New York. He can be reached at www.winedrunksidewalk.blogspot.com

the hero of my shit

sitting here in the morning
somewhere between the poem
and the novel
trying to write about my youth
in some kind of context
turn myself into the protagonist
the hero of the novel

but the hero of my shit
isn’t going to win it
i already know this, so that makes it
hard to write anything of substance
that doesn’t bring the rage
the blood of the old wounds
leaking back out of me
that doesn’t chip the soul anew

for mine was a lost youth
of too many moves
too many new faces to navigate to care
of fat lonely days and nights
in the bedroom of thwarted dreams
of arguments and misunderstanding
of chaos and creation
of turncoat pals and all the girls
that never gave a damn

ah, the poetry of the dead end street
to nowhere

i wouldn’t change a second of the pain
not for anything

maybe that’s all you need to create a hero

perseverance and the ever-twisting knife

maybe the hero isn’t sitting on this page
waiting for drive and motivation

maybe he’s the guy in the chair drinking coffee
nursing another periwinkle dawn
just trying to get it all down

luddite

i read in the paper
that digital books
are out selling print books
according to sales
at one behemoth online retailer

the book is dead
one of the modern technocrats writes

book lovers
need a reality check,
another genius proclaims
because they knew
that this day was going to come

they are so happy and wise
to watch these
old articles of faith
fall by the wayside

they seem as happy and eager
as a group of young nazis
waiting by a warming furnace

technology is all the rage
for the many
who still make up the few

it’s just disease and death
for the rest of us

and i feel like an old man
in a plastic world that i no longer hunger for

but tonight
we’re putting it all aside, baby
i’ve got a volume
of hemingway in one arm
and you in the other

i want to wrap our love in videotape
wrap us up so tight
that we turn to nothing by silicone and dust.

the asshole at the end of this bar

has been playing nothing but rap music
on the jukebox

it’s been going on for over an hour now

the entire oeuvre of the beastie boys
and now it’s eminem

he won’t play the black shit
in this joint

all the old drunks are grumbling
but it’s okay
the asshole at the end of this bar
is a new york city fireman

he’s been telling us stories about 9/11
rehashing that bullshit
while the rap music molests our heads
and rattles our bones

he has touched all of the old drunks’ hearts
it’s the only reason that they haven’t killed him yet

suddenly we are all taken back
to that fateful day

they all want to share where they’d been

the asshole at the end of this bar
tells us he wishes he was able to help more people
that he just missed the towers falling down

he arrived too late in my opinion

he gets misty-eyed retelling it
as ol’ eminem
still the poet laureate of the american idiot-ocracy
raps about raping and killing his ex-wife

i stare at
the asshole at the end of this bar
trying to see something in him
trying to see what they are all seeing
a modern day hero

but there is nothing to him

there is flesh and blood, bone
and a little gray matter

that is all

except for his penchant for rap music

so i shoot down my beer
i ask the wife if she wants to go somewhere else
as all the old boys start in on
obama and illegal immigrants

we find another bar about two blocks down
where the asshole at the end of that bar
is nursing a pint of coors light
and bobbing his head
to a cher song

and this is all right with us

for now.

2 poems from Alison Ross

2010-09-09T04:31:00.000-07:00

Clockwise Cat publisher and editor Alison Ross dabbles delicately in verse. She also spews incessant invective. You may peruse her precious poesie and rowdy rants online. Alison's personal utopia would be to dwell inside a painting executed by Joan Miro, wherein Frida Kahlo, Arthur Rimbaud, Jorge Luis Borges, Dr. Seuss, David Lynch and The Cure all converge in felicitous, surrealistic bliss.

Negate Tyme aka the riddles

The riddles speak to me with invisible tongues
and utter wordless verse about transparent oblivions.

The riddles speak to me in equations of rhyme
that Einstein solves while traveling back in time

The riddles speak to me in scrambled Sanksrit
foretelling the future of Latin on obsolete planets.

The riddles are riddled with holy black holes
and splattered with the rainbows of gravity

The equations speak to me in riddles of rhyme
chanting Tibetan Latin in transparent tongues
in an invisible oblivion solved by obsolete magicians.

Vienna summer

Your Klimt-kissed skies,
gold-glimmering.

Your crooked geometry of streets,
Schiele-sketched,
stealing refuge in Baroque shadows.

Mozart moans through your veins:
violins breathe fire,
inflaming your cathedrals
with sun-kissed jewels.

5 poems from RC Miller

2010-07-24T04:14:00.000-07:00

RC Miller lives in Metuchen, New Jersey. He is author of the chapbooks GORE (Calliope Nerve Media) and A Large Retailer (Ronin Press) and maintains a blog at http://visionblues.blogspot.com/

IF U HAVE HAD IT W/ETC.

Eat sushi with me bitch.
Eat me out of our mutual love of fish.
The lion and the tuna argue about the state of Israel.
It's so obvious you have butt implants.

I would feel fuller if this were real instead of paid for.
Eat sushi with me bitch, there was a bloody weekend elsewhere.
Now that I'm old I accept that
The weather turns unicorn.

TRAZODONE

The fly is lovely
Its heart is my habit

On the peg I murder
The fly by habit

Its heat is lovely and
Names my habit

Rabbit on the peg
Birthing lovely maggots

DOUBLE MID-CALF

Hidden winds
In a block where
Spiders drink hands.

Lank yellow honey,
Its long glow
Drunk and cawing
To burdens soon stiffed.

In your eyebrows is wet sex
Giving me an operation
So you can know my thoughts.

Summer dress fingering an ass gets.
Asian shemale fisting busty Gepetto.
Hot guy wanks into teacher with collar.
Chew off my head.

I'M LIKELY TO DIE

The sun insists
The ponds are here to ignite
And whirl like the sun is empty.
Their spiral instantly erases their sum.
A sinus from the devil is in the peeling.
Fireflies grow cold.

A SMALL APPRECIATION

With new blood and pieces of flesh on the floor, I start
Coming, crawling out of
The bomb that, in fact, blacked me out.
I remember it also blackening people who were watching football and not

Creeping up to my follow button.
With pieces of floor on my new flesh, I sprout an extra leg
Brushing my teeth.
Carnations certainly fart a lot.

3 poems from Lee Stern

2010-07-22T07:37:00.000-07:00

A BUNCH OF ACROBATS

It’s no use pretending that we’re a bunch of acrobats,
because no one’s going to believe us.
They’ll say that we’re doing cartwheels.
But all we’re really doing is sitting down.
They’ll say that we’re trying to vault across the nearest horse.
But all we’re trying to do is feed it
some of the grass that we were never able to come up with when the sun was here.
I say that if we keep pretending like this,
what used to be a circus
will become one of the orchestras that we always wanted to hear.
What used to be one of the rings we placed in our hands
will become an object destined for good.

RELICS

I like to keep my relics over here
where everybody can see them.
Otherwise what would be the point of having relics?
If you couldn’t see my relics,
you might not think that I was such a serious person.
You might not want to lend weight
to whatever it was that I was attempting to say to you.
Dismissing me out of hand might be one of your preferred tacks of course.
You might say to yourself,
“Who is this miserable person
who prefers to keep his relics
hidden from the view of the ordinary world?
Who prefers to keep rocks in his house coined from the wood that he burned?”

THE MOON

Do you want to know something?
The only time I looked at the moon more than once
was that time you said it would be a good idea
if we could all go there sometime
and look for all of the presents
that we should have gotten when we were children but that we never did.
And I remember thinking that that was a lousy thing to say.
And I didn’t fault you for it.
But I thought it told me a lot about your selfish ideas.
It told me more than I really wanted to know about you.
It told me your premonitions were seated beneath the windows
of the circles you formed that pulled your eggs through the sky.

5 poems from Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal‏

2010-07-13T10:32:00.000-07:00

Luis works in the mental health field in Los Angeles, CA. His chapbook, The Book of Absurd Dreams, was published by New Polish Beat. His chapbook, Digging A Grave, will be published in autumn 2010 by Kendra Steiner Editions.

SHE NEVER DID SUCH THINGS

She never killed a fly,
drowned cats,
or kicked a dog.

She did not stomp on
plants or cut up flowers.
She never did such things.

At his bedside
she read him a note
about love,
about her love for someone else,
about her leaving him.

TINY GERMS

Everyone is unseeing
the little germs
tiny as can be,
they are everywhere.
In the streets
they walk with me.
The city grows
with bleeding germs.
I have seen them.
In the bright lights
I step on them.
I go blind with rage.
The soil is full of
bruised germs.
Their tiny feet
walk on my food.
I see them in the water.
In my cold ice cream
their tiny feet chill.

FOR POE

Under the floorboards
the poet’s heart beats.
His words do not stop
for Death or time.

It looks to angels
to grant him a voice.
The poet’s magic lives
in the black night.

His imagination
neither hostile
to Death or time

lives on forever.
Fallen, but his
future is bright.

YOUR EYES

Your eyes said everything,
joy and mystery.
When open they made
my day.

I dreamt of seeing those eyes
forever with me.
But my dreams did not fit yours.
Something had to give.

IT WAS SATURDAY

It was Saturday.
I gazed upon the sun and smiled.
I did not keep track of time.
The far away sky held up the sun
with its blue canvas.
It was vast.
I stood in admiration,
respectful of the sky and sun.
The day was a blessing.
I took it in and
enjoyed my freedom.
The sun did not acknowledge me
and I did not mind.

3 short poems from Michael Mc Aloran

2010-07-02T02:41:00.000-07:00

Michael Mc Aloran was Belfast born, (1976). His most recent work has appeared/ is forthcoming at Clockwise Cat, Psychic Meatloaf, Pratishedhak, Graffiti Kolkata, Fragile Arts Quarterly, Danse Macabre, Heavy Bear, Cannolipie Pie, 1000th Monkey, Fashion For Collapse, etc. He is also the author of seven short collections of poetry, 'In the Black Cadaver Light', (PMI), 'The Rapacious Night', (Calliope Nerve Media), 'The Gathered Bones', (Calliope Nerve Media), 'The Redundant Pulse, (Shoots & Vines), 'The Black Vault', (Calliope Nerve Media), 'The Death-Streaked Air', (Virgorgray Press-forthcoming), & 'Final Fragments', (Calliope Nerve Media)...Other pursuits include paint, cigarettes and alcohol...He is also presently Weblog Editor at Calliope Nerve...

---

Ablaze-

Transparency of vacant absence

I snap shut you are the ember’s speech

The sky seeps downwards earthen walls

My throat is snared

The debris of my tears ablaze

---

Bludgeoned-

Ecstatically to splice the tears of

Dead flesh...

Room of ice

Arrested sunlight

Bludgeoned smiles of echoing defeat in the pyre

---

Soldered-

My birthed laughter splits the fingertips

I vomit the bile of fruitless flowers into vibrant air

The shadow envelopes like a shroud

Night’s cavalcades

Tearing

I am un-birthed

3 poems from Rob Plath

2010-06-25T03:37:00.000-07:00

rob plath has been widely published in small presses thruout the world. his latest book 'a bellyful of anarchy'(epic rites 2009) is kicking ass all over the world. rob lives alone w/his cat in new york.

is a neutral human sling

a
parade
of
No's
hurts
me

&
a
parade
of
Yeses
hurts
me

all
this
protesting

it's
gotten
to
the
point

where
i
say

fuck
war

fuck
love

fuck
any
kind
of
fucking
etc...

i'll
spend
my
days
untangling
these
braids
of
veins
of
mine

untwisting
the
tubes
of
blood

&
weaving
them
into
a
hammock

a
neutral
human
sling

where
i'll
swing
the
afternoons
away
____________________________________

the guts of a mountain

i wish i had
the guts
of a mountain

to just stand
there like they do

no matter how
fierce the wind

no matter how
blazing the sun

no matter how many
humans trespass
over their sides & peaks

fools seduced
by mere altitudes

i wish i had the guts
of a mountain

to just stand

& tearlessly
erode
___________________________________

all my life i've given nods to nothingness

today i think
of shapes
of white clouds
that parade
past my window

& i admit
i'm jealous

they're nothing
in the best
way possible

those peaceful
strings of islands
in cloudland

but although
all my life i've
given nods
to nothingness

been a devotee
to dust

all poetic posturing
aside--

i don't actually
love nothing

just its characteristics

its calmness

its guts
to not do

& to just float...

3 poems from brianprince

2010-06-20T10:06:00.000-07:00

i am brianprince. to me, it's so much better to see things rather than have things.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

8:09
metronome pattern 
every morning eight 
oh-nine a.m.  

just in time for
 creamed coffee 
and headlines  

everything becomes
 silent surrounding
 the sonic field

  that leads 
that follows 
that’s within

  steps stepping
 sequence ten 
second rhythm  

from back alley
 toward front 
boardwalk  

by the kitchen 
window drapes 
drawn  

she glances
 she smiles 
she’s gone.

  the confidence 
spawned from
 high heels.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

possibly.
deep sleep
 hot spots
 grinding teeth 
sweat 
percolating
 from 
receding 
hairline

  trying to  
calculate

  meditating on  

wondering if  

all words from  
all dictionaries 
from all over

  the world  

were being used
 in this very moment
 simultaneously

  then i rolled over 
to the cold side of
 the pillow and  

quietly said
 “possibly.”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

dessert first.
i was raised to
see a priest in order
to speak with God.

i was raised to
not drink before a
meal. not even water.

i was raised to
follow my mind because
the heart doesn't make money.

i was raised to
respect women. but all that
leaves me is too much pussy.

i'm now inclined to
forward the FedEx'd pussy
that lies on my doorstep.

to the priest who needs
it attached with a note that reads
who says the water is holy.

retire my mind. speak to
God with my heart. and
eat dessert first.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

3 poems from Shannon Peil‏

2010-06-09T10:30:00.000-07:00

Shannon Peil is 25 now and that seems weird. He edits for people who know what they are doing at http://amphibi.us, a site that costs money but coincidentally makes none. He failed economics.

'tuesday mornings'

my old neighbor
[60's, leather skinned]
lived in a house across
the way

he built himself
[on the side of his property]
a garage and filled it
with cars

he said, 'junior -'
[he always called me that]
'junior there's not much in life
besides contentment'

and he said this
[as an old bachelor]
after his kids and ex-wife left
years ago

'you can find a number in the paper,'
[the Westword, I think]
'and if you call on a work day
it's cheap'

their cars would park, Tuesday morning
[out front, facing my house]
and a little asian would go in
then leave

and he'd come out front
[Marlb red and a Coors in hand]
and smile across the way at me
just content.

'solitude'

my knees hurt
supporting the pointy weight
of my elbows
supporting the dead weight
of my head
cradled carefully
while i piss sitting down
because i am too drunk to stand

my toes hurt
from stabbing them
against the aptly named
kick panel of the wall
as i ambled in here
before sitting down
before realizing
i needed to turn the light on
if i was ever going to find my dick

my dick hurt
and it is unpleasant
when pissing is the biggest chore
of all
because you've got a rash
on your shaft
from the loneliness
when you've got a shiny
new ten gauge ring
hanging elegant
from the head of a cock
staring at you like a dog
scared you're about to beat it again

i dribble lazily
for a while
and when it's over i feel relieved
relieved enough to take comfort
on the soft
dirty bathroom floor rug
its damness is fixed easily
by pulling a towel from the hook
to use as a pillow
and sleep

i wake to my roommate knocking
first soft
then noticeably annoyed
decibel output increasing
and i stand and answer
looking down to realize
i am wearing boxer-briefs
and my throat chokes up as i try to speak
it is awkward
but not just because i am nearly naked
but because
it isn't like some friend came calling
and i answered the door
no
it was like someone needed to use the head
and i was passed out drunk in it

the conversation is cut short abruptly
and i flush
exit hastily
retreat to the comfort of my own room
where no one knocks
and witnesses moments like this
occasional lapses of judgment
that are becoming more frequent
this year
i lay down
think about that look in his eye
the embarrassment for me
that i should have been feeling
but am currently unable to
and learn something from this

i need my own place

'19 & bleeding in New Orleans'

the men all screamed
'show me yr tits!'
& the women laughed
they yelled down at me
from the patios
'show me yr dick!'
& i was fuzzy
dazed
& agreeable
i dropped my pants
to the knee
presented myself
smiling wide as they hooted
threw beads down
then yelled
'look out!'
&
watched the cop
throw me face down
grinning into the concrete

3 poems from David M. Morton

2010-06-05T07:52:00.000-07:00

pine

i slept until somewhere after noon
then rolled over and lay there awake
until 2:43pm
i remember rolling over to another side last nite
and the good feeling it was
to have more time to sleep
when i looked at the red numbers on the clock-face

i thought of the days before
when i got up, drank, ate, went out,
achieved nothing
as i sat smoking
on the front step,
thinking of the pickle-loaf
in the refrigerator
and the lack of something sweet to drink with it
i think of ways to escape
of dogs abandoned on chains
their owners gone off to better places

i think of the fakery on my cousins
as they talk to my granddad
watching their mouths and pretending
their lives were pure trudgings
on of the long line of tradition

i walk back to look at the great pine
planted to stand in the back of my yard
my neighbor once said,
“god, I love that tree!”
I thought and still think,
“jesus, I’m glad you do.”
and want every nite to be crushed
by it in my sleep, after
I look at my red clock-face
thinking I have plenty of time
then feel the peace of the
sleep leaning towards me

its best to have no friends...

to take you away
and fuck away your time
if you want to write
its best not to write too much
but to listen
and not say to everyone
i write
when you say you’re a
writer you become nothing
and other writers you must
not be afraid of
you have to walk up to them
tell them what you are
and throw the knife up in the air
and let it come down
all of the ones you admire
you must come to hate them
hate them until they are nothing
write and hate and love the hating
while writing
shakespeare was just a man
as was whitman
thoreau
yeats
hamsun
byron
their work is done
you must not look up at night
and see all those suns
and think
what a thing ---- that GOD!
but scoff at the separation,
the pattern of the stars
laugh at the black of the sky
and fall to the ground
cracking the skull an extra fissure
and darken the night to the point of pitch in your
mind and into that glowing
white spirit who wants walk
while it has a body
and not just listlessly after
to it that spirit that hellish soul
concoct a blackness
so that the stars can shine
for once, perfectly
shimmering in a lighted rhythm
so damn brilliant that
it aches the eyes to see

saturday ritual

down on the cool cement and the dusk setting in
i rubbed my hair with my hand
and watched the lights come on in the houses
felt the dying summer come against my face
so that i put my hands over it because it felt too good -
watching the swifts or swallows flying overhead me
the streets lights coming on and off

deciding

like the whining nerves inside me
i shut my eyes and see the nerves move
and then open them to see the green bottle of wine
it is a ritual not unlike the pagans or the indians
one where i light no candles or say no prayer
but begin shutting things down and off
radio- music- tv- books- words
with the hush sound of the car tires on the road
behind and in front me
i begin to wind down the lighted knob of my nerves
hearing the speakers hiss as they go all the way down
the moon looking so sharp
as it'd cut through the thin black tips of the trees

5 poems from George McKim

2010-05-30T09:49:00.000-07:00

The poetry of George McKim has been accepted for publication, or has been published in Tupelo Press Poetry Project, Rust and Moth Journal, Hanging Moss Journal, ChicagoPoetry.com - Cram 6, Crossing Rivers into Twilight Journal, Simply Haiku, Everyday Poets and Everyday Poets Anthology. George is one of the ten winners of the 2010 Nazim Hikmet Poetry Competition (chapbook available at Amazon). George is also a visual artist and the editor of the new poetry journal - Psychic Meatloaf - Journal of Contemporary Poetry (http://www.psychicmeatloaf.com).

page 123

the morning
was filled with

ourselves
in unlighted
houses

after sundown
in the dark light
an ordinary woman

leads me to
undulating lines,
ruminations

violets

like a distant
sermon of stars

silence
falls across her sunlight
in curved moments of skin

at night,
high in the elderberries
she is a confluence of birds
nesting amongst the burnt suns

poverty

look at the empty sky
look at the vagrant slur
of drunk / black / air
staggering
from crippled star
to crippled star

in this opulent paucity of light
your halo of luminescence
is a galaxy of clotted moons

look at my penniless eyes
as they exhale crayola darkness

my minds are a broken nest of suns
in the amplified distance
i was cousin to a sparkle of birds
their chime language
a glitter of sunlight
and while my scarred lungs
begged for mercy

we and i wept into a hairdo of leaves

page 140

each fields
with
six colors

like
a hundred things
at once

vincent,
seriously,
a lonely uniform

a requiem for dark kerosene

gathers

his detachable shadow
from a thicket of scars

a priestly glitter of moon
leftover from long years
of december skin

in the asylum
they are erecting ladders
to your drooling cardboard sun

almost and almost
a requiem
for dark kerosene

5 poems from John Grochalski‏

2010-05-26T07:07:00.000-07:00

John Grochalski is a published writer whose poems have appeared in Avenue, Lit Up, Rusty Truck, Thieves Jargon, The Lilliput Review, The New Yinzer, The Blue Collar Review, The Deep Cleveland Junkmail Oracle, The ARTvoice, Modern Drunkard Magazine, The American Dissident etc. His short fiction has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Fictionville, Bartleby Snopes, Retort, The Battered Suitcase, The Big Stupid Review, Pequin, The Legendary, The Moose & Pussy, and will be forthcoming in the anthology Living Room Handjob. His column The Lost Yinzer appears quarterly in The New Yinzer (www.newyinzer.com). His book of poems The Noose Doesn’t Get Any Looser After You Punch Out is out via Six Gallery Press and his chapbook Meditations On Misery With Women is due on Tainted Coffee Press in the summer of 2010.

orgasm

she had
this paper thin dress
that she wore,
and she wore no
underwear
underneath,
and while we were
in the store,
she kept lifting
the back of the dress
to show me her ass.
she had a fine ass,
although the cheeks
were both red
from the plastic
of her car seat.
i thought how much
i really wanted
that ass.
and when we got
back to my
apartment,
i threw her on
the bed
and practically tore
that dress
off of her.
after that,
i turned her over
and stuck my tongue
in her asshole.
licking that sweet shit
for ten minutes
before she begged me
to fuck her.
and when we did
we didn’t last long.
but at least we came
at the same time.
when it was over
she got out of bed
and put the dress back
on,
and in the moonlight
her ass didn’t look
so fine,
and in effect i learned
for the first time
that feelings were
fleeting,
and after it was
all said and done,
everything just fades
back to black
anyway.
so i walked her
out to her car,
and when she was gone
i went back inside my
room
and fell asleep
to the sounds
of the city moaning
its orgasm of the wasted
night.

turning over

big beard
flecks of gray
gray in hair and beard
big belly beer belly
scotch belly vodka belly
wine belly

the girls are looking
at you
and laughing
young girls
the old chase
with their sweet
poet boyfriends
with long blonde
hair and thin
waists

fat waist
long hair, greasy hair
black pants covered
in food and dirt
and jissom
same shirt worn
three days

how’d you ever
turn a head
old man?

sore joints
sore heart
pains in head
headache from being
up too late
chapped face
porous lips stained
in wine
bags under eyes
chest open
gray chest
white chest

the girls are looking
at you
through you
they see beyond you
down the road
to the next light
where someone else
is shuffling home
old man
dead man
young man
with a sack of cabernet
and a bad back.

scum

she walks into the exit sign
instead of the door
then stumbles back to her seat
confused
he sits a few away from her
smelling the limes that the bartender
is cutting up
they remind him of cabo he says
she starts crying
he gets up and goes down to her
pulls her off her stool
takes her out the backdoor for some privacy
but you can still hear them
her crying and bitching
him telling her to go the fuck home
and sleep it off
when he comes back he talks to
the guys about the mets
the jets draft picks
she’s bawling in her seat
sucking another johnny walker black
she yells and calls him a son-of-a-bitch
a dumb drunk
tells him that he’s scum
he tells her not tonight, baby
let’s not make a scene tonight
she gets up and makes it to the door
goes through it this time
letting in the fading light
the joint gets quiet for awhile
just some neil young playing faintly on the juke
it still smells of lime
he shakes his head and says “women”
his buddy tells him that it’ll be all right
tells him he likes scum
they laugh
the bartender pours another round
her johnny walker sits half-finished
christ, how is she going to walk the whole
way home, i think
and on the television is a game show
wheel of fortune
but none of us are watching it
right now

just another thing dying

i don’t know when it was
that the idiots took over everything
maybe it has always been
or it’s just gotten worse
but i can’t stand the digital clatter
the people dressed like rejects
from music videos
crowding the streets
stopping every few steps to check
on some inane message
broadcast via a sleek black box
while i’m trying to get an afternoon beer

take this joint for example
the old bar on st. marks place
from the 1970s beyond the 1990s
great conversations and gossip about art
went on here
on weekends the place was packed
with the lonely, the intellectual and the hungry
right now
two blondes are discussing shoes
they’ve been on shoes
for almost an hour now
they’ve said all there is to say in the world
about shoes

the prick sitting next to me
with his john kennedy teeth and hair
is discussing the virtues of a $2 beer in manhattan
to his girlfriend who wouldn’t condescend to drink one
he calls it the new york experience
having a cheap beer in this bar
about the beer, i understand his plight
i just can’t relate to him
his drinking it with a sense of irony
while i’ve known men who have
shot this swill down as a means of survival
as for his woman
well, she’s wearing gold shorts, blue tights,
and sunglasses in a dark bar at five in the afternoon
so that pretty much says the mother-load about her
and when he leaves her to take a piss
she checks the text messages on her phone
to see if there’s a better game than this one
in town

still, i can’t shake these kinds of people
they are everywhere like roaches
with their heads snapped off
they bother me more than bills
and the forty-hour work week
they encapsulate something portentous for me
they define the downfall of man
better than oswald spengler ever could
better than the ennui of lovers talking into their phones
instead of to each other

or maybe their being in this place
at the same time that i am
is an even greater harbinger of doom
the last call for a generation
that never got off the ground
just another thing dying
on these plastic, happy streets
where everyone claims to be broke
but there’s a cash machine
and a frozen yogurt joint on every corner
and if something heavy goes down
it’ll be broadcast on my computer
fit for public consumption
one million hits of pure entertainment value
before i’m even home
getting that great machine of mine
hot and ready to blow.

john henry

i don’t like
john henry
i wish he’d go back
to the railroads instead
of coming into this bar
the place is always
a pain in the ass
when he comes in here
there’s always some
kind of drama
a fight almost breaks out
whenever john henry shows up

but the guys
love him here
they crowd around john henry
and slap him on the back
some of them hug him
they call him kid
they are happy to see that
john henry is working again
that he has his tools on him
because who is
john henry without
his canvas sack of silver tools

even the bartender
is happy to see john henry
until john wants a beer
the bartender says
man, i can’t do it
you know the rules
besides this is the only
gig that i have

john henry grunts
someone gives him
half of their beer
when the bartender
isn’t looking
john henry seems
satisfied with this
he puts his sack of tools down
right on the stool
where my wife was sitting
before she had
to get up to take a piss

when my wife comes back
she sees that john henry is in the bar
she tells me not to worry about it
but that’s bullshit
i move john henry’s tools
to another seat
i take john henry’s fabled sack
and i set it on an empty stool
i’m drunk enough to think
that i’ll just reason with him
i must have a death wish

my wife gets up
to piss again
about the time
john henry wants to leave
he comes over to her seat
and begins digging through her things
while all of the guys are
slapping him on the back
and hugging him
telling him go get ‘em, kid
i tell john henry that i moved
his sack of tools
i hold up his bag
and say, here they are

john henry doesn’t
recognize his own things
he thinks the tools are
something else
he doesn’t know why
i’m talking to him
he says
what are you talking to me for?
i tell him again
your tools, man, i say
i moved your tools
because you put them on my
wife’s stool
the place gets quiet
guy stop slapping
john henry on the back
they quit giving him
encouragement
it’s just him and me
in that moment
and a mountain of misunderstanding
building up between us

i see my beer on the bar
it’s half drunk
the pint is thick glass
i figure the only shot that i have
is to grab the glass
and get john henry
across his face with it
i can feel everyone watching
my wife is back and watching too
she has that look that says
i shouldn’t have moved
john henry’s sack
i want to tell her it’ll be all right
but dead men can’t talk

in that moment
john henry takes his sack from me
he hoists it on his steel shoulders
and he smiles
he shakes my hand
and the joint breathes
a collective sigh of relief
john henry says goodbye to us all
then goes back out into
the purple brooklyn night
searching for work
and the secret to life
as the bartender
hurries everyone a new round
while one of the boys
queues up a dead song on
the jukebox

...and that, my friends
is how a legend is born.

3 poems from M.P. Powers

2010-05-25T11:30:00.000-07:00

M.P. Powers has been published in The New York Quarterly, Rosebud, Main Street Rag, Nerve Cowboy etc. He was born in Chicago, and lives in the Miami area.

BANG BROTHERS CO.

I get off the dolphin expressway
follow a guy with five
sagging mattresses
strapped to the roof of his truck
take a left on 52nd
turn a corner
pull into this parking lot
flooded with people

a rent-a-cop
with a mustache and flattop
approaches
tells me to go to the back
past the jet skis
opposite the black stretch hummer
and inflatable
pool

I park
unload the scissor lift
drive it up the ramp and into the
warehouse
where
some soul-dead twenty-nothing
mope
in a mohawk
and a shirt with a smiley face
on it
peers up from his desk

it's surrounded by pictures
of naked
women
and one lifesized ass
of questionable
gender

behind him: racks of porno
videos

he signs the paper
I get back in my truck
drive
through the crowd again
men
women

they are all porn stars
evidently
standing around in the sunshine
waiting
for the doors of their playhouse
to open

I whip past them
turn onto 52nd
and back on the dolphin expressway

and as I drive around
the rest of the day
I think about the others
the plumbers
the garbagemen
scrubwomen
painters, nurses, police officers, etc.

all of the people
in the world
working for their pittances
who will never get anywhere by virtue of their
fucking
skills

we are a truly
tortured
lot

The Red-Light Secret

do you see that beautiful girl trapped in the window?
I wonder if she likes what she's doing. I wonder if she
likes the action, or was she somehow
coerced? was she kidnapped
and brought here to work? night after night,
opening the door and closing the curtains. servicing
the flow of human detritus, letting
any stinking thing
with a pulse and fifty euros
have at her. I wonder if she chose this. and I wonder
where her husband is - that young professional.
the naive ambitious american with the soft
hands and tender eyes.
the one she'll meet online in four or five years,
and marry in some opulent oceanfront ceremony.
the one who will never know
a thing about her nights in amsterdam, or the truth
she found here.

JOHNNYBOY AND HIS MEALTICKET

johnnyboy, who grinds
stumps
for a living
was standing there
slumped in front of us
"wrong
shoulder higher
than the
right," left leg
longer than the other

eyes of an axe-
murderer

he looked like
something
that just seems to operate
better
when it's crawling
on the ground

suddenly
his cellphone
rang

he looked at it
dropped
it back in his voluminous
pocket
unanswered

then his bushy eyebrow
raised itself

"evuh beat
yuh wife?" he asked.

"no," said dan,
"i haven't,"

"how long you been married?"

"two years."

johnnyboy turned toward
the door,
looked back

"give it three," he said,
and exited

outside,
his wife
was waiting for him
in her sedan

she was rich, mean, jewish
wore bright
red lipstick
had eyes
like a hawk

and was old enough
to be
his
grandmother

3 poems from Joseph Veronneau

2010-05-24T07:14:00.000-07:00

Joseph Veronneau runs Scintillating Publications, having published chapbooks for the underground since 1999, and the lit zine AGUA. His own poems have appeared throughout the small press, including Word Riot, Ken Again and Ditch.

monocle

he is forever
a red sox fan
"yankees suck"
is the back statement made.
i've seen him everyday this week
either at the grocery store
flexing pseudo conversation
with the woman attendant
at the self-checkout line
while listening to the sound
of his own voice, of course
gives him equal pleasure.
they say it's tourettes
an old shop owner said once
but it looks to me more
like a damaged soul
someone that could've reached
forward and forged a path
even though his head is much larger
and gives him the impression of a lollipop
in stature.
bless those red sox
sucking it up this year
and to the man who doesn't realize
just how much of a spectacle he appears.

the unforeseen

as a kid
i sat with my niece
and ate as many poisonous berries
from my backyard
that i could consume.
they had little taste
and seemed like they
weren't fit to consume-
i didn't care.
after many rounds of gulping down these
half-hidden behind a pricker bush treasures
i was instructed by a family physician to
imbibe a bottle of epicac syrup
as the remedy needed.
when i look back
i wonder if this was a sign of things to come
a bridge that started burning
before it was ever built
and as i ran away from the flames
behind me
the higher they rose
until scorching my ass
with fine attitude.

no saints allowed

the last time i tried
to help someone in need
they looked at me
as if to ask what i was doing.
the last time i motioned
pedestrians to cross in front of me
at the intersection between a busy
part of town
i was viewed through empty eyes
with no hands showing gratitude.
the last time
i gave a shit
about an organization supporting
what seemed a noble cause
and wrote them back a letter stating why i couldn't
afford to contribute anymore
silence was the response
though it was personalized.
pulling at the inner core
of Gandhi
i realize
i am not
and look past the oncomer
past the jehovah witnesses
peddling an eternity of blissful conditions.
i pay no attention
to the newspaper headlines
doomsday shows itself
everyday in some form
and i'm just another domino
waiting to see it all go down.

3 poems from Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal

2010-05-20T05:30:00.000-07:00

THE MONSTER TREES

The trees appeared as monsters.
One was not a monster.
Still, it had a flaw.

It had flesh for
branches. The tree had
hair for leaves. The monster trees

wanted to have hair for leaves
and flesh for arms too. But
they were just trees and

the one tree’s teeth
were hungry. Its lips
salivated and munched

on the ugly monster trees.
It put the branches in
its mouth and ate them.

OUT OF THE BLUE

What has the doctor been smoking?
Out of the blue he wants to make
an example of me. I beg to
differ with his assessment. My
mind is far from broken. Sometimes
I hear a voice, but it might as
well be the wind. I don’t want to
spend my time locked up for no good
reason. My thoughts are my own thoughts.
No one in this world has the right
to dissect my anguish and pain.

WHEN LIFE BEGAN

I was alone when life began.
I was born from the sea.
The world was small.
The smell
of life seemed fresh.
From the moment I was
born I have been waiting for death.
Eternity could be
found in the light
that was
more bright than the
sun in the sky. There was
no night when life began on earth.

4 poems from John B. Burroughs

2010-05-20T05:25:00.000-07:00

Poet, playwright, and co-conspirator in the monthly Cleveland area Lix and Kix Poetry Extravaganza and annual Snoetry Winter Wordfest, John Burroughs (also known by his nom de blog Jesus Crisis) is in the process of writing a book about his eleven years in prison for a crime he did not commit. You may find him at http://www.crisischronicles.com.

No U in Mourning

Head on your pillow
and mine on your head, you dream.
Happily ever after.

* * *

High Ku for C.B.

I peruse your in-
timate journals, discover
your abode, a lair.

* * *

Tiger Woods

Night clubbing

From escapade
to Escalade

A long drive

* * *

Scat

I seek inspiration sitting on the toilet, half squeezing out what I like to think are my obstructions. Jung almost rhymes with dung and I don't mean that as an insult. But I don't dream much anymore, or remember my dreams, or feel much inclined to turn on the light when I awaken and do remember. For one, it might wake Geri up and I don't mean that as an insult either. For another I'm too tired and know I'll already awaken and feel the need to rise a whole lot sooner than might be healthy anyway. And what is a dream? Even if I recall it and accurately plumb it and distill the liquor of its best message for me, it's not like I'll listen or drink it or be what it seems to wish. So why bother? Maybe so I'll father a poem like this that some might call longwinded or not a poem at all. You can't have dung in a poem, particularly if you rhyme it with Jung — or so some say. But's that's okay. I need to wipe now anyway.

2 poems from Neal Whitman

2010-04-20T08:41:00.000-07:00

When Neal Whitman retired from his "paid" profession as a teacher, he took up what for him is a non-paying profession, Poetry. Over the past four years, he has published over 100 poems and has been invited to several poetry recitals which allows him to combine both professions. Neal likes to write in both Western and Eastern forms; in 2009 he won first place in the James McIntyre Poetry Contest and two Honorable Mentions in the Yuki Teikei Haiku Contest.

Icicle Triplet

glazed deck ––
the redwood bench
hung with icicles

rain put me to sleep
my dream in Morse Code
morning icicles

still in my jim-jams
coffee and cinnamon toast
javelin icicles

Midcoast

winter vacation
the desk clerk rings my room
a call for me:
The wind chimes swung in the storm.
Your back deck window is cracked.

pelicans take turns
leading the flight pattern
into the heady wind:
This far North?
A gift of severe storms.

sipping herbal tea
I look out the window
the bluegrey sky whitens:
Two sails are white dots
far across the choppy sea.

my fingers in rhythm
knitting by the window
on the beach he casts his line
looking down at my tangle
I see it is time to rip back

little waves at low tide
rippling in a murmur
late winter afternoon
beach sage waving back and forth
time to nap on the daybed

3 poems from P.A. Levy

2010-04-13T12:35:00.000-07:00

P.A.Levy, having fled his native East End, now hides in the heart of Suffolk countryside learning the lost arts of hedge mumbling and clod watching. He has been published in many magazines both on line and in print, and is an original member of the Clueless Collective to be found at: www.cluelesscollective.co.uk.

Sunset Landed by Easy Jet

you only hold me this close
in black and white
for your mary pickford shadow
to be the star
tied to the track
and for a line of ecstatic shivers
that theurgically becomes your spirit
to a broken down scratch and whistle
lo-fi duet with the space eyed jesus
AA battery lit-up
and ibiza holiday snaps E lit-up
slamming holy quenches of tequila
pinch of salt
dash of lime light
jive partner latin mannequin
come down
with stanstead disappointment
and souvenir castanets

Crash and Burn

buried in the sorrow of longing
stars are melting droplet by droplet
trickling down the rosy red cheek
of the she moon…

it’s night and the princess has brushed her hair
shaking loose the thousand debris particles
of romances lost in mist
without headlights
crash

she sleeps alone in a tower built by the council in 1962
ghosts of drum and bass
dub her between her legs
she thinks of him
burns

…this is the time she is closest
touch (and the memory of touch) story dust
and the knowledge of distance
she feels him
feels momentarily rescued
but is always eclipsed by longing

STD

under a microscope you look tiny
it takes me some time before
i can focus sharply enough
to be able to count
the legs on your lies
now i can even see your smile
with teeth
you’re a nasty virus alright

perhaps you should have a pet name
in the fashion of lovers
let’s be libertine in dirty latin
decptus afficere morbus
treatment involves copious amounts
of time in bed and plenty of fluids
until that is you decide to leave
which you will
soon
your intentions have been transmitted
and received

but there will come a time
when i’ll be deemed over you
even though
i doubt i’ll ever be truly cured
you’ll always be with me
as a phrase or a radio tune
remaining as a weeping pus abscess
somewhere
heart struck intimate

3 poems from Gillian Prew

2010-04-08T07:06:00.000-07:00

Currently living in Argyll, Scotland with her partner, two children and a cat, Gillian Prew ditched philosophy in favour of poetry even though the former still haunts her. She has three collections of poems and has been published at Full of Crow, Counterexample Poetics, Gutter Eloquence, Gloom Cupboard and The Glasgow Review among others. Her blog, growth of the blood, can be found at http://gillianprew.blogspot.com/.

contemplating things too distant

Do not speak to me of mountains.
There are none here. The hills
do not even try. They have
enough to be themselves.

I refuse to talk of peaks pitched too high
for wandering, their colossal disturbances
too heavy for contemplation. They are always
black, swathes of shark fins on a deadly horizon.
The sky meets them awkwardly like two ill-fitting groins.

These mountains hate me (I hate
them) too rigid and yonder. Old,
yes, and riddled with memory; addled
with burden and longevity. I will never cry
for them: there is too little of me left.

Sorrow is making up its own conditions. Whatever
the poets say is true. Mothers persist. Love is
a primary colour. The shadows on the walls are
just stories. Tongues grow to such unaccountable lengths
sometimes it makes one tremble. Books
are possible worlds, as is this.

None of it was ever meant.

Why mention mountains
when the ground underfoot is breaking?

I don’t know.
I don’t know.

my tongue; the sun; the cat

The pink stone of my tongue
contains memory, hard
and dry as a desiccated dream.

All around me is the day; the lingering
whimper of its birth low down
to the floor where living is dangerous

...but almost all living
is a risk if done properly.

Outside,
the sun flaps like a lost canary
far from its cage, aching
for the mirror and the bell.

The dead are complete -
accomplished, say the stones
by the path; a grey spectrum
of dead tongues.

The cat lacks philosophy
overtly
but is as accomplished
as the dead:

its tongue pleasantly rough.

the perpetual eulogy

Are we colours, mother? I ask you
even though for too long your eyes
were blind fish swimming
in the void of Once Was. Now
they are still
and nothing. Another year
passes and
we are all closer to the grave
where colours don’t matter
nor even Being. There is
the seeping of self; no bloody
conclusion but hollow-
mouthed atrophy, and
I am every road from it.

3 poems from Peter Magliocco‏

2010-03-28T09:17:00.000-07:00

Peter Magliocco writes from Las Vegas, Nevada, where he edits the lit-zine ART:MAG. He has forthcoming poetry at PENS ON FIRE and HEELTAP & a new poetry chapbook The Heaven of Words from Propaganda Press. His most recent novel is The Burgher of Virtual Eden from Publish America (www.publishamerica.com)

the hunger artist

Trying to cook a potluck dinner of cannibalized stuff
in my suffocating small
studio apartment one night
I wonder how pretentious
I could possibly be
in a world relegating
"true art"
to hungry shredding machines
(like the teeth of the mentally ill
poetry critics feeding off
their disdain for what misses the mark)
Perhaps a purblind quisling
lurks in all of us
to censor a literature befouled
by commerce & whatnot
rather than an elite culture
of hard-working artists
So now, I'll cut this poem-pretension up
& add it to the beef stew
which lacks a saving grace
of sorts, one bold dash
of 20 lb. bond
for me to choke on
before believing
in the sanctity
of my art "burp"

narrations from the invidious conflux

banking on the elderly to re-define existence
Mother steps out of the 1959 Psycho film
to terrorize the audience
with her flesh-decaying skeletal face
& her putrid smells
of pustulant cankers
while specters hitchhike
across Chilean earthquake debris
L.A. will later in ruins emulate
resurrecting devastation
as a design mode
Obama seeks federal funding for
eradicating
& someone seeks the ghost
of the crazed artist assassin
Valerie Solanis
to please wake-up what's left
of an obviously bad situation
portrayed in a much better video
for smaller audiences with plastic remotes
who manipulate barriers indefinitely
between you & them
achieving separation
from the self & the non-self
but there remains
immaterial matters
of thoughtless-
ness

none
the
less

mantra of the pornstar operator

that's me in the yearbook
looking at you with evil eyes
wanting to hypnotize your virgins
& pimp them off on the internet
so you can chat with all the turned-out
celebrities of interstellar intercourses
after you win a free trip to outer space
you'll travel thru a curved infinity
while down on terra firma
hundreds of thousands
of homo sapiens
rant on cell phones to everyone
simultaneously
pass each other
in an eternal night
never speaking
to the other
passing
by
hearing
only the aural
radiations
of deafness

5 poems from Stephanie Smith

2010-03-20T06:07:00.000-07:00

Stephanie Smith is a poet and writer living in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in such publications as DARK FIRE FICTION, THE HORROR ZINE, PAPER CROW, SEIN UND WERDEN and YELLOW MAMA.

CANNIBAL

I was a poet
A rock star
I was neither of these
Until you came along
Took me aboard
Gave me a name
A pen
And guitar
Said create beautiful music
But that beauty was only gore
I became hungry
I became a killer
And I was happy

I was a poet
A rock star
I was both these things
Though not a creator
No. Nothing was fresh
I was too content
With what I’ve done
Instead of truth
I settled for illusion
Said it was okay because it paid
You made me afraid of my own mind
Blinded me

Left me forever hungry

THE DEMON WAS A VOYEUR

He could feel the swelling in his jeans
The heaviness burning a hole
He was lighting a cigarette
He was undressing her with his eyes
He was splitting her in two
He was listening to her
recite Leviticus
and getting off on it

FINALE

to cut only deeper
into this existence

to take one last
exquisite breath

a love of life
but lust for death

to shut my eyes
and dream
sweet fever dreams

loved once
lived once
died again
over and under
and in between bed sheets
I bled

said no more

flesh no more

FOLLOWER

Man these days
has castrated himself;
genitals buried deep
in the garden of Eden

He sits on the couch
in a cloud of flatulence
wondering what
happened to the world

He eats sugared flesh he
peeled from plague-ridden rats
that swarmed
the alleyway of the gods

His bloodshot eyes cannot tear
for the fear inside
riddles him with the cancer
that will kill him soon

Man shrivels up
when time tells him to

WASTED YOUTH

I waste my sorry ass
on precious breaths
and a mouth
that spits out
sentimental drivel
drooling truth
that seems quite fictitious
And my youth
just slips out the door
like a hooker
who will never come back
for more

3 poems from Ivan Brkaric

2010-03-06T05:51:00.000-08:00

Medusa

I still remember when a gentle breeze once blew through that valley
and how your locks of hair fluttered in that warm summer wind.

Your hair would tease your forehead
and with your hand you’d brush your hair aside to smile.

I remember how your eyes told me a story.

There were no words written or spoken
and your eyes were so inviting.

They would express a love that was so deep, so true.

I wish I could say that all was strong between us
and just like a fairytale we’d live happily ever after.

But,

Shortly after I whispered in your ear, I told you that I loved you.

That was when the wind stopped blowing
and your hair turned to serpents.

They hissed and bit at my flesh.

Your eyes no longer spoke of the same story.

Instead your eyes pierced right through me
and like a parasite you sucked my emotions dry.

You turned my heart to stone and left it forever empty.

Fish Tank

One night we eat at a restaurant

A nice and fashionable place.
In the lobby, my wife and I wait.
We sit on a bench and gaze at a fish tank.

Collages of fish, beautiful, swim across the tank.

She looks at me and asks.
“Do you think those fish are happy?”

I sit and think. Are they?

Food is given to them.
Shelter is given to them.
Friends and lovers are given to them.
Besides death, not a worry in the world.

All they have to do is swim.

I reach for her hand. “I guess so.” I say.

And then I think about our bills to pay.

Our mortgage, our utilities,
our cell phones, our credit cards,
our car and so on.

A few minutes pass.
She squeezes my hand and I squeeze back.

She looks at me and I look at her.
And then I realize that we too are confined.

Living in a fish tank,
created by our own debt.

Legacy

Walls he built,
from discarded
blue-stone.

Stones set,
to mark his
pyramids.

Walls for
generations
to see.

How they
encompassed
his property.

But
his words
cut like a
serrated
edge.

For all
the scars
to see.

His legacy
was not
of stone.

But walls
he built
out of
his own
neglect.

3 poems from James H Duncan

2010-03-06T05:41:00.000-08:00

James H Duncan is a New York native and the editor of Hobo Camp Review. Being a lifelong student of the road, you’ll find him picking up non-credit courses in local dive bars, all-night cafes, and train station platforms minding his own damn business. Plainsongs, Red Fez, Gutter Eloquence Magazine, Reed Magazine, and The Battered Suitcase, among others, have welcomed his work. Bird War Press released his fourth collection, "Maybe a Bird Will Sing," in 2009. More at www.jhdwriting.com

A debt paid

there is a bum
who lives in the garage behind
my neighbor’s
house

the garage faces
an alleyway
one long alleyway
of garages and trash cans
very quiet
very private

most garage doors
are open a crack
to keep the air moving, to
keep the heat from spoiling their
paint, gas, etc.

I saw him back
there one
night
his cigar light
caught my eye as I walked
home drunk
up the alley from
Winston’s Pub

he stubbed it out
and slipped further
back into the
garage
the door open all the way
the moon bringing
his eyes into
sight

I saw him there
saw the fear in the
darkness surrounding
those gleaming eyes
he wasn’t hurting anyone, just
sleeping there
and I’ve seen him since
many times, always
at night, or always
just trace hints
that he was there,
cigar ash and the like

the old lady might
mind if she
knew
but she doesn’t
know, and I
won’t be the one

in fact, last night
I left a cigar
and a pack of matches
there for him before it got too
dark out, before he
arrived

and I know he
found it
because I saw
the ash
the next day, the one
burnt match stick,
and a rock-scratched
“thanks” on
the pavement

it’s a nice little garage
in a clean quiet
alleyway, and I know
I’d sleep there if
I found myself
in the same spot
and there would be
nothing better
than to find a cigar waiting for me
every now and then

something to fend off
the coming of dawn
the death of the heart
the end of the line

Dead walk

walking through the hospital hallways
I sense I am in a morgue and see
myself in every whittled face staring
up from white cotton sheets, robed in age
and brittle fear
this hallway cannot continue, I think
but it extends across the city block into
the park, onto the freeway
through the zoo and down beyond the universities
and ghettos where the dead walk and the living
sleep in boxes of oak and pine
their bones playthings of the karma children
left behind by long gone gods
this hallway extends and you are there
drinking from a water fountain, reading a sign
looking out a window into the same hallway
weeping in a wheelchair
you are there and I am there and together
we walk through yesterday’s end
and tomorrow’s sunrise hope,
looking for the door with our final given name

hollow out their bones

wring out the moralists
from the shirt
bathe in the dirty lamppost light
strip naked in full view
of a shattered mirror
and see clearly
why

the sweltering heat of knowing
will bake you alive, broil
your heartfelt impression
of your own self, and the hand
which belongs to God,
who is no god, will turn
the dials higher,
and the flames will love you

close whatever book they gave you

sweat will bead no matter
how many winters you survive
even bears can only take so much
the bats go blind at birth
and the ravens hollow out their bones
to escape to the wind
yet Man works and kneels before
his own solemn sins,
a million sins in bronze
and wood and marble
praised, praised, praised
as songs ring
and wolves howl
and someplace even a baby
is silent, knowing
full well the hypocrisy
that will rain down
from an empty heaven
every time the bells
beat back against the sun

3 poems from Justin Wade Thompson

2010-01-30T19:35:00.000-08:00

Justin Wade Thompson was born in New Braunfels Texas and currently lives in a trailer park in East Austin. He has never pursued a higher education, career, or held a full-time job.

The Same Old Fight

once i held
my mouth together with
string and
fingernails

saw a stranger
in my bed
where once
was the woman i loved

in black
drain flies
the tiny hearts
that beat
behind the dark
curtains thin as
blood

the lights flickering
with the thunderclaps
and the rain
like popcorn on
the roof

a house that is not
my home
moving from year to year
paying rent to
landlords
and paying deposits
under a drunk sun
asleep at noon

carrying death in a bag
in cans, in cases
in little rubber balloons
like eight-ball eyed children
in bath water nightmares.

St. Jude

saint Jude,
you're
supposed to be
my patron saint

the saint of
lost causes

i'm not
a catholic
or a christian
but
i have
this book, St.
Jude

it tells
me of your baptism
of fire
and
oh, don't the little
women thank
you
in the daily papers

i wish you were
an angel
of mine

to slay these
carnivorous thoughts
that invade
my every day

like a drunk
sticking me with
a knife
in my side

and laughing

what about the saint
with breasts on
a silver platter?

what about
the sacred heart
and steal
medallion?

i've nothing left for
you, Jude

no blood or bread or faith
no offering

and yet i still
bleed and my stomach
still aches

oh, curse the dames and faces
of men who fucked my wife
before me

and their messages and their
cars and their special places
in her heart

i can't shed anymore
tears for you,
Jude

you'll have to
beg the dagger out of my chest
and beg the blood back
into my veins

and beg the light back
into my eyes
and skin back onto my naked bones.

Post Modern Baby

tin men
oiled
and
tar men feathered

all these
kids
want to talk
about is movies & video screens.

i want more to tell.

not for grand children
but for mountains carved
out of words of men.

white like
bones
bleached.

until woolen
nights
bite satellites

and all we
have to talk about
is Genet & Rimbaud

tattletales
& twisted
lions

make sugar bread
out of minstrel blood
with black
shoe polished faces

and
bathe
mornings
with
heads peeled
to a
new flesh

a revolting flesh

a gun smuggler's
flesh

while the children
play
William Tell
with
the radio.

3 poems from David S. Pointer

2010-01-14T16:27:00.000-08:00

David S. Pointer is currently seeking submissions for an upcoming domestic violence anthology as a fund raiser for domestic shelters in middle Tennessee. For more information please contact the editor at dspointer@hotmail.com

12" Navaho Code Talker

Maybe this generations
Kaw-liga is a Native
American G.I. Joe
displayed in nonsmoking
designer coffee sector
overseeing, deciphering
near nightly premium
poetry readings: Grandma's
persimmons, the hometown
healer's front porch, the
tahiti sunrise dahlias, the
oppressive summer
reading series....

Another Hard Shift

Just as the patient's body cooled
on the night's cold concrete

Just as the military tank table lighter
stood by for questioning and prints

Just as the car mechanic perp climbed
under the lime-marinated skirt steak

Just as Isabella, a third-shift cop climbed
under the table and cuffed the perp

She got a call to Corn Knife Road

where the victim's
blood dripped
down a mirror
like a slaughter-
house rain slicker

Punking Up

Trey had a bomb
tech rebuild his
guitar and amp
only way to
harness all this
riffage-n-rage
all these folks
treated like
skin cancer
buttocks scabs
exploding,
explaining
rat a tat tat
freedom agony
economics,
ecstacy sonic
with thick
blistering
picks-n-
thermal dreams

3 poems from Steven Leonardo Clifford‏

2010-01-09T20:14:00.000-08:00

Lunatic

She reverses her steps
while staggering forward,
up tangled gray clouds these thoughts mesh.
Marching black vapor with no cause, but yes the dawn has
been skipped over. Beats lapse
between syllables, expand from inside.
Cruising white glow,
highlights the falling, fluttering snow,
my bones become enrapt this hour.
Time beckons sense and coherent nature,
this speed bump stalls: the world
grinding for more breast milk of a prostitute,
(over worked) to out run the gash.
Midnight plain has no pleasure
but for the stroll upon the glittering
lucid sky of pavement,
splashing the moon
onto my boot.

Her Stranger

Peeked thru the door’s
sliver, she made her lover
cry.
Her farce of affection, shot
to his head.
Withdrawal when she’s else where.
Pocket spent.
Sex rush gone.
Pipe kicked.
These her smoky agenda.
Her skin,
crusty and consumptive, the only
tell tail.
Delayed, he figured:
who is she besides herself?

Contentment Looms

The night city bench
desolate,
infected by a dirty black rash.
There he sits
before a filthy curb, cluttered of butts
discarded from imminent night crawlers.

The winds
ruffle the fat darkness, pass at each
ominous peripheral.

Danger could be
on a whim
where he lies at his safest.
Soul ventures.

2 poems from Alex Dafnis

2010-01-03T04:53:00.000-08:00

lovely is a two-way street

you're tattered and heart so sweet
waltzing up and up this estranged path
lovely is a two-way street

listen closely
these walls are ugly and dead
lever and pulley [not a system are we]
we breathe in patterns instead

your heart is burlesque
(ironic is that something as big is so hard to find)

a tawdry tramp, my hearts vanguard is
words toss and turn, spilt out of my mouth
and evolve into vacant bliss
that indulge and purge from ear on out

this season's first stanza,
melody bled dry of all contentment,
set forth fragments of a
marvelous and forsaken resentment

of wastes

these eyes do not belong here;
these paws should not exist
because everything i came for
is something i now miss
these ears receive all
omnivorous in nature
they are my soon downfall
i need to cry out:

i've never kissed a butterfly

3 poems from Rose Aiello Morales

2010-01-02T03:26:00.000-08:00

The Calling

I heard the murmur through the trees,
the static on my line of reasoning,
the calling of the brightest voices;
Was it God or his angels tapping me
with celestial fingers? Singled out
for fortune or ruin, the eternal gamble
of my immortal soul, wheels turning
the puppet strings taut, so they
might someday play a different tune?

I paused in my pursuit of nothing,
relentlessly searching the homes of the damned
to spy at once where they'd gone wrong.
Were they thought too strong in their convictions,
or punished for their derelictions? A choice of potions
made big or small, a fateful leap against the mirror
to the alternate, when heaven knew
where it would end; the same place, same time all along?

The answer went from saint to sinner,
cherubim ears to demon mouth
with each one singing their own harbinger,
pass or fail, accept, deny, my reason for being,
my purpose on Earth, my station at birth.
Could I rise above, or fall to ground,
my bright wings melted in waxy drips,
chastised for my arrogance, brought low
as a warning to one and all?

My ante so small that I folded my cards
and ran from the table, pursued by the dealer,
the cacophony of millions of voices;
but never once did I heed their call.

Nails

(Funny how the nails are pounded.)

Ideas hammered into younger heads
hate upon hate, the point is rammed,
minute silver spots dot virgin scalp;
you press to find the pogrom of the day.

(A hammer has two sides)

The other pries, lifts out each tiny spike,
letting hatred flow like snake bite poison
sucked out through a straw, left now to rot
harmless on absorbent sand, it's spiteful power drained.

Better thoughts are funneled in
becoming pins removed at portent times,
the letters flowing out onto the page, the lips,
a golden spill upon a poet's page.

A chasm into which our love is poured
an education in a soft caress,
harder than a hammer in our memories,
released to soothe an ever dying heart.

It’s the Things You Leave Unsaid

I told them where it wasn't.
Little clues left on the shower door,
written in the soap scum of forgotten baths,
tucked away in my dresser drawer
beneath the bras and panties,
in tiny baggies pushed into the toes of heel-less shoes.

A lingering scent is sprayed in closed off rooms,
escaping around doorjambs to assail the thoughtful nose
with the smell of a memory, a hook that draws them
ever further into a seeming invisible web.

Like paranormal demons that show as infrared
on poseur's films, the ghosts of a thought
battle ink and pen and the permanence it brings,
having no truck for any other than smoke and mists.

And still I hear them scratch and search,
the telltale sounds of opening drawers,
the squeak of a floorboard, the creak of a door
They're finding, and reading, with self serving grins

(And it's exactly as I planned)

3 poems from Ross Vassilev

2010-01-01T07:51:00.000-08:00

Eastern Europe

all that bullshit about
“freedom and democracy‭”
no jobs no money
no hope at all
gangs of stooges and
lackeys serving
Washington’s interests
the young men going off
to be exploited
as farm laborers
in the West
the women and girls used
as sex slaves
in their brothels
you can tear down a village
overnight
pollute the water in a minute
but the new Lenin
will be a long time coming
the return of basic
decency and humanity
will be a long time coming
now the West and Islam
are at each other’s throats
so maybe
there’s a chance.

kenef‭*

tell a Bulgarian
what a shithole New York
is and they won’t believe it

arguing with idiots
is arguing with the dead

I remember
the homeless beggars
leaning up against the walls
holding out coffee cups

I once had to step over
a homeless woman who was
lying in front of
the building entrance

city of street whores
crazies, homeless
junkies

people who fell thru
the cracks

Travis Bickle wanted a flood
to wash all these people away

but what these people need
is compassion.

‭*‬Bulgarian for‭ “‬shithole‭”

the eyes have it

sitting in the unemployment office
with several drab-looking women
and their babies
some of the babies are crying
I tune them out
I close my eyes
the room turns orange
I see a procession of Buddhist monks
some of them are on fire
Nixon rises up out of the grave
with his phony smile
and maggots in his eyes
I see a GI screaming in the jungle
both his legs blown off
I see a young man punching a cop
outside the DNC in Chicago‭ ‘‬68
and Nancy Spungen lying on
the bathroom floor with
a knife in her belly
then I look up and a fat woman
with glasses says to me
sir,‭ ‬do you have your paperwork‭?

Neal Whitman's New Year's Incantation

2009-12-19T13:13:00.000-08:00

A New Year's Incantation

Yesterday: Today's farewell.
Today: Tomorrow's magic spell.
Tomorrow will not exist, I say,
unless Yesterday
becomes Today.

This New Year
I swear:
a rift will be made right
by the end of the night.

Stir thrice
the waters of Science
with oils of Faith,
you know of Seven Wonders,
this is the Eighth.

Drink this precious
Elixir of Life
so that you may forgive.

The secret is not to forget,
but to act as if you had
without malice
with generosity
and grace.

even MORE Paul Harrison for you

2009-12-12T14:36:00.000-08:00

a taste of domestic bliss

when your little angel runs out the door
brushing her hair and into your arms
letting mummy know that daddy's here
but it's a not a workday evening
it's a Sunday morning once a week
and inside your ex and the new guy
are conversing in a civilized fashion
not with fists and bottles and cursing
and the ex has a neck problem
and another house inspection
cos the landlord's a cocksucker
and the little angel's sick but that's okay
you can stay awhile, don't need to head off
and the new guy says hi, then leaves, you stay
and you can see
she's in a lot of pain
though nothing like the hell you inflicted
beyond circles, beyond meaning
all those years ago
nothing like the pain of a hangman's fracture
misdiagnosed for weeks
nothing like the black holes
you circled, drowned in, died in
and your grade one little angel
is beautiful
reads like a fifth grader
on chapter books already
so she reads to you
in her little girl's room
and the ex carries on with the cleaning
as best she can
carries on thru it all like she always did
and after a while you offer to hire some new releases
Hannah Montana, twilight, the usual tweenie shit
cos mum can burn them before you leave
and then you start helping out
mowing the lawns front and back, etc.
and out in the yard for the first time in ages
you think about what might have been
what it was you had, and lost
and when you go back inside
all covered in dust and dogshit
you talk about Olivia/whoever and school
domestic stuff, kinda civil like
and then you and your little angel
go for a chocolate sundae
but she's still not feeling too good
so you head back home (their home)
to the teddies, her room and seven yr old dreams
and you play dollies and watch a movie and your ex comes in
sometimes
with fresh clean clothes
and you know she's also thinking about stuff
and then all the piss from the night before starts hurting
and you need a beer real bad
and the little angel's nearly asleep
reads like a fifth grader, breaks your heart
so you kiss and hug her goodbye
leaving 50 bucks on the kitchen table
and the ex says thank you
for everything, really means it
(cos you did have some times)
and the little angel waves goodbye
standing on the verge in her pjs
until another Sunday
(and you will always remember
her face in the rear view mirror)
and the next thing you know your
lying paralytic on the threadbare floor
of a lodging house dreaming of a family
you love and miss but never could fit in

she dreamed

two grown up teeth
were baby ones
he dreamt his were
falling out
that he was late
for some exam
in the wrong place
and the wrong time

for a while
and certainly
not forever
he would wake up
each morning
with little
memory of
the night before
maybe
some tasty
flashbacks would
niggle like flecks
of rotten meat
between the fillings

his daughter still
believed in tooth fairies
lately they'd been corresponding
short and sweet and to the point
lots of glitter, swirls and color

for him
the days were always
wobbly, ready to fall out
the job
the ether and entry point
for serial reruns of deja vu
the looping reality
of dreams on auto replay

now checking his teeth
(eyes like road maps)
in the rearview mirror
then starting the engine,
beginning again.

the last shudder

now that the last embrace has gone
i wonder if god in his heaven, misses
all the butt fucking, cumshots and fisting
all the swinging, orgies and bondage
but yea, i doubt he gives a fuck
busy not existing except in the act itself

5 poems from Justin Hyde

2009-12-08T09:27:00.000-08:00

unsolicited advice #37

if she has
tarot cards

books
concerning
the interpretation
of dreams

or

a collection of
graphic novels.

i don't care
if her pussy
is a
golden glove.

run.

dumb cunt

dumb cunt,
crippen says
and shows me a piece of paper
after i run the metal detector
and pat him in
at work release.

tells me his ex
gave him a ride to work last week.
but come to find
she only did it
to see where he works
so she could turn him in to child support.

but check it out
check it out!
he says
smiling like a barracuda.
the notice letter from dhs
has Tones listed as his employer.
but he works at Alumco,
right next to the Tones plant.

bitch got the
wrong goddamn building,
he says
putting the notice letter
in his pocket.

stupid bitch
gave me a beej
right there in the Alumco parking lot
how the fuck
she get Tones?

whatcha’ gonna do?
i ask.

he looks up and down the hallway
making sure nobodies ear-hustling.
then he leans close at the control desk
says when he gets out of work release
he’s gonna plant an ounce of dope
in his ex’s car
call the cops
and get their four year old daughter
taken away
by the state.

fix that bitch
dumb cunt,
he says again
and walks down the hall
to his room.

clipping my fingernails with my fingernails

dark
brooding and
empty like formica
he's unilaterally consumed
with fame:
not like paris hilton
or lebron james
i want to be famous
like elvis costello
or woody allen
more well known in
france than here
know what i mean?
is what this kid
from new mexico emails
along with a few
innocuous platitudes.

you remind me of my coworkers
who sit around
hours at a time
talking about
what they'd do
if they won the lottery,
is my one
and only
reply.

ben

something
in his countenance

the radish tone
of voice

it's all
fake snow
and butterfly piss.

none of the men
at the waveland
can stand him

the women
glom on
iron filings
at the magnet
which just makes the men
grip their
axe handles tighter.

last night
the female carpenter
told me
ben's son invented the bobblehead
then went crazy
because of fame

how his wife
is a hoarder
their house is so full of shit
ben sleeps out in the garage
on a free standing hammock.

it sounds cliche
settles at the bones
like cliche

and while the tips
of his wax smile
still make me
want to snap a fist
through it

i have to admit

some burgeoning impulse

due east

of sympathy.

18 days

18 days,
says the
second shift supervisor
as i pass him
in the parking lot
on the way in.

they're
euthanizing him
after forty-seven years
of service.

what are you
gonna do with yourself?
i ask.

says
he's got
projects around home
to last
until spring:

then fuck
i don't know

maybe i'll get a dog
or some of that viagra

says he
hasn't gone at marcine
with the old shoe-horn
since before mash
went off
air.

3 poems from Ross Vassilev

2009-12-04T20:48:00.000-08:00

Ross Vassilev was born in Bulgaria and now lives in Ohio. He's a poet and the editor of Opium Poetry 2.0 (http://opiumpoetry.blogspot.com/) and Asphodel Madness (http://asphodelmadness.blogspot.com/) blogzines.

you won’t read this in the papers

I shoulda been a 60s radical
throwing rocks and bombs
punching cops between acid trips
at the ‘68 Democratic Convention

my only weapon is my computer
the words I type
are Molotov cocktails
that I hurl through the windows
of the empty rancid skulls
of the American Right
(I know it ain’t much)

congenitally stupid nation
might-makes-right
kill-the-poor
social Darwinist fascism
iron-fisted police state
that woulda cracked even Lenin

this country needs a real revolution

not another Founding Fathers
bullshit revolution

but a real revolution
led by someone named
Castro or Chavez
or maybe even Trotsky.

turning on the light of learning

well, there were the dyke gym teachers
the dyke English teachers
and the ex-Marine who became a teacher
cuz he couldn't find a real job
most of them were unambitious
content to rot their lives away
surrounded by the dumb teenage mob
and the worst were the teachers
who tried to inspire the kids
but it's your parents and the kids
who'll crush you
the teachers don't count for shit
and to all my former teachers
all I have to say is:
you're less than the acne on my neck.

abstract art and the defeat of Socialism

old men walking down the street
walking towards death

lost in a country not my own
I'm walking towards something myself
but I don't know what it is

it ain't right to be led around
like a dog on a leash
(I should be so lucky)

the blackbirds cry
as the sun dances on cold white air
there's people walking down the street
in Russia
talking in Russian
(it seems unbelievable)

as the blackbirds tear their guts out
there's dark matter
swimming through my head

and for a moment
I can forget.

3 poems from Mike Meraz‏

2009-11-30T17:44:00.000-08:00

Gawd, I Feel Like Rumi Right Now

we need to be good
through strength
not weakness.

good as a positive moving force
not good as a
default.

why is it tainted
that the good side of us
always seems to be the
weak side of us.

why is it stronger
to say "fuck you"
than "I love you"?

this is not true.

we are living in opposite
worlds.

everything is upside down.

tell everyone I love you
for a whole day and you will be killed
but alive.

tell everyone fuck you
for a whole day
and you will be alive
but dead.

love is a moving force,
eternal,
exquisite
in all its manners.

hatred, death,
will die with you.

What Comes After I Love You

the first 6 weeks: "forever!"
the next 6 weeks: "but you need to..."
the next 6 weeks after that: "but you haven't..."
the next 6 weeks after that: "as a friend."
the next 6 weeks after that: "I miss you."

We Are Everywhere

on those solitary nights
when you feel desperately alone
realize
I spend most of my nights
reading alone.

on those strange nights
when you feel insanely alone
realize
not many miles away
there is a person
(just like you)
searching for answers
(just like you)
feeling alone
(just like you).

the alone,

we are not hard to find.
you will see us tomorrow
at work, or at school,
or in rush hour traffic.

we appear to be
average citizens
happy and content with life
but we are not.

we are headed
(just like you)
to an empty apartment
(just like you)
of another night alone
(just like you).

so on those solitary nights
when you feel desperately alone
realize
you are not alone.

we are everywhere.

5 poems from Ivan Brkaric

2009-11-30T12:10:00.000-08:00

Ivan writes because nobody cares to listen. In his spare time he does his best to edit an e-zine called Callused Hands. Callused Hands is located at http://callusedhands.blogspot.com/ and it is a place were ordinary people can share ordinary literature. His poetry has appeared in Why Vandalism?, Blowback Magazine, Gloom Cupboard, Lit Up Magazine, The, lesserflamingo, Camroc Press Review, The Legendary, Deuce Coupe, Black-Listed Magazine and Opium Poetry 2.0.

Another Interview

A fresh crisp shirt
nicely starched.

Pressed pants
with matching creases.

Spit-shined shoes
and a Windsor Knot.

A fresh mint
and you’re ready
for another interview.

Open the double glass doors
with rounds down range.

Answering a barge of questions
No cover, No foxhole!

Just to dance again
to talking guns.

And the pitter-patter
of machine gun fire.

Experience

With your pencil tip you write.

A smeared thumb print, you ask

“Your lack of experience concerns me.
Is there anything you want to add?”

And you wait
systematically tapping
your school bus yellow pencil.

“No”, I reply
shaking my head.

But I can only think of
The ‘experience’ I do have

The experience of being rejected.

Extinguished

Hell’s Gate pours its flames.

A gust of blinding red flames
devours their home.

Memories burn to ashes
and become fossilized ruins.

He watches his ex-wife cry

“My house, my car, my belongings,
all is gone, she shouts.”

Though the house he bought
will soon crumble to charcoal.

He can’t help it, but to smile.

And the lit coals
will soon be extinguished.

Like the burning fire
his heart once desired.

I Shall Return

And the candle
flickers its last breath.

In the eyes
of my grandparents,
I cry.

Too soon to leave
and so far away

In the eyes
of my grandparents,
I shall return.

To light another candle
and honor them.

If She Only Knew

If she only knew…

Of the first glimpse of
sunlight rising above the Adriatic.

Crystal blue water
and silence
not of sadness or sorrow,
but of zeal.

If she only knew…

That we gave it all away
for a paper boat made of money,
with crisp edges
and oars made of broken promises.

If she only knew…

"I've Never Been to Paris" by Damion Hamilton‏

2009-11-27T12:54:00.000-08:00

I’ve Never Been to Paris

But a friend of mine has,
He’s an older gentleman, and
Has a wife from Argentina,
The both went a few weeks
Ago, and he’s showing me the pictures
On a laptop, cuz I will probably
Never get to Paris-- yet this
High definition camera he has,
Makes it seem like I am already there
Everything in Paris seems old--
The streets, the buildings, the metro station
And somehow the streets don’t seem as crowded
As I thought they would be-
My friends were sitting down a café, and they
Were the only one’s there,
They show me the Seine, which is a small river
Compared to my Mississippi
The Gargoyles impress me-- they
Are there to protect the city
I feel wistful and can not help think of Hemingway
And the lost generation, Joan of Arc, Rimbaud, Celine,
Bernadette Soubirous, Frank O’Hara or my friend Francois Bennett
I think of fashion designers and rich people, even though
They have nothing to do with the pictures,
I think I would feel lonely in Paris-the city seems too old
And unreal
I see the cathedrals and the painted glass which are very beautiful
And make see sad somehow,
But I like the people in the their small cars and motor bikes
Drivers seem more courteous in the states,
Paris does seem to be a wonderful city,
And I always seem to be looking for it
Carrying it in the small neighborhood
Of my heart

3 more from Paul Harrison

2009-11-20T04:03:00.000-08:00

7 years

at the detox unit
they put me to bed about 3am
but i couldn't sleep
wanted more wine; needed it really
and the junkies and drunks
who were still awake
started dissing me
or at least i thought they were
back then i was blowing .3 plus
all the time
i'd also been imagining i was the focus
of every strangers' conversation for weeks
so up i got to fight
but the biggest just said
take it easy kid, you're alright
then tucked me back in
and after the nightmares
and before the sweats
and shakes set in
a few hours later
out came the trays
of soggy toast
and sweet hot coffee
mountains of the stuff
temporary relief
from stiff dry horror
and so we'd sit there
the street kids
the dispossessed
the aboriginals
the speed freaks
the decent defeated
the drunk and the mad
thinking about our next move
drug or crime
and some of us stayed, did the program
and some of us left and never went back
but my move, my cowardice
was always this
to head out the unit
and into an early opener
just round the corner
until later
she'd get back from work
or a friend's place
and i'd beg another reconciliation
with impossible promises and need
or a few weeks sobriety
then do it all again
cheat, steal, lie, abuse
disappear for days
until at last
12 months after a beautiful birth
the locks got changed one last time
and the cops came
and took me to a place
where all my bullshit and bravado
got stripped away
leaving sadness and grace instead

on the no. 19

listening to some nerds
discuss black holes
i knew there was a lot
of everything
i'd never know
like how a poem works
the meaning of life
or the taste of yr cunt
but of course
if i know anything
at all
one thing's certain
that kaufman and wantling
were gods, and had forsenic soul
that often
all knowing
all seeing hearts
stop too soon
that the best
left the building
long ago
and now
looking out graffited glass
i see the rest of us
just milling around
like chickens scratching dust
pissing in each others pockets
the maybes
the fakers
the sorely deceived
spewing mostly nothing
on streets
the greats
checked out
then left behind
so long ago

to recap

some 'poems' published
in mostly online poetry zines
small press, underground style
some success slamming
state and local
also this room
in a lodging house
and a job
assisting the casualties
of a neo-liberal consensual nightmare
making just enough
to maintain my 4 addictions
but thousands in debt and counting
also a criminal record
though that was then way back when
and the past
always best remembered
also battles with depression
and inevitably
a litany
of broken love affairs
2 beautiful children
the oldest
now running wild
in northern suburbs
the youngest
the apple of my bloodshot eyes
summer coming on
and a dead pigeon
rotting
under the decking
and of course
this counter, this widget
a fifth addiction
checking clicks
most days
and maybe
once a fortnight
where on earth
in this fucked up world
you arrived from

i thank you my friends

the misguided
the misdirected
the merely curious
it keeps me alive

click, click, click...

"Sleep" by Kenneth Radu

2009-11-18T02:28:00.000-08:00

Kenneth Radu's poetry and fiction have appeared online in or are forthcoming in fourpaper letters, Leaf Garden, Spilt Milk, Thirst for Fire, vis a tergo, Foundling Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Quebec.

Sleep

i

Brave events,
excitements at the end of a dull day:
letting the cat in, locking the doors,
turning down the thermostat, washing,
slipping between flannelette sheets,
trusting our bodies to the very depth:
epics of endeavour, misunderstood
in repetition, leading to a common enterprise
when we shut our eyes
against dark pressing hard on the glass.

ii

I sit up in bed with novel in hand,
chamber music from the radio in my ear, subdued light
and breathing and the soft soft drumming of my heart.
The furnace is low, the cold night high,
the roof creaks under the weight of ice.
Reading is a kind of sleep running slow
in old veins, but my eyes are still dry
enough to follow love and crooked ways.
My mind is a raft loosely moored to print,
waiting for an undertow to drag me
into the smooth similitude of death.

3 poems from Neal Whitman

2009-11-17T08:34:00.000-08:00

When Neal Whitman retired from his "paid" profession as a teacher, he took up what for him is a non-paying profession, Poetry. Over the past four years, he has published over 100 poems and has been invited to several poetry recitals which allows him to combine both professions. Neal likes to write in both Western and Eastern forms; in 2009 he won first place in the James McIntyre Poetry Contest and two Honorable Mentions in the Yuki Teikei Haiku Contest.

Hobo Signs

It is soon time to call it quits.
Shadows let us know
not too late
when day
is
done.
Stop
here.
Woman
good for meal.
Kindhearted lady–
talk religion to get warm coat.

Rainy Day Opus 327

Numbers can be odd
I’ll wager even-steven.
I’m also positive
they can be negative
though not a bad one is said.
Numbers find it natural
to be irrational.
Nothing at all, like crazy-eights
played with a best friend.
It’s perfect.

Rare-able Pair-able

How dare you
take the last bite?
Or even the last word?
How dare you
pick a fight
Or not to have heard?
Let me suggest the humble are blessed
and advise that honorable mention
is better than second.

3 poems from John Grochalski‏

2009-11-12T21:28:00.000-08:00

John Grochalski is the author of The Noose Doesn’t Get Any Looser After You Punch-Out. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

another year

another year
honey
you can keep it.
another year rolling around
on the tongue
hell bent to be picked apart
by madness.
who wants it?
and we will tear it down
brick by brick
like we did the last one
through life, through death,
through war and hapless indulgence
we will suck time dry
and spit out its bones
come the ringing of another
midnight bell.
some will die in the streets
for this
while others will get rich
on blood and sweat.
more people will be crucified
while more of the worthless,
talentless, beautiful fools
will be hoisted
up on pedestals.
and the bars will be packed
with the dumb and silent
beholden to the television.
the stadiums will be packed
with the blind
beholden to false idols.
the offices will be packed
with the dead
beholden to a new couch.
and the churches will be packed
with the sick and the lame
beholden to myths.
the scientists will fail us
as they always do.
the politicians will fail us.
governments will fail us.
our families will fail us,
as we will fail all of them.
and we will walk to our
own beat,
our own music,
not giving a shit
as system after system collapses
as the rivers and lakes dry
as the grasslands go brown
as baby after baby is hustled
out of its mother’s cunt
onto playgrounds and developments
that all look the same
that have become unaffordable
as credit rates rise
as debt becomes inherited.
the sun will burn out the moon,
as the rest of us go hungry
on food with no taste
on a diet of boredom and defeat.
another year will come
like this one
like the last and the one before it.
and it will be a celebration
as always,
a goddamned dance for the dead
that never had it right enough
to live it honestly
from the very beginning.

homecoming

she looked at the
idiot
ranting and raving
over his indian dinner,
pointing a finger at her
as if she were
his whore,
while intermittently taking
large pulls on his beer.
it was his hometown
and they had been
through this scene
before,
maybe even in the
same restaurant.
always the same situation
some slight
some inconvenience
for which the idiot
did not stand his ground,
choosing instead to break down,
until it was all out war
between them,
until someone got up and left,
which he did this particular time,
to prove a point
to further the drama of the moment,
to pause to read a local magazine
and to cool down.
but the gesture was enough
for her,
a direct sign
of his callousness
and before she knew it,
it was her, not him,
going through the vestibule
of the restaurant,
and walking quickly amongst
the goons down atwood street.
of course he begrudgingly followed
never knowing what
he did wrong,
feigning innocence for strangers
who did not care,
never thinking,
never seeing the brute
hidden underneath
the decade-long veneer of
boyfriend
fiancé
husband
only knowing that he
had done this shameful walk before,
trailing her slowly
on the callow streets of his
hometown,
after wrecking another
summer night,
imaging her a stranger
on the street,
thinking how beautiful she
was
silhouetted by the distance,
untainted by his words,
and perhaps how he’d seen her
this way
a little to often
for his current tastes.

leon

leon liked to drive
the delivery trucks in the snow
and barrel them down 219
while listening to conservative talk radio
and spitting snuff juice all over the cab
because it kept him from smoking.
he smelt of sawdust
and built countertops for a living.
he was one of those assholes
who loved their job
and for fun he liked to aim
the truck at animals crossing the road
just to try and get a rise out of me
although we never hit anything.
leon loved to test a man’s metal
but i never gave him a wince
even though i found most
animals to be above most humans
but that was okay to leon
because if he couldn’t hit a live animal
he’d just run over a dead one.
it was all the same to him
to collision of fast rubber and flesh
and usually after we smeared some already-dead
animal along the pavement
leon would laugh, turn up the bile
on the radio, and tell me how he
had this vegan girlfriend for awhile
and whenever he got bored they’d go
out riding on his motorcycle
and just to get a rise out of her
he’d aim the cycle at crossing animals
usually missing them
but enough that she’d squeal and cry
and make him pull over the bike
on the side of the road
vowing to never get on the thing with him again.
then leon would console her and apologize
and that typically lead to them heading
back to his apartment
where he’d lean back and watch her
suck on his cock
while he thought about not smoking cigarettes
having rare steak for dinner
and all of the wood he’d have to cut
the next day at work.

3 poems from Paul Harrison

2009-11-07T19:53:00.000-08:00

paul harrison is an Irish guy who started writing a year or two back after meaning to for twenty odd years. paul lives, loves and drinks in perth, western australia. his words which could do with a good fucking edit can be found at http://thelastdisciplefirst.blogspot.com/

some things are known

what i have learnt
having lived the lifespan
of 2 dogs and 1 very lucky cat
amounts to this and not much more
a rocking horse without a head
looks strange and a child's body
without one is terrible; the end of things
that murderers walk freely among us
preaching greed
and a con called democracy
that whisky burns and life goes on
that love is difficult but not impossible
what i have found having lived longer
than the Third Reich thrice
longer than 400 million children dead
amounts to this
that the privilege to write poetry
badly
with line breaks and not much else
here in this trap, this yard, this gilded cage
depends and finally rests upon
perpetual
aggravated theft
that a verge of white goods is obscene
that memories change and skies turn red
that loneliness is difficult but not the end
what i have felt all along
having lived 14 000 times longer than
the flies that congregate around this lake
cannot be remembered or numbered
only repeated
cannot be described or shared
only encountered
leaving sadness and silence instead
what i have found having lived 39 years
on the verge of consumption and death
i leave to the poets and lovers
the king of kings
to collect

love one another

once
before my neck
got broke
in a bar-room brawl
or maybe after
i can't remember
and it doesn't matter now
not now she's gone
me and her
sometime in the early hours
had our usual
psycho-sexual
red wine brawl
and so
before any more windows or lamps
got broken
i jumped in the car
and fucked off for more
rear-ending some prick
stopped on green
and next thing i know
the car's surrounded by
four very irate gentlemen
and they grab my keys
no way out
and then the cops arrive
and the reading .35
and into the paddy wagon
busting to pee
so more in reflex
than any political statement
i pulled it out
and painted the cab
for all i was worth
ahhhhhhhh......
and the stream kept coming
and now it did feel political
artistic even
so i gave it laddie
and sang some more
until at central lockup
discovering my creation
the cops got sore
twelve of them and me
no bail for you
getting smacked
around the head
and then the strip search
and the booking
and the pinball walls
and into a cell
without any friends
the usual cruelty and humiliation
for nothing really
but that's how it worked
for her and me
back then
and that's how it still works for them

my favourite beer

F A Nettelbeck throbbed in '71
still does i suppose
on a poetic ranch in Oregon
as i sit here
bugging out
discovering him and the time
he asked a famous now dead poet
10 easy questions in that era of
5 Easy Pieces and mimeo machines
when the third rate poets squabbled
their tongues out; same as today
anyway this is what the famous now dead poet
had to say
about his favourite beer-
'heavy drinking is a substitute for
companionship and it's a substitute
for suicide and tho i dislike drunks
i do suppose i take a little drink now
and then myself.'-
of course F A Nettelbeck
is still going strong
cutting stuff up, interpreting the
pain of life and drinking beer
while the other guy's dead
and suddenly
i imagine that famous now dead poet
finally finding
the single truth he valued more
than all the guns and mass ideals
all the rot and ruin
out there somewhere
drinking buttermilk with Jane
as i sit here
getting ready for another 6 pack
to keep the loneliness
the debts
the cockroaches
and a little piece of truth
some COMPANY
just waiting for A BUG DEATH
that never seemed to start or fly
and must be drawing near its close
to end
and in case you're wondering
and want to rescue me
i like Millers with poetry best.

3 poems from Ben Smith

2009-11-04T09:14:00.000-08:00

Ben Smith lives in Melbourne, Australia, where he works as an industrial painter and enjoys reading and recently self publish a short joint of his works. He runs a smutty and cheap blog called "Horror Sleaze and Trash" and is currently (like a desperate housewife) sending and receiving letters through a world wide pen pal correspondence. For more details see his blog.
http://horrorsleazetrash.blogspot.com/
Air à boire (A collection of poetry by Ben Smith.)

“cemetery hot pants.”

I love watching the girls
Run around the cemetery
In the just warming
Mornings.

In the early light.

With there perky little tits
Built on stretched chest
Pectorials.

Ear phones
Running white
From there little faces
That are flushed and
Beat red.

The jiggly German sausage
Asses
Rimmed with a half
Crescent
Of glistening white
Sun light –

While the meat inside
Sticks and morphs
From form to form.

Me and all the dead bodies
That rot inside the cemetery

Watch them
run
Around.

“Hear what you want to hear.”

Deliberating another bottle
Of wine
I ask her if we
Can sleep in tomorrow,
as late as possible.

She wakes up
From her sleep on the couch
And says

“Somewhere over the rain bow?”
Its playing on the
television.

I say,
“you mean like the song?”

"Yeah,"
She grumbles,
"Something like that."

Then,
the bottle cracks
like quiet
thunder.

“cemetery hot pants II”

The over cast sky
Hues every thing
Grey.

Its cold and
The rain falls
As if
It can hardly
Be fucked
With itself.

There are no hot pants
No peck drawn chests.

An old man trundles past
On a push bike
And a pork pie hat.

Like Satan.

I sit with the dead.
Them hard and gone
Me soft,
And waiting.

2 poems from Ross Vassilev

2009-11-04T09:07:00.000-08:00

Ross Vassilev was born in Bulgaria and now lives in Ohio. He's a poet and the editor of Opium Poetry 2.0 (http://opiumpoetry.blogspot.com/) and Asphodel Madness (http://asphodelmadness.blogspot.com/) blogzines. He's been published here and there.

the proles

when I see
a white trash family
in the supermarket

worn-out old clothes
worn-out people

by the looks of their faces
not too well-read
no working-class
intellectuals

they look beat-up by life

I imagine how right-wing
and patriotic they must be

I feel both contempt
and pity for them

especially the kids
they won’t know any better
never had a chance
to start with

I imagine the trailer
they must live in

and I could laugh about it all
but I don’t.

betrayed

Ho Chi Minh
kicked some
Yankee ass
reunited
the nation
now Vietnam’s
“Communist”
government
has imposed
capitalism
on the country.
what American
bombs and
Agent Orange
couldn’t do
greed and the
Almighty Dollar
have. did all
those
Viet Cong
heroes
die in vain?
Wall Street
is a cancer
spreading to
the whole
damn world.
maybe only
Armageddon
will ever
roll it back.

3 poems from David Kowalczyk

2009-11-02T19:35:00.000-08:00

David Kowalczyk lives and writes in the woods outside Batavia, New York. He has taught English in South Korea and Guatemala as well as at several American colleges. His poetry and fiction have appeared in five anthologies and over sixty magazines in the United States, Wales, Turkey, New Zealand, and India. He is fond of foggy mornings, Maggie Mae Ryan, most Canadian ales, Thai food, and the geese that fly over his house.

Evanescent

This word
has the specific gravity
of smoke.

Fragile as a doe
in the forest.
Frail as the dreams
of a hummingbird.

Keeping this word
on a page, a task
worthy of Sisyphus.
Sly, slippery, and cunning,
nailing mercury to
a wall is easier.

So is making
a statue
out of shadows.

Discovering Grace

The faces
of God

are revealed
in dreams.

They are
almost invisible,

like rainbows
on a cloudless day.

Shooting Stars

First of August.
Hot enough to melt tin.
Waist deep in a field
of rye, I load my shotgun
and wait.

Clouds bury the sun.
Noon becomes midnight.
Stars sparkle and dance
like fireflies full of peyote.

The clouds darken.
The sky shrinks.
I raise the shotgun and fire.
A star falls.

I reload, and fire again.
And again. Eleven times.
Twelve dead stars
scar the field.
I smile.

The sky blackens and shrivels
until only the howling of obsidian remains.
The world is ending.
The temperature rises.

3 poems from Isaac Seal

2009-11-02T19:32:00.000-08:00

Isaac Seal is an obnoxious city kid, who currently resides out of his element in rural Wyoming, on a ranch 16 miles south of Jackson Hole. How did he get there? Why would he stay? Well, he's a pro-chef, and the pay's pretty decent. As he grew up in cities with trains, he never learned how to drive. His laptop is his best friend because of this, and he is ridiculously prolific. This is considered by some to be a "good" thing- but not by most. He also has many inexplicable phobias, such as his face, the flammability of toothpaste, and radio-waves. His parents seem to love him anyway. He is also an insomniac who drinks too much.

Watery Percentages

Wash me and the fence I'm on- If I don't swim from the net. Troubador policy dictum and the stated wherewithall may or may not remain. Clinched in the rain, slow falling ash, Pompeii us. Liquify my insides. Speckled and nested in a skein of feeling- where the nerves thrive still.

Hope reckless and in wild comet tail smear on the sky, there is a secret in those belts of gas and rock. You'll never find it if you don't orbit, too. That doesn't mean it won't be told. Where stillness speaks, and the speed of trees is deafening- It's out there. Underneath the claw of now.

The infrastructure is crumbling everywhere- edifice into hourglass guts- ticks talk. Whispering about the good times, the back whens, is also deafening in its way. Cult of the feckless effort, with certainty. This tar in my eyes has got to cool once. My fingers are spines, each a labor of love, broken-backed in the holding.

Shaking and unsteady in this wash, and calipered to humility. It was the best, it was the most eloquent, it was drowned in its own goodness. It was a fraction of itself, blinded by its own shadow. In the interim, a maxim is relinquished. Dropped into the tendered oceans, salt curing the letting go.

Hex, Bewitch

Dollops of consanguinity list in this bearing. Ruckus the hacksaw, bit, it aspires to you.
Towards the glistening scape of blowing cottonwood, your face, crowned pinion and bloated bereavement.
Idyll oratory shivers lifetimes, caught in seconds.
We named the raindrops, forgetting the river had a name already.
Quantified comings and goings in leaflike structure; the Fall.
Tapped remorse code surgeries, small fires, little cornucopeias of disaster in the conversative efforts of a lifeline.
Telegraphic and consumed, I question the twine between our cans.
Is this rusty nail of a planet workable?
I am throwing it away- my masonry's wrecked by its presence.
I have a present for you- and i need to feel it for you to receive it.
Hexogram, polyolioxygenated free radical kiss the dithyrambic aliment, love me in wizardry.
Your dark and histrionic arts can find purchase in my uneasements.
Why does it float?
It doesn't.
It's simply that so much of this rusty nail is mired and sinking; sunk.
Convoluted into the torpor of eating itself inside out and shunning the light, maggot-like, back in.
Side.
Inside.
You are an affable corpse, your coprophagia and my necrophilia intertwine, and these cans are subtle.
Overbearingly so, in its way.
So much for this week.
But the betterment of all can be sewn in this decay, where my selfish death meant something, to someone else, at last.
So much for today.
Or any other day.
Feverish blot of memory I am to you, eating your mentalities and amok in those consumptions, I still miss you devouring my malady.
On which end of the fork we are, I can no longer say. I wait for your reply, from can through string.

Lung

My neuroses have become predictable,
and are almost accepted. I'm starting to
develop new ones all the time-
it is a catalytic effort at decomposition.
Lately, I am starting to fear that
I am a cyborg, an incomplete machine.
Broken, in factota and blunted hatchetry.
Slaloming fingers in veins of ice
begin their seeping thaw, reaching,
velveteenishly merciless. Stickled,
into the undercurrents of pragmatism,
to ruin it by melt. In the adaptation,
to shortcake days and sloe summer syrup.
Tar filled; your mouth, of mesh.
And that is fine. Conspicuous drawn,
in activity to eye through bone spur.
String activate stran, masses,
manos belie the key. Doves and
swallows, peace and love, remember
from the eaves the day of their cold
assassination. Swim, air-bound,
in ghastly circumstance. Cradling
the ferric haunting in an overpriced
lung. Stop staring with your mouth.

3 poems from Michael Lee Johnson

2009-11-02T19:27:00.000-08:00

Michael Lee Johnson is a poet and freelance writer. He is the author of The Lost American: from Exile to Freedom. He was nominated for the James B. Baker Award in poetry, Sam's Dot Publishing. He is a contributor in the Silver Boomers poetry anthology about aging baby boomers, by Silver Boomer Books. Michael Lee Johnson presently resides in Itasca, Illinois, United States. He lived in Canada during the Vietnam era and is published as a contributor poet in the anthology Crossing Lines: Poets Who Came to Canada in the Vietnam War Era published in May 2008. He has been published in USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Scotland, Turkey, Fuji, Nigeria, Algeria, Africa, India, United Kingdom, Republic of Sierra Leone, Nepal, Thailand, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Finland, and Poland

No One is Here

I walk in a poem
late at night that sings no sober song,
no lyrics for the living,
toss in a few lines for the dead.
It fetters my anger
with hostility and sticky jam between
my toes and worn out shoes.
I find myself walking 2300 Western
Avenue in Chicago at 3 A.M. like a damn dummy;
thinking of Mayor Daley's sales tax proposals,
lack of health care in this country unlike anywhere else
free in the world,
and some boxers who shoplifted some goods
out of Marshal Fields department store earlier
in the evening-
no one is here to spit at me,
to fist my face in brick,
or steal my wallet silly,
or my car keys or jiggle coins
out of my jean pockets.
Disgusting, it hangs,
it beats metal drums in my ears
Over and over, like a pistol going off.
Loneliness is an elbow plunged
in one's ribcage at night.
I get in my car, bruised,
bandaged,
go home-
wait for God,
sprinkle prays
for the fairy dust
of healing.
Go about, the next day,
my crusades for the world.
No one is here.

I Hide my Craft

I hide my craft
under the armor
of the armadillo-
tucked beneath its armpit,
hovering near it's stomach
with insects buzzing noon
day sun issues and indigestion-
away from the editors
punitive critics,
and pay on demand
print money mongrels;
cold bacon and lard
under the pages
between poems
and the words
stick I write
everything
with a scent or odor.
I look up at the sky
and giggle my nerves
like gold chains
waiting for the next
editor to tell me
my mind doesn't work,
flow with my words quite right.
I count them one
by one
those for me on one
side; those against
me on the other.
I hide my craft
under the armor
of the armadillo.

I Trip on My Poems

In the night when poems
are born, I search for no one
but the hidden words.
Conjunctions are just meeting places
like personal ads for wild women.
Even my lady friend criticizes me
for being uncreative, disconnected,
a time degenerate.
The secrets stretch inside my metaphors, I
can't find them all.
I miss spell check;
grammar is a liar;
syntax is drug substance I refuse
to understand.
I'm a trouble-free minded poet
with the training of an uncultivated monster;
I chew on my experiences, go back
to the prey, the kill, usually alone and spit.
But I have no sense of formality.
Even near my tender moments
when the images blossom into rain flowers
I trip on stems cut my way lose to nowhere.
I go there to see what I can find.

3 poems from Vince Anello

2009-11-02T19:21:00.000-08:00

Vince Anello is 20 and currently attending Thomas Nelson Community College in Williamsburg, Virginia.

the autumn inside of me

i know that fire can become,
and that its many gaping mouths are home
to churches of spring,
miles of desperate hyacinths.
but there’s an autumn inside of me
that’s masked by shedding ships,
cetacean bones and shadow hands.
its sea is speckled brown with grief
and wrenched from its shores
of solitude.

what month is it? and is it cruel
or kissing rings, feet, stones in the sky?
does it rain on windows and do they weep
when their clarity is gone?

something burns and struggles in
and moves with a fluid drape.
it bites the tattered cuffs of tattered pants
and licks the womb of a woman in white.

i can abandon the indifference of a house,
the ripples in a skin,
but purpose always clings to floors and knobs,
to chairs overturned
to the moisture of rocks, where light has spilt
and ushered our palms to dusk.

we come undone through ancient hair
with age that opens night
to the movements of men in rows and in groups
of torch and cross and page.

the guitars are their own eulogy
and wander after death
past vacant lots and watersheds,
fastened to a flag.
its dance is now immeasurable
or guided by a wave.

do you see the scaffolds red steps,
the noise of revolt or sexual flesh?
i am looking but i cannot find
any means to any end.

there is an autumn inside of me
and this fire can become,
and this fire will become,
because purpose can show us a world without sin
and create it, too, with the very same blood:

seeping through ash with seven long fingers
and pulling this ground apart.

ghosts among the dirt

i.

this is more than just
the dying age of men;
of life and love,
slither-born by dew.
the shackles are rusty
sacraments
that clang in the heavy air,
caught between
these city walls and you.

so will you let me in
to your rose-print dress,
as little boys run rings
around your waist?
the grass has turned black
by railroads and their lines;
the blown-glass cracked,
but half-awake.

and we are ghosts again,
in ways the steam cannot relate,
plunged between the tracks
and the gruesome light ahead;

we are ghosts again
in nights dethroned by lust
as we are wrapped
in blankets made of dust.

ii.

and there is nothing quite
as peaceful as
sleeping with the earth,
whose words are more unspoken
than unsung.

all the love i could afford her

i brushed her gray hair to the rhythm
of her breathing,
each stroke ending with exhale.
and when i was done,
the tangles were no more
and she looked a little younger in
her grave of snow-specked dirt.

3 poems from Dianne Borsenik

2009-11-02T05:27:00.000-08:00

Dianne Borsenik, a former flowerchild and current redhead, is active in the local poetry scene, and co-hosts the popular monthly Lix and Kix Poetry Extravaganza in Cleveland, Ohio. Her poetry has appeared in, among others, Slipstream, Rosebud, The Magnetic Poetry Book Of Poetry, Haiku World: An International Poetry Almanac, Nerve Cowboy, Ship of Fools, Zygote In My Coffee, and Mnemosyne. Actor Jonathan Frid used three of her poems in his program "Genesis Of Evil", and her chapbook HardDrive/SoftWear was published in 2009 by Crisis Chronicles Press.

Screw You

Screw it. You
are wound up,
screwed in,
a little too tightly.
You need to
loosen up,
just a little,
teensy tittle,
just a jot..
You don't want
to have a screw
loose, or worse
yet, a loose
screw. Some
things are
meant to be
tight. You don't
want to
overscrew or
be screwed over;
and you want the
right screw
for the job.
You don't want
to be tapped out,
screwed, brewed,
blue and tattooed,
wooed by god
knows who and
refused anew.
Screwing is
important.
Better to be
screwed
than to be
unscrewed.
Better to be
a screwdriver
than to be
screwed up.

Butterfly

When we
are in the middle
of making love
and you are on top
of me
thrusting away
inside me

your dark eyes
unfathomable
swallowing me

my captive heart
fluttering
helplessly
pinned
like butterfly wings
to this mattress of passion

you hook
my thigh
in the crook of your
pale arm

my heart
fluttering
surrenders
to the net
of your lust

drowns
in the killing jar
of your silent cry

Baby Needs A New Pair Of Wings

What thumb print
sealed my fate, consigned me
to this place, to be a joke
among such happy souls?

The fools around me roll
the die, barter for another try:

C'mon, c'mon, c'mon
Baby needs a new pair of wings
Snake Eyessss

I ache to grapple with the odds,
wrestle with the croupier,
scale the heights, make my
escape from all these broken
seraphim and their fallen God.

I want to love and be loved
in return. I want to burn
with all the passions of a life
well justified, not with
regrets. I want to win.

But, no. The game is Craps
and Snake Eyes come up
every time. There's no
chance here; the fix is in.
I'm trapped in God's amusement
park of Hell.

His Snake Eyes narrow.
Forget the sparrow; His eye is
on the prize of viper's sting.

The fools roll die;
oblivious to their demise.C'mon, c'mon, c'mon...
Baby Jesus needs
a new pair of wings

3 poems from John B. Burroughs

2009-11-01T02:51:00.000-08:00

John B. Burroughs, a.k.a. Jesus Crisis, is a poet, playwright, and composer in Elyria, Ohio. His works have appeared in dozens of print and online publications, his musical plays have been performed as community service by Ohio inmates, and his poetry chapbooks include Bloggerel,Identity Crises and 6/9: Improvisations in Dependence. Founder of the Crisis Chronicles Press and Online Library, John co-hosts the monthly Lix and Kix poetry series in Cleveland and is currently writing a book about his 11 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. You can find him at www.crisischronicles.com.

Out (Not Fade Away)

I did what I did and I knew what I knew
And it all came to nothing
Maybe if I did what I knew and knew what I did
It would have come to something
But then again maybe I
Both knew and did
Long before I was young
And it still came to nothing

What's new

Someone with no clue how to fix his or her life
Told me how to fix mine
Gave me some books or records they thought
Divine sublime or something of the sort
And whether I took their advice or not
It all came to naught
Like when I
Played wreckereds or gave books
To other folks
Who thought
They were nothing

They just folking stared
Maybe the extra are
In scarred or out

Our scared

Though I could not tell front from behind
The pearls from swine
Before I knew what it meant to kneel
I gave my advice a swell
I gave ad
I gave vice
I gave sugar and spice
Naughty and nice
Head to the shoo
And it all came to something resembling little
More than anything at all
But me and you

Who am I fooling
No matter how many worlds of words I put it into
It still comes to nothing

I traded in my bicycle for care
My care for a car
My car for another car
My other better car for the same old bicycle
And this endless cycle for more care
But it all came to nothing

I read books and did chores
Distinguished between bores
And boars and boors
But could never extinguish
Wars and worse

And though I tried to rush her
All I did was hush her
Perhaps even crush her but
I could never crush hearses
And they still came
To nothing

I wrote and I wrote
And I typed and I typed
I wrote about this type or that
I typed about this rote or that
Rotor this
Wrote her that
And it all turned to piss
Or even less
Till no one in particular hit the flusher
And it all went to shit

But in spite of it I wrote on
Rode on
Right on
Rye dawn
Rite yawn

It all grew tired
Unwired
Beautifully turned dutifully
And mutually undesired
Until untied began to end up
Reminding me of united
Except out of order and unrequited

In other words
It all came to nothing

When I found myself just pulling the levers
Trying to be clever
Dying to be better
And better at dying
I wondered what's the use trying
It's all coming to nothing anyway

Why not shut the fuck up and let it
And try to forget it

I drove tanks into banks
And I drank and I drank
And I sank and I stank
And it all came to nothing

I sat sober two decades
Even then I decayed
And grew more and more dismayed
As it all fell apart
And even my heart and hard
Drive came to nothing

So I finally gave up
Figured screw the indoors
I'd make love to the outdoors
Fuck the chores
Maybe have a sun
Who unlike me could successfully run
From everything that comes to nothing
Including myself
And this cold old earth

If I had to succumb
I'd at least go out feeling
Enlightened and warm
At least go out feeling like something
Hotter than cold
More young than old

So the sun starts to blaze and
Coming out of yore
And my haze I no longer wish
To earn and yearn
My way to a wormy grave

Fuck being grounded
Give me an urn

Kneel young is right
It's better to burn

- Jesus Crisis 4/29/2009
(nodding to kneel young)

Allen Ginsberg Wants You

Allen Ginsberg
You sucked
The cock of life
Drained the bulging bone of its marrow
Honed in on our howling
With your eye on the sparrow
And spit out godly children
A spectacularly spiritual spawn to carry on
Your sacramental work in our wordsick world

A fellatio facial
For earthfolk fine and fucked

Allen Ginsberg
Your poetic prick
Penetrated us
Probed the pettiness,
Prettiness,
Power and pride
Hungrily hardening inside us

Then withdrew to
Spew your gooey godliness
On the just and the unjust
Before turning wholly dust

CRYst

I'm a messiah
With emphasis on the first syllable
Christ
With a y and no h
And the first three letters capitalized

Mess
Sigh
Ugh

3 poems from Alex Dafnis

2009-10-30T07:18:00.000-07:00

My writing is proof of the constant agitation brought against the roof of my mouth. Let it sink, let it roar, let it implode. The noise that my writing aspires to embalm in your ears is all that I will lay claim to.

"at a time when he folds the sun and pockets neatly"

at a time when he folds the sun and pockets neatly
the glare which playfully distracts peripheral vision.
Frequent are the clouds of rains

naiveté entangles
the blushing tone which redeems ears and burdens tongue.
the short breaths between [your] words and the spaces that separate writings
keep [me] damned to skin

to emblemize what emotions sound when arguing
equates to diving a pooled sun; smile into a deaf sink
for the destruction of mouth, nothing is pined
but the rhythm of teeth and solace of mind

"fabricked; noise"

taken out of context, i place my lamentation into one significant smile

one eye’s exhalation is vanity’s reminder
that dissonance is the priority of ghost

my hands screaming into a bruised sky,
asking, “what are we but our words?”
satisfied, a crestfallen cloud reply:
“actions do you not neutrality nor significance, much like the blades of a grass.”

for my dancing, skinned knees
for my singing, cystic tongue

aspirations begin long and uninterrupted-- reality curls and makes beauty tangible

"This boy's first step"

comb teeth over words.
this is epileptic ambiance
somewhere, there is a tin print of a dream
it is my dream;
it is my spry ambition to emote with reason,
so that my words may become animals
who may dwell
in my mouth’s roof.
and so they will settle in the sharp sea of mistakes
bubbling in this throatless choke.
until the day they arouse enough suspicion
to scratch at my gums and cascade out of my throat
these animals are opinion

2 poems from Doug Draime

2009-10-29T13:00:00.000-07:00

3 poems from Justin Hyde

2009-10-29T12:47:00.000-07:00

a mutual energy

two and a half inches taller than me
nine years younger
she has a leaky heart valve
od'd three times on opiates
lives with her mother
in a bum-fuck town
north of here
works part time at dairy queen
but her voice
cuts through the pigeon-speak
she's more valid
than fifteen cemeteries
i tell her so
standing in prairie grass
up to our waists
watching a small river
unwind towards mississippi
it's a mutual energy
she smiles
sliding her hand
up my neck.

175 over over my head ten times

90 strapped at the waist
for three sets of twelve
on the dip bars

followed by

300 pound deadlifts
until my heart bottoms out
and the legs quiver
like a tuning fork.

this has nothing to do
with schwarzenegger vanity.

nietzsche
called it sublimation.

i call it
burning fog
off the runway.

it’s my medicine

taken daily

to remain civil

anchored here

amongst you.

a real time juxtaposition of walking conundrums

these are my
dead grandmother's cigarettes,
she says
pulling one out of the pack
and cutting off
half the filter
before lighting it.

her jean-shorts
are so high
purple underwear
show below them.

she's nineteen.
i'm thirty-one.
she responded
to my craigslist ad
looking for other
deranged souls.

her parents
are on vacation
in vegas:

we're standing
in her garage

which is full of cats
cat shit
and her mother's pottery wheel
and easels.

i suppose
you want to fuck me,
she says
flicking the cigarette
into a
five gallon bucket.

i tell her
i didn't come here
for that.

well
that's a new one,
she says.

then she
lights another cigarette
tells me
her favorite constellation
is cassiopeia:

says
lets walk down
to the lake

no streetlights

maybe we can find it.

3 poems from Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal

2009-10-27T08:34:00.000-07:00

Luis works in the mental health field. He was born in Mexico and has lived in California for the last 31 years. More of his recent work can be found in Pemmican Press Online, Blue Collar Review, and O Sweet Flowery Roses. He has a new chapbook, "The Book of Absurd Dreams" upcoming with New Polish Beat.

THE STONE

There was a stone on the sidewalk.
I fought the urge to kick it.
I left the stone there
for someone else to deal with it.

Should I have kicked it?
My mind thought of the stone.
Should I have forgotten it?
The stone weighed on my thoughts.
It was there on the sidewalk.
Four hours later the stone was gone.

I AM THE PROPHECY

I am the prophecy.
I was born with brain damage.
I come to bring destruction.
I want to witness my waste
of this world. I come
without peace. I will control
your mind. My power is a
drug. I am the pharmacy.

AFRAID OF THE LIGHT

I am afraid of the light.
I prefer the darkness.
Luminous beings scare
the life out of me. I
go down to the basement,
one of the places where
I am not visible,
and I stay all day. The
dark is good to me.
My mind is at ease
when I remain hidden.

3 poems from George Wallace

2009-10-26T02:59:00.000-07:00

George Wallace is editor of Polarity, Poetrybay, and Poetryvlog, and author of nineteen chapbooks, including Poppin Johnny (rel date Oct 09 available on amazon.com) and two CDs (inc. Sky Is, on CDbaby.com). Of his latest chapbook Poppin' Johnny, released Oct 2009 by Three Rooms Press, poet and KPFA commentator Jack Foley writes "brilliant, funny, dangerous, cantankerous...a burst of articulation that carries us into the country of Talk...they tell us something genuine about our experience of America." Ojai Ca poet Robert Peake describes his poems as "rough and vulnerable as manhood, as full of hope and heartbreak as the new world. If you want to know what America feels like in your mouth, read George Wallace out loud. And NYC's Angelo Verga, uber-host of the legendary Cornelia St Cafe series, says Wallace "navigates between high & low diction with generosity elegance & power. I don’t know precisely where he wants to take himself (and us) next…but wherever it is, I’m packed and ready to go." A frequent performer not only on the NYC scene but nationally and internationally, he appears at such venues as the Beat Museum, Woody Guthrie Festival, Lowell Celebrates Kerouac, Patchen Festival, Insomniacathon, Howlfest, Shakespeare & Co and the Dylan Thomas Centre.

IN HIS HONOR'S HONOR

he could kick some ass
he could tuck into dinner
he could jumpstart a manhole cover
from fifty feet he was so pellucid
and talented and free his eyes
were magnificent they were
fluorescent green like waves on
the deep blue sea and in his walk
there was something special something
graceful and magical too it took us
by surprise it took us i tell you i shook
hands with the gentleman and he
shook hands with me he is much better
looking than the old mayor who
are you kidding that old guy
made the E train shimmy
he made the E train
spit up its wheels
(we stopped at the station and
we shoved that son of a bitch out)
and this time we thought we were lucky
this time we thought life would go on forever
we thought we could reach for the sky
or read the daily news with our eyes shut
what should we what should we do?
do we dance with the jinns or with
the hippies in the park do we dance
alone do we make ourselves at
home make ourselves necessary
like love and death and witchcraft
we should go crazycrazy crazy
bing bang boom!
said our new mayor
applause rose up around the city
like harpoons around moby dick
like grace notes around alice tully hall
he was the kind of guy to put his peter in
the meter the kind of guy to stick his tongue
deep into the pockets of john q public and
pull out a quarter you gotta hand it to the man
(we had to hand it to the man) he mobilized
the crowd so he did so he did so he did
and we did exactly what we were told
we knew a good thing when we seen
one -- our good old new mayor
with his goon squad in sunglasses
w/georgetown hair and walkie talkies
held to their spray paint mouths
he was a good old mayor
but his eyes were full of hate
he wanted us to up the ante
he wanted us to fall over ourselves
to better ourselves and so we did
and then our lives took a turn they
couldn't get much better than that and
just like that someone knocked over a chair
in a greenwich village cafe there was noodles
and vegetables and garbage cans every damn
where and everything else you can name
and there was thunderclaps over new jersey
sally saw lightning we went wild
it's the mayor! the mayor!
some people waved when they saw him coming
he was santa claus on a fire truck
keystroking mommas with their tap tap tap
they were in love with him
hips rolling like jellyfish
from eighteen story windows
cops barking and rabbis dancing in the streets
as if a minor celebrity had
just stopped in at the corner deli
and ordered up a corned beef sandwich

MI ABUELO

mi abuelo
i loved you
when i was able
other times
i hated you
somewhere
in hell there is
a place reserved
for men like you
the very wicked
the very wise
the womanizers
and gang bangers
the wonderful boys
who carved their
teachers up for laughs
like kewpie dolls
like apple skin
like windpipes
like alleyways
like the crusts
of incredible fruit pies
somewhere in hell where the
bad boys go the real bad ass ones
the ones with hard-ons a mile long
with needles in their voices with eyes
like polished windows of waldorf astoria
and elevator music in their bones mi bad ass
abuelo once you passed out in my arms you were
down for the count the cockroaches came out but then
it was dawn, no pasar! out on the street with your upholstery
like crushed velvet with your curls in your hair and the whistling sound
of cuban music in your veins somewhere in hell somewhere in hell
with your pony tail and the cut diamond of your biceps with the
soft tufts of hair on the nape of your neck and the knot
tightening its tight grip on your throat mi abuelo
barrio warrior sweet as the sound of the night
when your time came like a bomb in a toilet
and you went to where the men like you
are supposed to go you went to a place
in hell where the men with manners
the men with money the men with
hearts like rapists with candle
wax hearts with a death wish
longer than christmas and i don't
mean las vegas butchers could not
save you from the scrap heap all the
personal letters in the world from trujillo
could not keep you from the grave mi abuelo
you fought beautifully with everyone in the neighborhood
like castro in the mountains and somewhere beyond all reckoning
you rest in peace because there has got to be a place reserved
for men like you the particularly damned ones
determined to destroy everything in their paths
a place where even they can rest in peace in hell
in the eyes of beautiful women, men with brush moustaches
and attitudes up their assholes mi abuelo you lived like an irascible woman
for fifty two years with your pride and your assumptions and your
blind ambition like tossed salad cursing the ones who ate up
your bank account the sad irony of your loveless
life no womb to sleep in you made no sense
to anyone except me love made no impression on
you mi wicked as fleas bad ass bald faced abuelo with your
face on fire with your job in the cannery some men would rather eat
their own shit than help their fellow man and you were that kind you made
room for no man in your life you woke for work in deflowered dawn
you came home from work drunk you gave me a hand job
and a black eye nobody gives a fuck if you live or die
to be perfectly honest i am glad you are dead if
the cockroaches are crawling over your body
i will let them if the sand bags of heaven
are pouring out and suffocating you
i will stand aside and cheer
you with your biceps
like a railroad bridge
you with your hands
around the neck of my
sister and your brains like
spiders in the plantains you!
when my day of death comes
let it come like wind over the hudson
like a lightning bolt separating the sky
let it come like a whore clutching
her heart like a tenant farmer
feeding chickens let me go
to a hell of my own making
just so long as you are not in it
mi abuelo tossed back liar
bad like bad tequila
furious as ice storms
ambition filtering through
your veins worms like shooting stars
sewing jealousy into your hide in life you were
perfect mi abuelo seeing you at the funeral i could only laugh
and say irrelevant things because men like you deserve to go
to the incinerator they say spit was too good for you with
your teeth in your hands like pomegranate seeds
like a trash compactor go die in the rain mi
abuelo fucking right go die again and
again with your graceful manners
like a heron in the rain
mi abuelo mi abuelo
you puke i take it all back
my abuelo take me with you
you go to hell bastard
with your skin on fire
with your walks on water
with your first taste of blood
come walk with me
like a tongue of shadows
walk with me through
my waking hours
through my heart
like tumbling dice
through my dreams
like footsteps on
tenement steps
like a river of
spectacular death
running like a beautiful
woman into the arms of the sea

A MAN WALKS DOWN THE STREET, RAIN FALLS INTO HIS EYES

the land runs deeply in some men but rain
runs deeper much deeper than that it falls
on farms and forests it falls on the streets
of a city in the new world it falls in the land
of incredible opportunity somewhere where
it all takes place rain runs deeper than deep
in the land where it all counts rain cuts deep
happy furrows rain cuts deep into the deep
and just like that a man walks down the street,
rain falls into his eyes, something like worry
cuts a fine little furrow through his face and
he starts to bleed real blood -- he begins to
bleed real brown opportunistic blood brown
as the earth -- blood trickling down his face
like a man in a german woodcut -- a fine
furrow for a fine figure of a man -- o it's
nothing only a cut he says o do not worry
there is time there is always time -- keep
telling yourself that -- you are an intelligent
man you can figure anything out -- you have
a glorious answer to everything -- but the rain
keeps falling -- and your face keeps running
away from you -- o what's with that? -- like
a deer on the edge of the road at dusk -- so
happy to be prancing away from this world
men have created -- not so fast -- so fast --
you hardly resemble yourself -- o black ink
on a white page -- where have all the wise
men gone? see how they run -- see how they
run -- down the blank face of the world --
back to the flat earth they have created.

3 poems from Aline Rahbany

2009-10-24T01:09:00.000-07:00

I dream. I dream when people are not watching. My dreams exist some place in the air – written in a dashing way. All I do is grab the air with my hands, wash my face with it, let it penetrate my body straight into my soul; only to come out in the form of words. A dreamer who puts her imaginings in words and plays on filtering them as an attempt to create her own little world. I only started translating my thoughts into writing recently. Upon taking writing as a way to escape from reality, I never knew I would go this far. My writings are pure thoughts and “raw emotions” mainly exploring different aspects of the human being.

When I am not dreaming, I am another 24 year old distorted person living in Lebanon and indulging in –down to earth – humanitarian field of work for the past two years. I have been published in Shoots & Vines, Opium Poetry 2.0 and BlackListed Magazine - soon, in November, in Calliope Nerve.

A fictitious reality

The music was loud
And I was immersed by the vibes
Around me were characters
From a novel I just finished reading
The musicians, looking elated
With every note played
Expressions on their faces
Look as if they were orgasming
And I think to myself
How divine, for a person to create
A note, a child
Just to be able
To create

Around me were characters
From a novel I just finished reading
Feeble minds
People whose past and future
Are nothing but one
Simply because they don’t
Prove their existence
In the realm of the mortals
You remember how they were
Ten years ago
And meet with them again
Twenty years later
And they are still the same

Around me were characters
From a novel I just finished reading
There is the dreamer
Who lives elsewhere
You think she is among us
Present
But her mind is on a different planet
Scrutinizing humanity
From high above
Mocking our generation
And the fast pace it took
To realizing its carnal goals
To achieving its useless ends
Not stopping for a moment
To absorb notes
Played by some musicians
Who dedicate their existence
To the creation of something
We all long to imitate

Ode to delirium

I am running on a rainbow
Wearing high-heeled sandals
My legs feel heavy
But my head feels light
So light, it passes right through clouds
Without the blink of an eye

I see arrows coming
From behind the skies
They reach my skin
Touch it, penetrate it
Pass through it
And I feel as if, swords of ice
Are passing through me

The arrows are colored
Each color prompts an emotion
And I feel dissected
Experiencing all sensations that
Could be felt by a human body
All within a second’s time-span

I rest awake - brain-dead

Of a dreadful correspondence

I wrote you a letter
With the blood of my period
I enclosed it in a pink envelop
With the scent of strawberries
I know you love the scent of strawberries
But you will not love my blood
It will disgust you
It will scare you away
As many features of my being do

Once you get over the idea of the blood
You will come to encounter my words
Of abomination disguised in admiration
Of adoration shielded in the mask of lust
Of a possessive resentment tainted with the sense of deference

But my words will not touch you
My words ceased to stir your fascination
They can scarcely budge your palpable sense of sight
Even less sway your brains
You will be repulsed and dismayed
Refusing to experience any kind of emotion
That might thrive in giving me a sign
That you still have a heart to feel

And I signed my letter

Truly yours,
Numbness

3 poems from Donal Mahoney

2009-10-21T18:22:00.000-07:00

Donal Mahoney, a native of Chicago, lives in St. Louis, MO. He has worked as an editor for The Chicago Sun-Times, Loyola University Press and Washington University in St. Louis. He has had poems published in or accepted by The Wisconsin Review, The Kansas Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Commonweal, Public Republic (Bulgaria), Gloom Cupboard (U.K.), Revival (Ireland), The Istanbul Literary Review (Turkey), Opium 2.0, Calliope Nerve, Haggard and Halloo, Rusty Truck, Pirene's Fountain (Australia) and other publications.

Fresh Off The Brazier, Medium Rare

How many times have I said
I’m through teasing myself,
through pretending
I don’t enjoy
the wreath of a woman
warm around me.
How many times have I said
I’ll go out on the streets,
as I have in the past,
in cummerbund and sash,
top hat and cane,
a one-man parade
with bugle and drum,
seeking the sweetbreads
served there all day,
fresh off the brazier,
medium rare.

One Stark Trumpet Peals

At eve, old melodies unwomb,
old ragings wake
as crones,
stringy hair unbunned,
creep downstairs
to supper on a loin.
As they feed,
their fingernails
roll back
and so they
gravitate
or, better, crawl
toward the dawn,
for in the din
that eddies in each ear,
they can hear
one stark trumpet peal
and so they creep
toward the sun
one more time,
drawn by
ancient echoings.

Good Mixers

Like the poor, the comfortable
you will always have with you.
They hold good jobs, then

get better ones. Like coyotes
they grin and walk slowly
in circles. They hire,

even fire each other.
They wed their own kind
and selectively proliferate.

Theirs is a constant harvest.
Their voices are like sediment,
thickening on everything.

5 poems from Michael Aaron Casares

2009-10-16T18:06:00.000-07:00

Michael Aaron Casares is a poet and artist living in Austin, TX. His work has appeared recently in several online and print journals. He has two collections of poetry forthcoming: Green Tea America from New Polish Beat and The Winter King, a post-modern epic prose poem, from Shadow Archer Press.

Obtusely Abstract

Distant curses in the sky
have swollen, soften and trickled by.
Gone distant rants against the wind.
Nothing shrill inside this pen.
Obtusely abstract, arbitrary,
disconnected thoughts from humanity.
Delivery indirect, not meant to speak
like conversation or a story telling
through simple prose. Perhaps no rhythm,
perhaps no swirl, no slinging slang to
correlate the vernacular with the layman.
Never seeking to please with words written
down, the actions always speak louder,
think when reading, exercise thought,
jog the brain, defy connections there
before, nursing understandings until
in their beds they choke, remove the
nipple from the lips of a dying baby
whose had too much milk. Disconnect,
but don't forget humanity. Everyday
who you love, who you hate, what you
love, what you hate, why you love, why
you hate. Heard all this before. Even
heard the stars. Heard about the green
grass and that unique perspective I cannot
see without my ears to hear your eyes tell
me a story. Obtusely abstract and falling down
to walk away on arms and knees, stomach hanging
to the ground. Definition is unnecessary.
Assimilation is a cop out. Validation for the
weak. Defense and offense for the young and time
well spent guarding the borders, but energy wasted
thinking, praying that the enemy will not come
and shatter all fragile egos.

Integer

Pulsars sweeping through the sky,
I become the sun of distant system
far away wanting nothing more than to warm
your life. Visible hadrons in the sky, naked
to the distant eye cannot see what hopes
and dreams are locked inside my heart. Expand,
I breath deep with cosmic lungs the dust of stars,
inhale the swarm, fragmentary like eclipsing
planets of the sun, light is fractured into shards
and melt into thin clouds, glowing, emanate
celestial swans with twinkling eyes and dazzling tongues.
Whisper far sweeps swift into this space, gregarious
place of mild chatter hearth with heart deep warmth
inside, pulsing, beaming, still alive.

Before the Stars

Distant is the night sky,
Perseids rushing overhead,
little message trailing by
whisper words no longer said.
From a distance farther than
my mind has traveled, I understand
the coming voice of divination.
God is not yet talking to me,
has not revealed his holy scheme,
but were it God I listened to,
there is nothing there, there is
nothing new. Space, a vast space
a world above my mind cannot see
or comprehend the energy as it maps
out, communicates, no remnant marking
to differentiate one side from the other,
it feels the same on opposite ends of the
universe, same heat, same cold, same
dense emptiness held together by a black
mesh holding planets bending time, pockets
for cue balls where nothing lives,
where nothing lives that my mind can know.
Perseids rushing overhead, taking ice
and water to the dead, hoping you will
wish on them to restore faith to the under
fed, to reform life, to carry on for in “his
image” is not humanity, but a glowing orb of
energy, confused by these organic shells of
expression, absorption, experience
a single moment before the stars.

The Understanding

This speeding alley
winds up and down hills
passed explosions of civility
& progression to expedite our
future hour in vibrant bass
tones distorted, unaware as
shaken brain, lopsided in
syllables long forgotten,
grown in external throws
and pitchfork knaves
dust is quick inside the
eye as remixed vital signs
capsize into this splurge
of memory and incessant lost
simplicity. Electric merge
in frizzled chasms pulse without
distress at questions graced with
repetition, resounding through my soul:
What else is there? the siren wonders
dancing, tossed, rag doll slap dashed
languidly pale with darkness in her eyes
seaweed ropes and leather binds no promise
to be kept, left to wander in buzzing chain
with no eccentric news or shame, floating
in the midnight sky, ghosts and receding
energies follow close behind the home
stalking slowly as she grows.

Re-Awakened

I come across this information;
for everything a time, a place
even in my misdirection, when I walked off
my path, that this detour manifested
to show me something I didn't know,
to help me learn and understand or distract
my universal flow, all things meant to be
meant to be, for everything a place, a time
to grow within this knowledge, to grow without
false truths. I'm allowed to understand things
thousands will not understand, will not ever
take the time to try and comprehend. Create
this thing called reality, not alone as realities go.
Shaping visions into flesh, shaping dreams right from the bone,
this simple knowledge I've been given to reflect
the paths I've never known, or have forsaken
with choices lacking balance, selfish arrows
of deceit, weighed by deeper forces, lower pitched
in frequency. Energy that pulled me down until my
soul was compromised, on the verge of truly breaking,
surrendering to a negative light, unraveling cold with lack
of love that could spiral through and from my heart. Problems lost
of moderation, scales erect tip not imbalance, a feather here,
a feather there, the weight of words activate the living.
Tones of voice, context, meaning all within the souls expression.
Learning once again the living, as peace and harmony is giving
life a second and third chance, to light the path and find the way
as we enter our cosmic day and ascend with one another, destined
met to meet together, merged of spirit and heart.

3 poems from Doug Draime

2009-10-07T09:01:00.000-07:00

Doug Draime emerged as a presence in the 'underground' literary movement in the late 1960's in Los Angeles. Most recent books include: "Knox County" (Kendra Steiner Editions) and "Los Angeles Terminal: Poems 1971-1980" (Covert Press). Forthcoming: "Boulevards Of Oblivion" (Tainted Coffee Press) and a full-length collection, "Farrago Soup" coming out from Coatlism Press. Awarded PEN International grants in 1987 and 1991. Nominated for three Pushcart Prizes in 2008. He currently lives in Oregon.

Sentences

Poet praying for his Muse
____________________

In the dead brain of material life

____________________

On the screen of all the
horror & lies
____________________

As his friends are
murdered in the Halls
of Justice
_____________________

Spreading the lie
of mercy’s
betrayal
_____________________

Nothing matters but the
moment:here, Now
_______________________

Vultures talk non-stop through
bloodstained teeth, it’s a fact of the
street life. It is lies and nothing else.
________________________

Everywhere the truth
is upsidedown; poet praying
for his muse in upsidedown
world

Signing The Funeral Book

I did not sign the funeral book,
because I had much earlier,
signed on the line of sky light and spirit, signed
the book of Life, but
as I was just finishing the e on the end of my last name,
the bombs began falling, people screaming.
And war time
is all time; who’s keeping body count?
Your blue eyes are bleeding and everything
is poison! And the stockpiles of discrepancies
of love and desire and greed bleed into dark harbors of
sightless flickering depths of blackness blackness,
and skies thick with suffocating gray choking smoke
and hallucinations. I will not sign the funeral book,
despite the dark blood gushing from my eyes.

“No Love Deserves The Death It Has”

My shoes are off and the hammers
of decision have stopped. I have an
ice cold Corona and I take a long
pull on it and think of Jack Spicer and
the moon tonight, which is an odd
shade of gray. Spicer dying of his
“vocabulary” the same year I spent 3 months
in Nam, not recorded on any of my Army
records, trying so intently not to die ...
like exploding dinosaurs or burning cities.
I was looking to destroy more than
invented ways of dying: “The negative that
cannot happen” and “No love deserves the
death it has.” I died one night in a fire fight,
in my mind, as those around me were
dead and maimed. The moon is casting its shadow
over the mountains like blue-green sulfur,
as I sip my beer. And I think of my mind and
Jack Spicer’s mind and my callused feet as
I stand here unfolding an AP story given to me
2 years ago by a friend at the newspaper
I worked for, about Bukowski dying. Bukowski’s gone!
I figured he’d at least make to 95 like his
German grandfather. I walk off my deck and back into
the house, and draw a steaming hot bath and light a Dutch Master
cigar in memory and honor, remembering the haunted
and exhilarating streets of East Hollywood, and my
little house in the back on Winnona Boulevard. Bukowski:
a negative that cannot happen. When I’m done with
my bath, I walk back outside to finish my beer in one
gulp and get another one, not bothering
to wipe away the tears.

April. 1996

3 poems from Si Philbrook

2009-10-06T12:36:00.000-07:00

Si Philbrook lives in Brighton (UK). He works in social care and is married with two kids. He has had poems published in various ezines, journals and magazines inluding Poetry Monthly (UK), The Recusant and The Arus Newspaper. These 3 poems are from Si Philbrook's series "The Beautiful Octopus Club". He's hoping to make it into a chapbook early next year. Learn more about Si and "The Beautiful Octopus Club" at myspace.com/jo_nobody

John

something dirty
something crushed
swept away
forgotten dust

I knew John for six years
and I don't remember him smiling.

I knew him first as "undiagnosed
with a non-specific learning disability".

I knew him as the one who lived alone
in a flat in Lee, "copes but needs help".

I knew him as the one with the porn collection
"no female staff will work with him".

I knew him as the one who listened to Dolly Parton
"because she has big tits and I think my mum liked her".

I knew him as a peddlar of petty drugs
and getting the charges dropped because of "his condition".

I knew him as the one who beat his mate up
'cos his mate's girlfriend said she'd been hit.

I knew him as the man who always wore a suit and tie,
but rarely shaved and never washed, just sprayed de-oderant.

I knew him as the friend who turned up drunk on tennants special brew,
at my flat, Christmas morning, puked in the sink
and made sure I was not alone that Christmas
because he knew Anita was away at home.

I knew him as the man, who only once
spoke about his family, that put him in care,
aged five, to be beaten and abused
till he could get out of "that fucking hole".

I knew John for six years
and I don't remember him smiling.

something dirty
something crushed
swept away
forgotten dust.

Sarah

"Make it stop, make them beatles go away"
It's ok Sarah, they are gone now.

Sarah had her own lounge
in a care home for 32 people
all with "challenging behaviour"
she was "too violent" to risk mixing
with others
with us.

Sarah had Aspergers
but not the friendly face of it;
the lost in a nightmare world
of unfolding fears and tears
face of it.

Sarah's was a world
I could not access,
I could not place myself
in any framework that made any sense
to her,

I could not connect.

When you work in care
no-one tells you
how many funerals there will be
or how sometimes
you really
can't make it better.

Sarah, just once shook me
took me by surprise
looked into my eyes
and said....."make it stop".

I couldn't.

Autism is lonely, and terrifying,
and we need
to try harder.

"Make it stop, make them beatles go away"
It's ok Sarah, they are gone now.

Richard

Richard is not a poem.
He is an ugly abuse,
used and discarded
hard to like,
and harder to work with,
ugly as life can be.

Richard is not a poem.
He is an abuser,
taught from an early age
but still...
unforgiven.
difficult to cope with.

Richard is not a poem.
He is the man
who threatened staff with a knife
who threatened staff with a smile,
who talked about arson;
because he knew that burns the system.

Richard is not a poem,
he was abused in care
and dare we say that how he
responded
is wrong
is anything other than normal,

Richard is not a poem
and I do not like him
and I never did,
is that
how we treat the weak?
maybe...and maybe
that is all there is to say
sometimes.

Gary Beck - 5 poems from "Assault on Nature"

2009-10-06T05:22:00.000-07:00

Gary Beck has spent most of his adult life as a theater director and worked as an art dealer when he couldn't earn a living in the theater. He has also been a tennis pro, a ditch digger and a salvage diver. His chapbook "Remembrance" was published by Origami Condom Press and "The Conquest of Somalia" was published by Cervena Barva Press. A collection of his poetry "Days of Destruction" has been published in 2009 by Skive Press. Another collection "Expectations" is being published by Rogue Scholars Press. His original plays and translations of Moliere, Aristophanes and Sophocles have been produced Off Broadway and toured colleges and outdoor performance venues. He currently lives in New York City , where he's busy writing. His poetry and short stories have appeared in hundreds of literary magazines.

"Assault on Nature", an unpublished poetry collection, explores some of the disturbing issues of our times, as well as the abuses heaped on the environment by its caretakers..

Poems from "Assault on Nature" have appeared in: The Hiss Quarterly, Nuvein Magazine, Clark Street Review, HazMat Review, Kritya Poetry Journal, Thorny Locust, Death Metal Poetry, Strange Road, decomP, The Blue House, Miller's Pond, High Altitude Poetry, MadSwirl, Bolts of Silk, New Verse News, Poetic Curfews, Enigma, Farmhouse Journal, Words Words Words, Apt Magazine, Blue Fog Journal, Juice Magazine, Sea Stories, Inscribed, Flash Fire, The Delinquent, Robot Melon, Halfway Down the Stairs, Emuse, Polse Guera, Gloom Cupboard, Poems Niederngasse, Foame, Words Words Words, Poetic Curfews, The Vertin Press, The Angry Poet, The Cat's Meow, Apt, Thirteen Myna Birds, Blinking Cursor.

Hit Song

This is the computer age,
so don’t waste time talking beauty.
Carbon monoxide gets its song.
Strontium 90 gets its song.
Even irradiated ergosterol has a song.
So don’t waste precious time
writing about trees or birds,
praise air pollution.

Buccaneer

Cartagena , you have betrayed me
and would again,
if I escape the hangman.
Your past promises were taken
for delights too soon forgotten,
spent as fast as wasted treasure
concealed ancient pools of blood,
spilled with pleasure.

Urbana

Glittering lights
speak cities to strangers,
kissing the congested distance,
the promenade through sensual streets,
the bus rides through sleaze town,
the unknown route to exile,
the rapid transit to discovery.

Continued War on Nature

The illuminations of the world
are fibrous curtains,
constructions of confusion,
the fear of nuclear eruptions,
economic deprivations
social rejections,
last remnants poisoned
by ominous mushroom clouds.
As the world shifts to sand
the dream for green tomorrows
leaves only a backward glance,
a yearning for illusion.

Return

Hostage tree,
your yellow streamers
flow with liberty.
The calculating city melts
as the heroes return
to pro bono ovation.
The Great White Way welcomes them
and America no longer worries,
lulled by ticker tape flurries.

Michael Mc Aloran

2009-09-26T09:08:00.000-07:00

Michael Mc Aloran was Belfast born, his family moved to the south of Ireland due to the 'The Troubles'. He has travelled extensively throughout Europe, living for brief spells in both Holland and Italy. He elected to study Fine Art & Design, but left after one disillusioned year. He still continues to paint pretty obsessively when he can afford to. He has been writing poetry for almost a decade, but has only recently begun to submit. His works has been published by 'Poetry Monthly International', (U.K), 'The Gloom Cupboard', (U.S), 'Lines Written W/A Razor', (Canada), 'Counterexample Poetics', (U.S),'Writing Raw', (U.S), 'Full Of Crow', (U.S),''The Recusant', (U.K), and is forthcoming with 'Why Vandalism?', (U.S), 'Clockwise Cat', (U.S), 'The Delinquent, (U.K), 'Deep Tissue', (U.S), 'Origami Condom', (U.S), and 'BlazeVox', (U.S)-(Fall Edition). His first published book of poetry, entitled 'In The Black Cadaver Light', was published by 'Poetry Monthly Press', (U.K), 2009. He also likes to entertain himself with cigarettes and alcohol...

untitled

the latrinal heart
the plague of the eye

severed lips in an ashtray full of
spent cigarettes

stained syringes and the itch
in the skin

time measured out in the drift

bottles emptied the skin ashen the
decaying teeth

the beauty of a gun forced into the
mouth the coolness of cold steel

a grave in the skull dense colours electric
gunpowder in the veins

lost intricacy feigned inspiration the
tongue dripping of words without meaning

yet even the sun falters
the sky streaked with acid light

rolling dice around the tongue
I am no longer here

(I
am no longer here)

yet still I can taste the serpents kiss and the
intrinsic teeth of the dark piercing my pulse

the shadow vanes the sky
all that I know is untitled

2 poems from David S. Pointer

2009-09-24T12:38:00.000-07:00

David S. Pointer is a widely published poet in the small press. He lives with his two daughters in Murfreesboro, TN. His recent poems have appeared in "Breaking Ground," "The American Dissident," and "Chiron Review." A new chapbook entitled "Camelot Kid's Triggertopia" is available at alt-current.com.

Blunt Dissection

Put my life on the fracture table
Get the surgeon some extra guide wires
Clamp the aorta above the need for
love, below the narrow inconsolable
valves that bleed like Cupid's veins
Tell the last rites priest that I'm no
ordinary surgical patient regarding
intravenous fluid-find the maiden's
kiss carnations blocking my main arterial
trunk bring my case of Pinot de Grigot
and pre-morgue medications-don't
blame any nice women for nicking
me more than they nursed me for, I,
too, know that love is a big practice:
pathological, full of circulation problems

Inkville

All these poets
caught in
a minimally
successful
state at
a compliment
swap meet
continuously
reaching into
wallet world
for a green
launch pad
into paid
literary
appreciation

3 poems from Glen Lantz

2009-09-11T13:38:00.000-07:00

Glen Lantz is 48 years old and lives in Dubuque, Iowa. He has a BA and a MA in Sociology from the University of Northern Iowa. His work has appeared in 10K Poets Zine, Bad Marmalade, Calliope Nerve, Clockwise Cat, the Curious Record, Deep Tissue Magazine, Ditch, the Dubuque Area Writer’s Guild 2009 Anthology Music & Dance, Full of Crow, Heroin Love Songs, Lines Written W/ a Razor, Lit Up Magazine, Lost Souls in the Fishbowl Anthology by Subculture Books, Madswirl, the Plebian Rag, Poetry Now, and Zygote in my Coffee.

Glen has poems forthcoming in Counterexample Poetics, Zygote in my Coffee, and Underground Voices.

Glen has two free poetry books that can be downloaded from Scribd.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/16109158/Boiled-Tomatoes
http://www.scribd.com/doc/18392309/Second-without-the-pictures

Glen is the managing editor of Deep Tissue Magazine.

You can find more of Glen’s work at: http://deeppiercingcut.blogspot.com/

Bifrons (Babbling Ghost #46)

the dirty bomb is waiting/ sitting on the bench/ seething in the darkness/ black mountain range/ all infrared and mouthing/ together with the building blocks/ safe within the protein shell/ the vast becoming/ on the cloud’s edge/ three years megaphone/ everything so similar/ hooking on the solution/ Bluetooth shooting/ hard plastic insert/ drill into the six mile/ immediate release/ drawing down the orange veil/ beautiful pulsating madness/
the last revolt against/ far off and distant/ into the wounded sun/ the flickered pause/

Vual (Babbling Ghost #47)

mindless grazing peaks/ waiting for it to happen/ on the execution black/ roasting the rain creature/ making the goggle/ mounting the dread/ crossing the swords/ wiggling conceited spread/ upon your toast and bread/ lonely as the day/ surrounded by indifference/ they seep between the cracks/ the holes fill with envy/ broken by the absurdity/ so long in the bend/ we can’t see around/ worn out malcontent/ the face of the obscene/ Saturn punctuation/ half baked pot/ mud smeared hauling/ amid the roaring vulgar/ rears up skyward/ out of the zone/ not even a death breath/ we talk of the weather/ as it begins to hurt/ right between the eyes/

Haagenti (Babbling Ghost #48)

I once was the wind/ every hard against me/ my shadow a mountain/ the end of time/
like a sleepwalker/ the final dagger/ in Caesar’s back/ no manifest heart/ the queen does not cry/ for your acts of wickedness/ she is haunted by the calm/ please untie my hands
let me die in the freezing cold/ I am lost to history/ a forgotten name/ my bones are dust/
you feel the scars/ they are there to remind you/ never surrender/ fight on forever/

3 poems from Rose Aiello Morales

2009-09-04T06:27:00.000-07:00

Fear and Loathing

I stole a car from the Cadillac Ranch
'cause the raunch in Nevada wasn't enough
to calm my nerves from adrenaline rush,
and do you know the way to Vegas?
What lives in Vegas dies in Vegas, baby.
I smelled Elvis' shit and it told me so.

Peyote no attention to the alien beside me,
I picked at Uranus at the corner drugstore
but left when they ran out of pharmaceuticals;
who knew drug stores didn't sell Drugs?
There ain't no truth in advertising.

Forget the Cola, and give me Coca,
the pop from the popper is pooped already,
Ralphie flew to the moon with Eddie,
and Norton's now his Steady. Ready?
Just hand me another beer, then stay clear,
what a long strange trip it's been.

So Viva Viagra, it's one for the hag and one for me
from sea to shining sea, but you knew that, didn't you?
You knew I liked ‘em young, my sidekick and lawyer brought guns and money,
and I always wanted Johnny Depp to play me.

I’m the Duke but Earl took my Notebook,
cell phones aren’t invented yet, and I’ve run out of quarters.
The cacti are all unlisted anyway.
Tell front desk I’m lost in the dessert.

Eulogic

Reports of my death have been exaggerated.

The wizened nugget of my heart
which wheezes and pumps powdered darkness
through a body devoid of pleasure,
enlightenment a guilty shame,
a litany of imagined ailments
taking the place of rosaries,
bead upon silver bead threaded through arthritic fingers.

I am searching for release

Is this my final answer,
waiting for the right (the write);
a living will penned only for the dying?
Resuscitate if needed,
repeat if necessary.
Unplug if all else fails

As I Lay Dying

Would you take a bullet for a friend?

People have, every day,
friends they have
and friends they'll never know,
community dies in red flow
on dry sand, hand clutching
hand holding nothing but the
promise of a golden medal
pinned to death suit jacket;

and the life of a friend

Run in step with speeding bus,
one arm stretched to push,
one gripped to stop,
10,000 pounds against 120,
a super being bound to fail,
but found to win.

Would you walk over a bleeding man?

While I sit glued to chair,
shackled to floor,
gutless limbs rotating in
ever reaching circles,
useless energy spent going nowhere,
fast approaching points where
the only friends I'll meet
are in the ground.

3 poems from Si Philbrook

2009-09-03T04:28:00.000-07:00

Si Philbrook lives in Brighton (UK). He works in social care and is married with two kids. He has had poems published in various ezines, journals and magazines inluding Poetry Monthly (UK), The Recusant and The Arus Newspaper.

Genetic Engineering

Let death surrender to us
We shall not die
Nor grow old, though the sky grows old,
Though we lie in fields where the flowers taste of death,
Though the rivers run in blood,
Though the sky is ever red,
We shall not die,

And let death surrender to us
We shall not fear him,
Engineer him from our lives,
Not for us the blunt cut and thrust of knives,
Not for us the lines of age and fading glory,
Not for us the fear and pity of mortality,
We shall not die,

So let death surrender to us
We have his codes,
He will erode us no more,
Let him be our gift-aid to the poor,
Let him feast at their table,
Let him sleep in their shit,
We shall not die.

The taxidermist drinks green tea

1.
I met him at the art gallery
A Clint retrospective; invective, perspective,
convective, abortive, thing.
I made an effort to "be more friendly"
(therapy is such cheap advice)
I smiled and asked him what he did,

Taxi pause dermist pause smile
the joke is pause worse for wear,
I smiled.

We built an uneasy truce, aware,
of shared inadequacies, but,
content not to notice them.

I found myself, unstealthily,
behind him in the queue, both,
buying Degas prints "for our mothers",

A second conversation required, focus,
resolution, the solution was
an invitation to tea, "Jazz night cafe at the Komedia".

2.
We meet at 7.47 pm, both early,
but not aggressively so
and we find a table, second row is comfortable.

We smatter-clap, polite,
but not quite engaged, with,
what is at best, leftovers of proper jazz.

The night has been a, search,
an uncomfort, an awkward hope,
that I am not his reflection, or worse.

I order beer, stella artois,
to show up his predicted white wine spritzer,
I am, clutching, at straws,

He orders tea,
The taxidermist orders green tea,
I smile, relieved, he is not me.

apply in writing

energetic female seeks reluctant male for post grad project,
esoteric interest in lawnmower starter motors an advantage,

north american country seeks symbol of redemption,
previous experience not required (equal ops employer)

elderly female seeks weekend companionship,
KY supplied, socks not a problem, no timewasters,

13 year old crack head seeks 40+ male for cash
all tricks considered, anal extra, ford mondeo preferred,

comic enthusiast seeks copies 7 thru 16, 2000AD, also ring gift
from issue one, phone me (not wednesdays takes mother to bingo)

artist seeks life models, unusual body shapes preferred,
please send photos, PO BOX only, cash paid,

TV station seeks contestants for reality show
dysfunctional personality essential, apply in writing.

2 poems from Kevin Reid

2009-08-29T13:29:00.000-07:00

Kevin Reid lives and works as a librarian in Angus, Scotland. He has a first class MA Hons. in English Literature. When not buying or reading books he writes, paints and enjoys the creative magnificence of digital technology. These poems are part of series which he hopes to publish as his first chapbook.

My Thighs

Os femoris et femur;
masters in momentum.

Flummoxed by the femur,
I lose my impetus,
utter function strikes me silent.

Still, I walk in their company,

I meet Genesis and Exodus, I am told,

when a hand is placed under the thigh, and
the mission held true, sterility may not be born;
proof in the womb of Zeus.

Still, I walk in their company.

I meet a childhood memory, on my bicycle,
a fast pedal, the excitement of two wheels,
a dog with no chain, a weak master,
my right thigh bitten, by a dog called Boot.

Still, I walk in their company.

I meet a Tantric Buddhist evoke spirit.
Accompanied by the Damaru, he plays
the Kangling with his left hand,
drives away evil and cuts off the ego.

Still, in the support of their company,
I am urged to talk their walk.

My Buttocks

...floating symbols...never representing themselves...

Joined at the hip,
these shape shifting strangers, muscular yet humble,
take me to the hindquarters, show me to my seat,
then breach my brain with joy and pain.

Pygopagus,
dazzles its prey with its twin moons,
lashes their butts with two wicked whips,
as it hits its desired destination for painful lessons.

The anger in my father’s eyes,
his leather belt, the firm hiding
for stealing apples and shitting myself .

The Devil bites a pact with a witch,
leaves his mark; the twisted horns of a ram.
This fiendish Callipygian,
the wet dream of a young pygophilist.

The excitement, my first grope,
her bare butt, her birthmark,
behind the bush by the burn.

Joined at the hip,
these shape shifting strangers, muscular yet humble,
take me to the hindquarters , show me to my seat,
and expose me to the exploited ar(t)se of fashion.

1880s,
the outstanding celebration of the bustle,
revealed
on a Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

21st Century,
the coin slot of the fashion conscious hooker,
the shame of her vertical smile in return.

Fuck that.

As I leave by the back passage, I catch wind of an ancient tale,
about a dominatrix, who spanked her clients scarlet before
some arse slapped their raw rump on the scales of Libra,
and sold it to the masses as astrology.

Enough of that crap.

I shit by the rear entrance,
my horizontal smile,
as I recall
these signifiers of seat,
this mechanism of motion, that gives way to excretion,
revealed the goddess to Virgil.

Siobhan Ditty

2009-08-27T19:55:00.001-07:00

volition

i can feel this will to rage then lay
my face on concrete
freezing to the grime
but placed, self-placed
in street and mind
there's always
the skin left behind

i can feel this will to rage then lay
down weapons, boil water
bathe wounds and oil
the asymmetry of fear
bound in neck and wrist.
let the doors
swing on hinges let them sway switch

i can feel this will to rage then lay
with racing heart my hands
to work and mouth and veins
hold back that urge to bite
behind the course
loud ringing in my face

i can feel this will to rage then lay
i hear your blood
and the rough of your hunch
over all the delays

before rest

i can feel the will to rage

3 poems from David S. Pointer

2009-08-27T10:32:00.000-07:00

David S. Pointer is a widely published poet in the small press. He lives with his two daughters in Murfreesboro, TN.

Traumathon

The unloved man, David Scott Pointer
required quality made keepsake stitches
to close Love's wound-no stainless steel
sutures corkscrewing the heart for this
one, no robotic syringe spewing bear grease
and ball bearings on this one while the
surgeon and wheel-tabled attendants
self-medicated with anti-psychotic
club cocktails, and the patient's pain
soaked memories prescribed percodan
like a self appointed nurse practitioner.

Former Project Kid
Still Hears the Boss

-I got a 69 Chevy with
a 396, Fuelie Heads and
a Hurst on the floor...Bruce Springsteen

My wallet broke down before
I could ever get to a car lot

scanning the infra-red range
of freedom, I walk the black

sands frothing insane against
musical advice, I discard my

dreams of song like a candy wrapper
ragged from a childhood long splat

at the Bruce Springsteen concert
on a boom box disc, I reenter

my life recalling Pete Seeger's postcard:
Keep doing what you're doing kid!

Cagefighter

Like an extreme cagefighter,
I come to on Love's canvas
the 10 count of loss over
early under starlight. Years
later I'm found just a field
hand tending the white
horse hydrangeas, the dripping
mascara marigolds, and
tracing the curves of
carnations. Once I promised
never to write any fairy tale
feature films into my poems,
then here comes Love's lead
detective asking me if I
am comfortable in long
term stable relationships?
How do I tell this woman
I could be a subdivision
built atop an entire field
of unexploded ordinances,
I could be a bank robber's
son who became a sociologist
without a classroom, I
could be ready for popcorn
and dvds by Saturday night
comfortable with any new
moonlight and pink front porch
perennials surrounding me..

3 poems from Bradley Mason Hamlin

2009-08-27T09:53:00.000-07:00

Bradley Mason Hamlin lives in Sacramento, California. His short stories, articles/essays, and poems have appeared in several independent press books, magazines, and newspapers in print and online. Brad works for Mystery Island Publications, a venue for pop culture and controversies located at: http://www.mysteryisland.net

ZEN IN THE ART OF JAZZ

Drinking
Jack Daniels
straight from glass
to lips
no water or ice to crack
the flavor
and I must admit
I am in love
with this American whiskey
not bourbon
a purity …
only found between the legs
of your lover
if you really love her
and in the hands
and heart
of a lone jazz musician
in the embrace
of
instrument.

WHISKEY BUILDS MUSCLES

I
felt that poem
knocking on my door
that little ghost Marley
tap
tap
hammering

Charles Dickens with a hard-on
hiding in the shadows …

bits
pieces
fragments
of
spirit
creeping in unkept wind

echoing
cracking the eggshell
gently
needing
the fracture
sewn
shut

and here
it is.

YOUR HEART’S ON BACKWARDS

The oldest story
in this world

man & woman
cock & cunt

he was into her,
deep inside,
and she liked it

until
they couldn’t control
each other
anymore
with the fresh junk high
of love

she scratched his eyes
until they bled,
and spit in his face
while he growled,
threatening
to pull her long pretty hair
out by the roots,
drag her cross the floor
caveman style

then he wrote poems
to try and woo her back,
con-jobs like:

10,000 nights
10,000 hells
10,000 drunks
10,000 crazy jail cells

You know this life
ain’t worth a dime
if your heart isn’t beating
next to mine

and she bought it,
well, most of the time,
okay, well, sometimes

then she wrote her own
verse,
little gems like:

go fuck a monkey
or
your heart’s on backwards
or
she would say
I think
your poems
are written
with
invisible ink;
there’s just nothing there,
baby

10,000 nights
10,000 hells
10,000 mean dinners
in dirty drunken jail cells

and you know this life
ain’t worth a dime
if your heart isn’t beating
next to mine.

3 poems from Tony Nesca

2009-08-27T00:37:00.000-07:00

Tony Nesca was born in Torino, Italy in 1965 and moved to Canada at the age of three. He was raised in Winnipeg but relocated back to Italy several times until finally settling in Winnipeg in 1980. He taught himself how to play guitar and formed an original rock band playing the local bars for several years. At the age of twenty-seven he traded his guitar for a Commodore 64 and started writing seriously. He has published six chapbooks of stories and poems (which he used to sell straight out of his knapsack at local dives and bookstores), six novels, two books of poetry and has been an active contributor to the underground lit scene for ten years, being published in innumerable magazines both online and in print. He currently resides in Winnipeg and shares a house with his wife, his teenage nephew and his mother.
http://www.tonynesca.blogspot.com/

HEROIN LOVE

ain't got money-hungry-blues
ain't got sweet-water-pools
ain't got no heroin-love
just me and you and the piano-jazz radio
sister brown eyes on the dirty boulevard
she running the crack whore meltdown
she moving the cocaine shark hunt
and
ain't got no blue sensation maserati
ain't got endless sunshine happiness
ain't got mad-bad whiskey whore
just me and you and long-gone Leadbelly singing the
sad-luck music,
singing the goodbye mind-waste,
singing the jazz-wonder-kisses,
ain't got money honey wishes
just blind love running down the
broken-bottle-alley hand in hand
with the dizzy riot madness…

MUTED LOVE SYMPHONY IN THE BIG EASY DRIZZLE

empty pen on table
concrete walls in my body
bearded man blows the saxophone
politician says alright slickster
head feeling down-low
world news grim
purple moonshine out the window
I watch the timewheel rotation moving easy
henry miller he got some wild ass cockroach-sexy
he smilin’ like satchmo in the big easy drizzle
I smilin’ like ella she giving me sweet ass
one I love misbehavin’ cuz it’s me and my radio
world singing the muted-love-symphony
it’s rain on your sunshine
it’s no idea in the urban indifference
it’s love in dark corners
it’s angry-jack in the wildman blues song
it’s me and you holding hands in the forever-happy
unforgiving celebration…

WORD MUSIC

deadly silence got me low-down-hungry
thinking about that hot-dog stand on the dismal corner
beside the old beggar hand extended 16 year old
virgin in hot-pants looking mad-bad-dangerous crimson
fireball streaking across the sky middle-aged hooker
front tooth missing she beckoning my weary ass
one I love absent in world-gone-hungry
Dixieland trio singing happy songs amidst angry
downtown laughter low-down drug-mood feeding me blue
music pornography rattling my brains wrap your
lips around me back-alley broken hearts
whiskey bottle-shards hitting the off-keys feel
that fucked-up saxophone tickling your ribs
atom-bomb-luvly feed me sin-soaked dead flowers
on my grave warm kisses moonlight smiles
her distant touch,
her long-dead-musings,
her love-gone-missing,
her hips arching in the afternoon lust-dance,
and your blue velvet beauty grinding away from me in
the gutter-love sunlight…

3 poems from Steven Leonardo Clifford

2009-08-26T16:09:00.000-07:00

Steven Leonardo Clifford, 25 years old and Living in Long Island, New York. I am studying Graphic Design at a community college. My art education has influenced my poetry but I am a self taught poet and consider myself an outsider artist. I’ve also drew inspiration from the creating-process philosophy of professional sculptor Todd Arnett. My poetry usually deals with deep images that I found to be like Robert Bly when I started my poetry endeavor. Although I was interested in his unique descriptions, I wasn’t very fond of his work. It lacked the raw realness that Bukowski so affectively bled. I also liked how Carlos Williams was so direct and didn’t have over the top poetics. I love imagery, gritty realism and straightforwardness with a deeper underlining meaning. Recently, I have tried to employ all of these aspects in my poetry for the sake of creating. Not that I have something to say intentionally. I have something to express and show that arises a meaning between myself and the poem. The poem doesn’t dictate me nor do I to it. My other inspiration sources include the postmodernists James Schuyler, Denis Levertov, Jack Spicer, Paul Blackburn and Larry Eigner.

They Told Us There’s One Spot to Enter

my wallet
cigarettes and lighter
passes between the links.
I climb two lengths high
and flip head first
to the other side.
beyond patchy tall grass
a modern, blocky building
absorbs the night in gray.
ever locked in shackles.
windows no longer free.
we sneak around the outside realm
for one way inside to strap the straight jacket.
we whisper our plan.
make sure not to speak too loud.
don’t light up a smoke.
keep out for the heat.
we seek through each turn and corner
every crevice, every pocket
the same rusty steel so bulky and tight.
we need tools for this one
but lets undertake the tunnels.
crawl low to the manhole down the ladder
hands grip the declining bars with cautious steps.
feet sink to the spongy ground
along with the stench of stale water.
only zippo flames a dimly guide
to illuminate convoluted pipes
that fade into the darkness ahead.
we track our choices but what might be forgotten?
went farther and already gone too far.
lets head back.

Nothing to fight

A man wraps a cloth around his fist
at 3am
in a back alley of decaying bricks.
This is my sanctuary.
The black road shines a hint of blue
and cracks battered the pavement
the edges rotten.

His head jolts to the left.
What do I do when the last fight is over?
He glares with his eyes flaring
and breaths.
Returns a straight on hit
snapping back the opponent’s head.
What would the story be?
He wobbles about
and then wildly swings his arms
landing sporadic blows.
The man deftly dodges.

There’ll be no battles
and no pain to thrive on.
The opponent strikes his strength to the left.
The man steps to the right in a curve
while his fist float before his face.
Fear will remain nameless.
and not be that man.
The opponent follows and bunches the void
The man brings his arm back and
slugs his opponent in a combo.
His body flings back and falls to the ground.
This derives from freedom
I never knew.
The man stands over him
and nods kindly
and walks off
into the dense night
alone

Who Else Caught This?

mind that just a handful of people
are seeing this. the black water bellow
sloppily washes amidst the beams
of a lifeless dock I stand.
gander out: the city lights
will not spoil the night.
not this hour when in the horizon
the sliver coast obscures
even deadlier black.
jaggy, rocky with some disfigured peaks
and vague structures a few
reliant to the darkening blue sky.
who missed out?
Not us

3 poems from Rose Aiello Morales

2009-08-26T13:50:00.000-07:00

Lalena Fell

Lalena is no more.
Those many nights left crying,
writhing on the kitchen floor
while you hovered above;
an avenging angel wreaking havoc
where none was due.

And you relished those days
of purple and red
when she woke with a crash,
the dream remembered too vividly;
the blues descending into yellow haze
from jaundiced whites tinged
the color of tobacco.

The road she was traveling on
ended at the third rail
(That's her rotten life);
now the guitar's ladeedah
plays a dirge in her lover's ears,
the fist used far too often,
caressing the polished wood.

Second to None

They're waiting for me,
searching with dead vulture eyes,
that slight haze of spit
on their blood stained beaks,
the squawk of the ones left cheated;
I sit, sequestered in the corner
front row seat to my own demise.

She has risen
they said, preening feathers
remorsefully at the loss
of their tender morsel,
hidden among the fallen angels,
a shower of black upon
their bald scarred heads.

Three days they circled
awaiting the second coming,
but, wilely buzzard I,
stood laughing in the vestibule,
puffs of grey smoke billowing
through snaking fingers.

Achieving the penultimate,
a spy through the painted glass,
a sparrow walks amongst screaming harpies,
late, as always, for her own funeral.

Revelation 101

Sat waiting for the revelation,
while others found it below their stations
in life to ponder the unponderable,
while dying, crying one last syllable
of utter understanding, the blue light special
shining in their glassy eyes, the truth revealed
in sephia tones, as no one live remains
to read their brilliant tomes.

Death in life, lived to question,
every day, the meaning of meaningless;
if studied enough, scrutinized, the lies might
seem like fact, in fact become dogma
fed a steady diet of by product crap.
A wise man searches with eternal lamp to devine
one honest man, what it means to be alive.

Then what is due? And what is spent?
A soulless human life is sent to misery,
an answer lieing in seconds left,
What?
What?
What is answered?
What is learned?
A spark of sorrow at execution.............

Nothing

3 poems from David McLean

2009-08-26T10:57:00.000-07:00

Up to date details of McLean's publications and several available books and chapbooks, including two print full lengths and two free e-chaps are at his blog at http://mourningabortion.blogspot.com. A new chapbook "Hellbound" is on sale from Epic Rites Press.

the dead alligators are sleeping

it is cold tonight and they are asleep
all the dead alligators in me
like happy little hippies

they do not remember the man who made them
and his temporary asylum heaven
a maniac singing in a holiday inn

about how the children should be living
so the man can't tape his glasses over their eyes
and teach them what he assumes is right

because what they teach you is not very nice
what Roky says was life

when you have ghosts

when you have ghosts you have innocent love
drinking silent wine in the skull,
fermented from sex and memories and blood,

you have stars inside you and angels
giggling innocence in your eyes,
you are a child that might have life

and time that ghosts are all you need to see
madness and memory and loving meat
is every me, like furious blood

and dreams speeding home
like coke in a dead man's nose,
for a body is hot three score and ten

though eternity is fucking cold.
so here there are ghosts
we make them feel at home

the shadowbone

the shadows are connected to memory
which knows about nothing
except we know things happened
and approximately where the scars go

and where they came from,
most of them, though others are forgotten.
because shadows fall through us like drugs
compassionate enough for us to love them,

like the ghostly graces of heroin
she gave us, curled like babies in cotton wool
that no baby deserves, but junkies do
because they are wise enough to refrain from action,

rolling naked in wu-wei. i prefer to get high
by being unkind, today. that's life,
and that's also the passionate progress of time.
we fall through it like rocks from a cliff,

like fetuses from the wombs cunt-lip.
the shadows are here instead of memories
and they fit us very nicely, they are mirrors
that show us all the absences precisely;

there's eternity in them, baby,
and that always comes timely