Two Acrostic Sonnets
By Mike-Mesterton-Gibbons
A United Germany
A wall divided East and West Berlin
Until the year of Nineteen Eighty-Nine.
Not thirty years since JFK's "Ich bin,"
Its fall made German folk, not zwei, but ein!
The breaking of the barrier raised hope:
Emancipation beckoned far and wide.
Democracy prepared to spread its scope.
Glad tidings of world peace fast multiplied.
Euphoria broke out, quite unrehearsed—--
Red states had tumbled, China would be next,
My neighbor said ... but then the tide reversed,
As we had all misread our history text ...
Now we must strive again to turn the tide—--
Yet Germany, still one, remains a guide!
Tortoise Or Hare?
The race was on. Hare bragged: "I'm in in the lead!
Old Tortoise won't catch me with his slow pace!" ...
Rash Hare would soon learn how slow beasts succeed—--
The tortoise made the route plan for this race! …
"Oi! Big Ears! Stop!" bawled out a cop, "your speed
Is twice the legal limit for this road!
Since, for each mile an hour that you exceed
Eight miles an hour, our government is owed
One ounce of gold, you owe a whole two pounds—--
Remit it here and now, or go to jail!" ...
Hare had no gold. He'd been outraced. "It sounds
As though," said he, "this route's designed to fail
Rapidity. Too slow of wit, I'm done!" ...
Embarrassedly, he watched as Tortoise won!
A Forever Saudade
By David Thorpe
On that cold and rainy evening
a sudden attack of loneliness
caught them gazing at empty glasses,
a last ´night cap`, or just one more
His invitation she accepted,
a business conversation drink,
whilst bored lips repeated small talk,
their eyes conversed in silence
The circumstances dealt the cards
of high stakes they well aware,
apprehension readily defied,
their acquiescence to betoken
Of sensual passion their night evinced
a tenderness of intimacy mutual,
yet the tears they shed on parting,
not of regret but of a forever saudade,
for like the moon, Selene and the sun, Helios,
they had broken the barriers
and journeyed to their mutual eclipse
David Thorpe ©®
ODE TO THE WEST WIND
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I
O wild West Wind; thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, –
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed –
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow –
Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odors plain and hill: –
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear! –
II
Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion,
Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean, –
Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine aery surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head –
Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge –
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might –
Of vapors, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh, hear! –
III
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams, –
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day, –
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers –
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know –
Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: oh, hear! –
IV
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share –
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be –
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven –
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! –
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud. –
V
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies –
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! –
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse, –
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth –
The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind!
Painting above by Roy Liechtenstein
Beth Plays Air Flute
By Robert Cooperman
In our car, riding home
after our morning walk,
the classical radio station
plays a Baroque
flute sonata by a composer
neither of us has heard of.
It’s lovely, zephyrs of air,
refreshing as the early autumn
open windows. And Beth--
who plays the flute for real--
mimics the fingering
and embrasure,
the melody dancing
delicate as hummingbirds.
“If only,” she smiled.
“That’s one difficult piece.”
When I was young, I pretended
to be Jerry Garcia; I picked
empty air while my left hand
worked the invisible fret board,
“Dark Star” soaring, cavorting
like a kite on the stereo.
Now, Beth, inspired, exalted
by the music, toodles silently;
then the sonata concludes,
her fingers still, the last
perfect notes echoing, fading
Paintings by Salvador Dali
Flies On The Wall
By Mike Mesterton-Gibbons
For Ginger Rogers and for Fred Astaire,
Love may have been for real, or just on-set—--
In movies they had many an affair,
Enchanting with their dancing etiquette ...
Such chemistry made rumors coalesce.
On-screen entwinement made their fans surmise:
No screen romance could seem so real unless
Their love was real——and so fans hired two flies.
How well these spies both hid from whom they tailed!
Each eavesdropped on a dressing room backstage.
Would Fred and Ginger's passion be unveiled?
Alternatively, would they not engage? ...
Luck blessed not fans. Fred swatted down both flies—--
Long afterwards, we still can but surmise!
Painting above: "The Girl with the Pearl Earring" by Jan Vermeer
A Painting in Oil of Magnificence
(Who was the girl and earring was it a pearl?)
By David Thorpe
Swift moving clouds across a sky of grey,
its teardrops on my cheeks and lips,
a distant bell chimes the hour of vespers,
almost a lament in the haunting gloom
The evening wears its winter gown,
the defeated leaves scattered by a cruel wind,
some drowning in waters of despondency,
reflecting the flames of burning torches
Across hump-backed canal bridges
my cloak wrapped tight against the cold,
with hurried steps I reach the deserted square,
the tall church tower veiled by descending fog
My footsteps on the cobbled streets
betray my impatient pace,
a dog on his nocturnal ramble barks,
without knowing quite the reason
My friend the artist begs me enter
to lead me to his master piece,
a painting in oil of magnificence,
the inspiration of Jan Vemeer van Delft
Speechless in a mesmerized trance,
I behold the enchantment of his muse,
the candlelight caught in her pearl earring
her direct gaze not of innocence
but rather one of complicity
David Thorpe ©®
A Painting in Oil of Magnificence
(Who was the girl and earring was it a pearl?)
By David Thorpe
Swift moving clouds across a sky of grey,
its teardrops on my cheeks and lips,
a distant bell chimes the hour of vespers,
almost a lament in the haunting gloom
The evening wears its winter gown,
the defeated leaves scattered by a cruel wind,
some drowning in waters of despondency,
reflecting the flames of burning torches
Across hump-backed canal bridges
my cloak wrapped tight against the cold,
with hurried steps I reach the deserted square,
the tall church tower veiled by descending fog
My footsteps on the cobbled streets
betray my impatient pace,
a dog on his nocturnal ramble barks,
without knowing quite the reason
My friend the artist begs me enter
to lead me to his master piece,
a painting in oil of magnificence,
the inspiration of Jan Vemeer van Delft
Speechless in a mesmerized trance,
I behold the enchantment of his muse,
the candlelight caught in her pearl earring
her direct gaze not of innocence
but rather one of complicity
David Thorpe ©®
Painting above by James Lee
Pulp Fiction
Poetry Collection by Alan Catlin
Pulp Fiction
She liked the kind of strange
men who sat in the back seat
of her cab, unwrapping his taped,
bloody fists, sweating as if he’d
done ten rounds with Mighty Joe
Young or ridden shotgun with
Death. Was the kind of fighter
who, instead of throwing the bout,
killed his opponent in the ring.
His deed being announced on radio
broadcast she was listening to,
heeding his command to, “Just Go!”
as if she wasn’t aware this was
the getaway to nowhere car.
Actually, he had someplace way
out of town in mind, where a bookie
was holding the big money he won,
betting the long odds on himself
to win, a stake he set up with
the cash he’d collected for taking
a dive. Once he got to where he
needed to be, he’d be riding a chopped
bike he stole from a pawnshop sadist,
so confident no one would dare lift
his ride, he left the keys in the ignition
while, inside, men were making his last
hours on this earth, a living hell spent
on the corner of Terror Street and Agony
Way.
She knew her way around men, and
the towns they lived in. Hung with
contract killers who liked to quote
Old Testament prophets of doom
before they completed a hit. Had
a date once with a hedge fund cokehead,
with a bad habit, who made the mistake
of ordering her a “Bitcherita,” in a high end
club, “for his lady of the night,” explaining
the drink was hard lemonade, a shot
of Patron with a lime. Was the last
cocktail he’d ever order, anywhere,
before a strange encounter of a fatal
kind, with some bad hombres who
knew how to make; A Fate Worse
Than Death, take on a new meaning.
***
Pulp Fiction (2)
They liked classic rock n roll,
especially The Killer at the keyboard,
hopped on So Co and underage girls,
did drive-bys instead of drive-ins,
coke in lines but not the fizzy kind
that comes in bottles and cans,
were into the eye for an eye,
Old Testament vengeance tour
but not into turning the other cheek,
understood the Solomon solution
of cutting someone in half to solve
a complex problem but not the Psalms of.
Had a heavy Chevy, cherry red ride
modified to motor, white walls and
a plastic jesus on the dash, a curl of
mardi gras love beads around the rear
view; liked surf music on the sound
around: Beach Boys and Ventures,
Dell Shannon and The Searchers,
needles and pins on tape and in their
eyebrows and arms, eyes like marble suns
setting into a blood red sea.
***
Penny Dreadful
Night like some penny dreadful setting:
shadows and light, street lamp glare and
recessed doorway caves. No exit, one way
blacktop lane, slick with early morning mist,
still as a withdrawn breath. Waiting for a
Third Man clone who never comes, a woman
with no soul, fresh red lip gloss, for a Judas kiss.
Solitary footsteps: high heels on concrete,
staccato as buck shot slung against sheet metal,
The opening click of a Zippo lighter, flame to
cigarette, red ember dot, the click of the Zippo
closing. The pause in mid high heel step.
An inhaled breath released, smoke rings in damp
light. One man, one woman, separate as any
two objects can be, their elective affinities drawing
them together, somewhere in the dark.
To be continued.
***
The Drowning Pool
This is how it begins:
a sedan through underbrush
up against a tree, a steaming
radiator, full moon reflected on
a lake, driver’s side door sprung
open, air bag deployed, blood in
the ruts where grass should be
This is how the movie proceeds:
a handheld camera shakily following
path of car downhill as in every horror
movie ever made. Feet cracking dead
sticks as they go. Pant legs scraping
against shrubbery, scattering leaves.
Hands moving obstacles impeding
progress. Rhythmic, labored breathing,
and the sound of a radio not quite tuned
into a station playing what might have
been country and western music in
another life.
The man from the car stumbling toward
the lake. His button-down dress shirt
torn at the shoulder, blood splatters
on once white cloth. Trouser legs
ripped to the knee, to the thigh, soiled
from contact with wet forest floor.
An open head wound free flowing
down unnaturally pale face. Eyes
trying to focus on what lies ahead,
conscious of what follows behind.
This is where the stationery camera
focuses on the moon on the water,
establishing a shot contrasting to what
is about to happen on the shoreline-pursuer
contacting the man from the car.
Thrashing on shore then a splash.
Then another, louder splash and a muffled
voice speaking words that make no sense.
Red bold type letters superimposed on
the once again tranquil scene:
The Drowning Pool. Unrated.
What happens next is up to you.
***
Bedtime Story
She looked as if
she'd missed a
second casting for
her role as a side
show Marilyn look
alike bimbo in Pulp
Fiction and had settled,
instead, for a walk on
part on the back lot
of Killer Klowns from
Outer Space, was so
far into the joy juice
before high noon,
rapid eye blinking
false lashes, suggesting
long nights up close
and personal, press on
nails, daggers to your
spine, looks that sd.,
"Once, long ago, and far
away, I'd been with
the great ones." but
look where it got you;
nothing but Bad News,
and here, now, with me.
Pollage by Ellaraine Lockie
Pollage definition: Ellaraine Lockie's one-of-a-kind pollages combine her three passions of poetry, papermaking and collage. She uses lifetime collections of handmade papers, postage stamps, charms, milagros, buttons, shells, rocks, feathers, pressed leaves and flowers, rubber stamps, travel memorabilia, magazine clippings and poetry. No glue is used, as items are attached with wet paper pulp.
Pollage bio: Ellaraine Lockie’s pollages have appeared in juried art shows around the country and have been the subject of a one-woman gallery art show and several online essays and interviews. They also exist in several private art collections and have appeared in: The Centrifugal Eye along with an essay on their origin, the Rio Grande Review, Homestead Review, Sein Und Werden (England) along with an interview, Prairie Connection, Ascent Aspirations, Alchemy, KYSO Flash and MacQueen’s Quninterly, and Slipstream.
Poetry bio: Ellaraine Lockie is widely published and awarded as a poet, nonfiction book author, flash fiction author and essayist. She has won Poetry Forum’s Chapbook Contest Prize, San Gabriel Valley Poetry Festival Chapbook Competition, Encircle Publications Chapbook Contest, Best Individual Poetry Collection Award from Purple Patch magazine in England, and The Aurorean’s Chapbook Choice Award. Her poems have found their ways onto broadsides, buses, rented cars, bicycles, cabins, greeting cards, key chains, bookmarks, mugs, coffee sack labels, church bulletins, radio shows and cable TV. Ellaraine also teaches writing workshops and serves as Poetry Editor for the lifestyles magazine, LILIPOH.
Poem Written While Listening to Vivaldi at
the Schenectady Public Library
By Alan Catlin
Amid strange
assortment of used
books on thrift
shop store shelves,
I find one by a now
dead poet friend.
One I’d never read:
maxims and parables,
word songs musing
on the oddity of being
no more. It seems
to me maybe his
finest work.
How could I have
missed it before?
If only he were
here to sign his
book for me.
The Sounds of Sorghum
By Carla R. Bailey
Under the hickory tree
Ole Harlan leaned his banjo
against a knee of a different time
and Ole Jack between the forks
round and round in circles
of sugar cane through the press
He sang Carter Stanley songs
like it was still yesterday
and the grapes still hung on the vine
Ole Jack never gained pace with the tempo
chewing on hay straws looking straight ahead
nothing will ever be sweeter to him
The claw-hammer twang
falls in tune with mule-time steps
where forever meets the always
alongside the hickory trunk
where crisp morning air
carries the sounds into another time
Melody and Motherhood
By Carla R. Bailey
Flame-time motions of mothers and saints
sing to us a lullaby and tuck in all that’s not holy
some that just never were. building strongly.
Soft and serenade we continue the dance and hear
the sounds of heroines singing, and call for the left behind.
For the final night’s dream, and rocking babies to sleep.
we’ll breathe in the surrender of music
and exhale that same summer song
sway away the morning light, and never mind the dew.
There’s too many of us to fret and feel away the day.
The kind and timeless melody has us in her grip
To bend our knees and continue to please
All the minutes that are a creeping by
And I’ll open up my heart’s heart
And learn to never say goodbye.
Suddenly the Strange
By Carla R. Bailey
The prickle of my white flesh skin
to hear the sounds no words can curve
I’ll look for you over the morning
and under the swinging yellow moon
There was a fiddle and we heard it great
he processed it all with one ear and a bow
And brought the day all the way to real-like-life
He saw it all from an angle so grievously and sweet
The echos in the valley still carry
with the soft chaos of the tin cup pain
bits of holy water and apple sauce
Will explain the night away
We’ll sit here until morning sir
And the sorrow-filled rhythm is here to stay.
Trombone Player
By Mike Mesterton-Gibbons
The Dorsey stamp shows Tommy on trombone,
Rejoicing to his sentimental sound
Of swing, with Jimmy on the saxophone—--
Musicians whose great hits were world renowned!
Big bands had never seen such skilled trombone:
Ol' Blue Eyes said he learned to breathe his way,
Not from a vocal coach, but from his own
Experience of watching Tommy play! ...
Perhaps, since Tommy's timeless, he belongs
Less on a thirty-two cent stamp than where
A stamp commemorates his classic songs,
Yet also says they'll always fill the air ...
Eternal tunes deserve a mail revamp—--
Releasing Tommy's own Forever stamp!
Photo above: Editor in Chief Charles E.J. Moulton in "The Tales of Hoffmann", Vienna Chamber Opera, 1996
One Haiku and Two Short Poems
By Alex Andy Phuong
Symphonic Symphony
Playing symphonies
Musical rhapsody
Live in harmony
Music
Music that is
The language of the soul
Helping make people feel whole
Filling up empty holes
With intangible beauty
The deaf cannot hear,
Yet there is no need for fear
For this present moment
Is here,
And music truly does
Whatever it does
To transcend
And help make amends
While reminding listeners
To never fear the end,
So play on!
Broadway Musical Baby
Fan of Broadway
Knowing the way
Music transcends
And how intangible
It is,
And how the deaf
Might not hear.
Nevertheless,
Extraordinary Auditory
Can create symphonies
While also promoting harmony,
So help the ones
Unable to do what others
Do,
While letting the music
Play on
Photo above: Gun Kronzell, the Editor-in-Chief's mother, successful operatic mezzo-soprano.
My Mother Sang To Me
By Paul Buchheit
A minstrel's lyric on a city street
betrays a moment past, a memory
held captive by a siren's song: retreat
is my indulgence, to a panoply
of silver maples scattering the sun
upon my eyes like tiny dancing sprites,
the specters of my boyhood beasts undone
by strains from Orpheus and shrill delights
of Pan's seductive reed, the sounds adrift
on perfumed breezes in the melodies
my mother sang to me. And as they lift
me on my wistful passage, and appease
a soul beguiled by scheming Time, I yearn
for pleasantries to which I can't return.
My Mother Sang To Me
By Paul Buchheit
A minstrel's lyric on a city street
betrays a moment past, a memory
held captive by a siren's song: retreat
is my indulgence, to a panoply
of silver maples scattering the sun
upon my eyes like tiny dancing sprites,
the specters of my boyhood beasts undone
by strains from Orpheus and shrill delights
of Pan's seductive reed, the sounds adrift
on perfumed breezes in the melodies
my mother sang to me. And as they lift
me on my wistful passage, and appease
a soul beguiled by scheming Time, I yearn
for pleasantries to which I can't return.
Photo above: The cast and crew of A Christmas Carol
(the Editor in Chief farthest right and his father in the middle)
International Theatre, Vienna, 1984
Oktoberfest, Group Home
By Susan Zeni
Picked-over sauerkraut, apple-brown betties slide into buspans.
Radiators hisssss like pressure cookerssss, valves too tight.
Every human thing on Ritalin boils
as Dorothy steps from the kitchen,
mops her face on a big white towel,
waves at the Polkastra, our all-girl band.
Yes, she’d like to retire, live with a sister in Sausalito
but who would stew for them, grill for them, love them?
They dance to our Beer Barrel, Johan Pa Snippen,
as they have gig after gig, year after year,
Barbara’s white hair like wild cotton candy,
Eric and Bill whistling, dinging, tambourine-klacking,
little Gracie splayed on the floor
ready to pound out the cowbell and hi-hat,
sweet Raj, redolent as garam masala,
waits on a hug from the champagne lady
in this cinder block basement of plastic trellises,
gossamered fleshiness, tin-bottomed planters.
Kathy, in a flowered dress,
eyes black and intense,
arms criss-crossing her chest,
alabaster skin, dark hair in frail wisps,
white sweater, single button, wrong hole,
rocks like a metronome in front of my music,
“Only in the night! Only in the night!”
Only in the night?
What does she need,
six years, six Oktoberfests the same plea,
the cipher of her unintelligible,
the warp and woof of her so seemingly simple,
yet so beyond our grasp,
as she breathes on my bellows,
stares at the drummer, concertina, and bass.
Strangers in the night, sleazy Sinatra--
is that what she wants?
Braceleted arms clasping a pillow,
poker chips on the Vegas strip,
bulbous husbands towing their wives
through confectioned streets,
a swollen crooner ogling the mic?
I do not know this song.
I will never know this song.
Is there not enough lonesomeness here
to fill a universe?
Where is her family, who are her pals?
“Only in the night, only in the night!”
She is a broken record,
a locked door, all the doors
in this place locked,
padlocks on chains, bars on the windows,
and I don’t have the key, major or minor,
for all the souls tethered together
in this mephitic cavern of souring kraut.
Flightless birds flap their wings,
fast and faster in the chicken dance,
“Don’t wanna be a chicken,
Don’t wanna be a duck,”
as handsome attendants whirl their favorites
in billowing whoops of tangles and laughs.
Only in the…only in the… O my God!
“Irene, good night? Irene, good night?”
“Yesssss! Yesssss!” Kathy shrieks,
as she spins and leaps ala grand jete’
as she peels off her sweater, kicks off her slipperss
as her buddies high-five, encircle her blissss,
as we strike up the waltz, yesss, yesss, yesss,
“Good night Irene, Good night Irene,
I’ll see you in my dreams,”
as Dorothy steps from the kitchen, pulls off her apron,
hands on her hips, grins a big grin that says,
“Yessssss, these are my people, this is our world.”
(the Editor in Chief farthest right and his father in the middle)
International Theatre, Vienna, 1984
Oktoberfest, Group Home
By Susan Zeni
Picked-over sauerkraut, apple-brown betties slide into buspans.
Radiators hisssss like pressure cookerssss, valves too tight.
Every human thing on Ritalin boils
as Dorothy steps from the kitchen,
mops her face on a big white towel,
waves at the Polkastra, our all-girl band.
Yes, she’d like to retire, live with a sister in Sausalito
but who would stew for them, grill for them, love them?
They dance to our Beer Barrel, Johan Pa Snippen,
as they have gig after gig, year after year,
Barbara’s white hair like wild cotton candy,
Eric and Bill whistling, dinging, tambourine-klacking,
little Gracie splayed on the floor
ready to pound out the cowbell and hi-hat,
sweet Raj, redolent as garam masala,
waits on a hug from the champagne lady
in this cinder block basement of plastic trellises,
gossamered fleshiness, tin-bottomed planters.
Kathy, in a flowered dress,
eyes black and intense,
arms criss-crossing her chest,
alabaster skin, dark hair in frail wisps,
white sweater, single button, wrong hole,
rocks like a metronome in front of my music,
“Only in the night! Only in the night!”
Only in the night?
What does she need,
six years, six Oktoberfests the same plea,
the cipher of her unintelligible,
the warp and woof of her so seemingly simple,
yet so beyond our grasp,
as she breathes on my bellows,
stares at the drummer, concertina, and bass.
Strangers in the night, sleazy Sinatra--
is that what she wants?
Braceleted arms clasping a pillow,
poker chips on the Vegas strip,
bulbous husbands towing their wives
through confectioned streets,
a swollen crooner ogling the mic?
I do not know this song.
I will never know this song.
Is there not enough lonesomeness here
to fill a universe?
Where is her family, who are her pals?
“Only in the night, only in the night!”
She is a broken record,
a locked door, all the doors
in this place locked,
padlocks on chains, bars on the windows,
and I don’t have the key, major or minor,
for all the souls tethered together
in this mephitic cavern of souring kraut.
Flightless birds flap their wings,
fast and faster in the chicken dance,
“Don’t wanna be a chicken,
Don’t wanna be a duck,”
as handsome attendants whirl their favorites
in billowing whoops of tangles and laughs.
Only in the…only in the… O my God!
“Irene, good night? Irene, good night?”
“Yesssss! Yesssss!” Kathy shrieks,
as she spins and leaps ala grand jete’
as she peels off her sweater, kicks off her slipperss
as her buddies high-five, encircle her blissss,
as we strike up the waltz, yesss, yesss, yesss,
“Good night Irene, Good night Irene,
I’ll see you in my dreams,”
as Dorothy steps from the kitchen, pulls off her apron,
hands on her hips, grins a big grin that says,
“Yessssss, these are my people, this is our world.”
Three Acrostic Sonnets
By Mike Mesterton-Gibbons
Professor of Mathematics
Ms. Longstocking
My name is Pippi. I can lift my horse.
Since I'm so strong, you should not mess with me,
Lest you discover what they call girl force:
One flip from me can land you up a tree!
No grown-ups ever tell me what to do:
Gold coins maintain my lifestyle parent-free,
So I can wear old tattered clothes. Though you
Tut-tut and frown, you do not mess with me!
One time a lady mocked my freckled face:
Child, you are covered! You need salve from me!
Kind lady, I replied, it's no disgrace:
I love my freckles. Please don't mess with me! ...
Nine years of age is all I'll ever be.
Grown people, though, know not to mess with me!
Pinocchio's Nose
Perhaps when Shakespeare said the truth will out,
It meant the famous Bard foresaw a day
No humans' words could ever be in doubt,
Or else they'd feel their nostrils sneak away!
Could Shakespeare have supposed an actor's snout
Could grow onstage from lying? Like as not,
He'd have to make his actor's back face out
In later scenes——or modify his plot! ...
Othello's tale could have a happy end,
Should Iago's nose grow like Pinocchio's:
New lines for Desdemona could be penned,
Occasioning no jealous-husband throes—--
Since all deceit would add a nasal inch,
Exposing Iago's lies would be a cinch!
Acrostic Sonnet
A Shakespeare sonnet's fourteen lines must be
Constrained to match its rhyme scheme to a T,
Requiring A B A B C D C
On top of D E F E F G G.
Strong beat must follow weak beat just five times
To make the meter perfect. But there's more:
It takes a turn between two later rhymes,
Concluding with the twist one's building for ...
So that's enough for Shakespeare? Not for me!
One fourteen-letter phrase must be enrolled
Not only as the title, but the key
No left-hand side can not display in bold ...
Each time I spot a fourteen-letter phrase,
This sonnet-writing urge brooks no delays!
Spock
By Christian Ward
He's the ideal flatmate: clean, tidy,
never drinks or smokes. Doesn't get music
but that's okay. I've learnt to stop staring
at his ears in case he grips my neck
and I collapse like laundry on the floor.
Some days, late at night, I hear him muttering
'Captain, Captain, Captain' into a shoe
and laugh to myself. Spock, fine as he may be,
doesn't make for the best company. Everything has to be logical: call centres, mangoes, even sex. My girlfriend says he's a pervert whenever she’s around, that he leers at her in a strange way, as if something is trapped under his skin and he's desperately trying to get rid of it. Weirdo.
And, if you're wondering, never talk to him
about poetry. He bloody hates it. You can almost smell the dactyls bubbling on his tongue as he drones on, how illogical it is to describe emotion on paper, before becoming still like a heron about to dive into the dark of a pond it has never seen before.
I AM AWAKE(THOUGHTS OF A VAMPIRE)
written by: Sophia Behal
performed by: Sean van Dutch
I am awake.
A sleeping city lays
beneath my feet.
But now a stranger passes.
I am awake.
A tasty smell of fresh blood
beneath my nose,
lingers and gives me a fresh energy shot.
I am awake.
A certain someone close to me lies
wherever you are; time flies,
and close to it my attention ties.
I am awake.
A search starts:
for a perfect time & place,
for the hurtful act at a corner in the dark.
I am awake
as everyone sleeps.
No one would witness
when my demon’s heart-shaped fang the neck pinches.
I am awake.
Drops of blood circulate.
A moment to celebrate.
One left for the other’s sake.
I am awake.
The Third Man and Dos Lolitas
Poetry Collection by Alan Catlin
Higher Than Kites, Higher Than the Moon
Faulkner would have recognized
these guys as next door neighbors
to the Snopes, refugees from a
field study on the cause, effect
and harm caused by rampant inbreeding,
people who went to family affairs in
a pickup that looked as if it had spent
the War Years, the Punic War Years,
buried in a pile of compost and mud,
flatbed rusting through to the main
frame, muffler long ago left along side
the hardened ruts of what passed for
main roads to Nowhere, a place where
they and their kind lived, carrying a
homemade coffin with them wherever
they went that carried the remains of
a significant other inside, extra
pre-cuts for what fell out over 'Shine
and road kill feasts on holidays, home
comings and funerals, tipping over
out houses on the way home for fun,
higher than kites, higher than the moon.
Wm Faulkner's As I Lay Dying
Dirt roads lead nowhere after
the flood are mud furrows obstructing
a pilgrim's progress to ancestral
burial grounds, the dearly departed
encased for transport, through
this world and into the next,
in a rude cord wood casket
accompanied by a cortege of wild
acolytes half-living, half-dead themselves.
At road's end, mudflats and bogs
enshrouded by a low cling of swamp
gas and of fog, bear tracks and feral howls
at night, and by day, as this sad
sarcophagus and its standard bearers
cross a great divide to the promised
land as last shadows seen this side of grave.
Toy Seller on the Steps of St. Martin-in-the-Fields 1920
My ten year old self wants
the lizard-displayed among
many such toy stuffed animals
hung with all the seller's wares
from a thick leather strap as
an attachment, an enticement
obtrusive as an unnatural
predator inserted within a flock
of mock blue heron, teddy cubs,
dwarf ponies…the lizard crawling
in full attack mode, strategically
situated dead center in the seller's
chest, an eye catcher, not unlike
the balloon seller in the post
World War II Vienna streets
at night in the “Third Man” at a
crucial time, an odd distraction
just before the collaring of elusive
Harry Lime. This man, this predecessor,
on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields
awaiting a march of children, airs
by Henry Purcell, the English Haydn
or, in this time between World Wars,
to end all World Wars, anticipating
a choral rendering of last poems
from the trenches by Wilfred Owen,
a War Requiem by R. Vaughn-Williams.
Promotional Movie Poster 1962
after Bruno Barbey
Lola Haze holds her lolly to
her lips, stares out from beneath
dark glasses, watching all
the boys, the men, the whole
of the male sex, crave the woman
inside the adolescent girl,
one who was never a virgin
nor would have wanted to be.
Her likeness is peeling at
celluloid edges, this all-too-soon
to be married symbol of her kind,
fated never to be an earth mother
dying, as she will, in child birth
so unlike this plain wife of Jesus
walking by, it seems strange
to think of them as belonging
to the same sex.
The Misfit and the Freak
Most of the novels about life
in bars are like Hemingway
with a bad hangover, nothing as
classic as a much better writer than
Papa, Chandler, full of lines that
flatten the heads of draft beers as
they are spoken. Every so often
a plot will develop like a bad
treatment for a great book later made
into an even worse movie people
see and mistake for the real thing.
Trying to impress with a worldly,
intellectual acumen, people speak
as if they were well read though
what they say is like the Cliff’s notes
of something with vital pages missing.
Mostly the characters along the wood
are like demented relatives of Faulkner
inbreds lost in some dense woods of
their own invention with festering bodies
long past their due date. Or else they
are guys like these two, Lenny and
George from Of Mice and Men
through the looking glass, the big guy
being the relatively well-spoken one,
the controller, while the smaller guy
is like a lit fuse burning down to
the charge, a non-stop talker, primed
on pills, a misfit and a freak drinking
flaming shots of Cuervo Gold, stolen
stuff in their pockets and dead things in
their wake, the bar an outpost even Conrad
heroes would never go.
Tom
“Ordinarily I wouldn’t share this
with customers but I know you guys.”
I thought about his fellow waiter who
shared that same story about Doc from
Winesburg, Ohio, the one good book he
actually read, a story so familiar
in the telling, you wanted to ask him about
Joe Welling, or one of the other characters,
knowing that would spoil his routine.
“These four guys came in dressed okay:
suit coats over open shirts, jeans but good ones.
At least they made the effort with the jackets,
so we let it go. Little did we know that was
for show.
Anyway, it was as if they hadn’t eaten in years.
Ordered it all: apps, salads, starter wines, aperitifs,
top shelf entrees, multiple bottles of vino….
You know :the stuff you really need to show them
the label of to make sure it was okay, because
you don’t want to make a mistake opening it;
that’s how much it cost. By the time they stagger
order desserts and house specialty coffees,
we’re wondering if the check might reach four figures.
All I knew for sure was, it was damn near the
biggest check I ever had on a four top.
No one thought anything about the first guy
getting up for the men’s room. His jacket was on
his chair, right? Then the second guy.
The third guy, same thing until it’s one guy at the table.
He yawns, signals for the check and goes for the head.
I’m working the adding machine like crazy,
not looking over, so I don’t notice right away:
the guy never came back from the john.
Come to find out the jackets were like Salvation Army
specials; still had the tags stapled to the inside pockets.
It really sucked at the time, but you had to give them
credit for the cleverest way I ever heard of for beating
the check.”
Dos Lolitas
They looked as if they could
have been Dolores Haze’s
slightly older sisters, in a bar
with a much older man who
might have been as old as 19.
They wanted something to
warm the frozen cockles of
their cold hearts, said they had
money or could do whatever it
took to score something good.
“Maybe if you wore more
clothes you wouldn’t be so cold.”
The bartender, said.”Or is business
so bad working Central Avenue,
that’s all you could afford?”
“Actually, we were working in
the Park.”
“Maybe you should have rolled
some of the winos for their
stash.”
“We tried that. The fight like
tigers, even the frail ones.”
“Well, you can go back and try
again. It’s not too late if you hurry.”
“We’d do whatever it takes to
get a drink.”
“Nah. I’m not into watching
the kind of sex tapes Security
cameras take. The resolution is
bad and besides that stuff always
turns up on the Internet. I couldn’t
handle that. Not that you’d mind.”
“We’ve been on the Internet lots
of times.
“Yeah, and all the guys that took
the pictures are doing time.
When you reach the age of consent.
come back and maybe we’ll talk.”
They didn’t like that. Whatever.
There must have been half a dozen
bars between this one and the park
and one of them was bound to have
a bartender undaunted by a morals charge.
Odysseus Takes His Place in Hades
By Robert Cooperman
We sit in silence, the way of the dead
unless one of the living ventures down
and lets us lap blood as if hungry hounds.
Still, our thoughts flow from one to another
like streams set free by Spring’s break-up thaw.
In the gloom: Achilles with Patroclus,
and cuckold Menelaus and his fuck
of a brother, Agamemnon, the authors
of our troubles at Troy; when I visited
alive, that venomed asp, Agamemnon,
cursed his wife, Clytemnestra, for his murder,
but the greedy boar slew their own daughter
Iphigenia, for a fair wind to Troy
and its store houses of glittering riches.
As for Menelaus, his face still red
with rage whenever he thinks of Helen.
If she weren’t immortal and laughing
at us for saluting her with our peggos
whenever she let her gown slip off her
luscious shoulders, he’d slay her over
and over, for running off with Paris,
whose idea of war was the one in bed.
“Was your long life happy?” Achilles asks.
“I went mad,” then stop, too boring to tell,
and wonder if the child I slew is here,
or in Elysium, as he should be.
But Achilles insists I continue:
“We have all of time, here, so tell the tale
with each embellishment you were famed for.”
He sits back, hoping for the endless lies
I spun, like the cleverest of spiders.
Even great Ajax, who hates me, draws near.
A Dream Within a Dream
BY EDGAR ALLAN POE
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow --
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand --
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
The Spirits of Trees and Ferns
By David Thorpe
The spirits of trees and ferns,
intrinsic to the scents and aromas
of forest whispers and sighs,
embrace the fauna and flora,
sharing this vast lung,
the sanctuary of Artemis,
guarded by stalwart pine soldiers
Intruding sunbeams pierce the silence
of the forest darkness,
opening wounds of light,
which illuminate enchanted hollows,
not yet deflowered by the hand of man
Early morning prints of animal dwellers
soil the annual bridal gown,
a veil of crystallized tears,
nature´s endowment to a virgin woodland,
come winter
Unawareness prevailsof a lurking danger,
for like a ghost it is invisible to many,
stealthily creeping down
from onerous clouds,
a poison trapped within omnivorous pollutants,
indiscriminately attacking its prey
Are we the culprits - ? - allowing ourselves to be gagged
by the cunningness of avarice and indifference,
who sweeten their soliloquies with vague promises,
a gullible audience to appease
David Thorpe ©®
High-Spirited
By Alex Andy Phuong
Vivacity
Tenacity
Within post-modernity
Are both essential
To keeping spirits high
Even as time passes by
Soar and love goodness forevermore
To let longevity ensure
That hearts stay pure
So that life itself
Could endure
Alex Andy Phuong earned his Bachelor of Arts in English from California State University—Los Angeles in 2015. He was a former Statement Magazine editor who currently writes passionately. He has written film reviews for MovieBoozer, and has contributed to Mindfray. His writing has appeared in The Bookends Review and The Society of Classical Poets. He now writes with the sincerest hope to inspire readers, and fully supports those who dare to pursue their dreams.
Three Poems
By
Megan Denese Mealor
***
Before the Beginning
God without Eve:
watercolor wanderlust
a blizzard stoked with stones
She smoothed in
vicious strokes of sea
lit reclusive hillsides
with bellflowers and begonias
etched herself at awestruck angles
tangled Adam's warring bones
climbed and climbed forbidden skies
slept forgotten in the mosses
Serpents sweetened and riddled
deafening star-stunned sparrows
left unfeathered, undefined
- Originally published in Liquid Imagination, November 2017
Addictions
there is a murderess on the loose
no asylum could hold her lightning
her beauty is so beyond repair
she will catch fire in the rain
her spirit cannot seem to stay inside the lines
one side of her is a queen
on her way to execution,
unable to believe that nothing can save her:
not her jewels, not her king
the other side does not exist. it is not there anymore
her rage has silenced moonlight,
painted over forests and fathers,
filled the earth with glass and bone
when she smiles,
flowers learn to speak
she promises nothing
while war swells in the blistering streets,
we bury our dead without bitterness,
promise ourselves that nothing is in vain,
scream and scream in whispers
she laughs herself apart
you will never find her again,
though she will be everywhere
- Originally published in Digital Americana, Fall 2012
Prostrate
You skim a little Puce graffiti,
sip from a tumbler of lukewarm Darjeeling.
You mail a glistering chain letter
to your half-hearted half-sister in Chesapeake
because you know she’ll fail to pass it on
and you want someone to have evidence
of your best efforts.
You listlessly pedal your cyclocross
through a levitating backdrop of loblolly pines
all the way to the red-light fringes
of your gutted hometown,
where Jane Doe junkies congregate
around lewd neon pick-up trucks.
You pause at a moth-eaten chapel
dubbed Windsong Church,
catching wafts of gimcrack gospel
drifting in the unkempt daylight.
You wonder what your infidel mother
would say if she could see you imagining
this holy house’s carved intestines:
a plexiglass pulpit presiding over
golden oak slatback pews,
heirloom hymnals hypnotizing
the spire sparrows,
painted glass apostles
depending, impending.
You have almost forgotten to exist
without her vivacious cinnamon hair,
her trail of yellow diamonds.
You almost did exist
within the flowerless space
of that total eclipse.
But here you are now,
self-righteous in your cork bed flats
and poured glass bib,
raw denim Sunday best,
littering the creek rock parking lot
with your prodigal noontime shadow,
still inconstant,
waiting to believe.
- Originally published in Gone Lawn, June 2018
Meeting God in a Lake and other Spiritual Poems
By
Jake Cosmos Aller
Author’s Note: these poems are about some of my spiritual encounters in my life. I am not a follower of any traditional religious tradition, sort of an agnostic Buddhist if there is such a thing. But neither am I an atheist. Perhaps the universe is alive and that is what we perceive as God? Who knows? I certainly do not.
***
Index
Meeting God in a Lake
Cosmic Cat from Berkeley
Meeting God in Bombay
Cosmic Dog From Goa
Buddha Cat from Edsel Road
***
These have been published, most recently in Hypertext in 2020.
***
Meeting God in a Lake
In my 64 years around the sun
I encountered God four times
At least I thought it was God
But could never be sure
The first time I met God
I had taken magic mushrooms
And had gone to a lake
And soon was tripping inside my head
Lost in inner space
Zoning out tuning in
Dropping down the proverbial rabbit hole
And then in the middle of my madness
I felt oneness with the universe
My body melted away
And I joined the universe
All boundaries dropped away
And I knew that the universe was alive
and I was part of the Cosmos
And the Cosmos was part of me
And I wondered at that moment If I was face to face with God
I asked God to reveal himself to me
And nothing happened
Just laughter as the whole universe
Burst into laughter
And the madness began to fade
And I slowly came down from the high
And became aware of myself
And I was no longer one
With the universe
I felt profoundly moved by the experience
Felt that I had achieved perhaps nirvana
Or felt the presence of God
The feeling faded over time
And my quest to find God resumed
But I knew that I would never again
Come so close to the divine essence
Of the very Universe
The Cosmic Cat from Berkeley
I next encountered the divine
Many years later in Berkeley, California
I had gone home to be with my Mother
While taking leave from my job in the Foreign Service
I had two weeks there by myself
My wife came later near the end of the trip every morning
I woke up had coffee
Did yoga
Spoke to my mother
Who was sliding into dementia
Day by day losing her reason
Then I would go out
And explore the city
Go to a museum
Go to one neighborhood
And just be there
Rediscovering the Bay area
After years of being away
Having dinner with old friends
Seeing movies etc
Every morning a black cat came to visit
The cat was friendly and waited for me
And then would join me in my morning rambles
Following me to the bus stop
I started talking to the black cat
He looked at me with the spark of divinity In his dark eyes
I called him the cosmic cat
He seemed to like that
He would look at me
And I opened up to me
Told the cat all my dark secrets
As I walked the streets
Of the old neighborhood
Every morning and every evening the cat
Would be there to greet me
And to carry on our endless conversations
Then I had to leave
And in our final conversation I asked the cosmic cat
Say, Cat are you just a cat
Or are you a demonic cat
Are you possessed by God Or by Satan
The cat looked at me
And I realized that God
Was indeed residing in the cat
But that god was residing everywhere
All I had to do was open my mind
And the rest would follow
So I said
Goodbye to the cosmic cat
And he purred and came up to me
And I felt the comforting presence of the
Divine
As I said goodbye to the cosmic cat
And said goodbye to my mother
As this was the last time
That we would be able to really talk
I told my mother about the cosmic cat
She smiled and said that the cat was there for me and her
to comfort us both in our hour of need
and that the cat was indeed a cosmic cat
Talking with God in Bombay
Five years later
After I had last talked to God
In the form of the cosmic cat
Who I hung out with in Berkeley
I found myself in Bombay, India
Where I was involved with another women
And contemplating whether to leave my wife
For the promised excitement of the other women
I did not know what to do
So I went to Church
And on the way home
I stopped on the side of the road
And prayed to God
to provide me a sign
What should I do
I asked God
And then I felt it again
God seemed to be everywhere
And nowhere
And I found myself down
the rabbit hole again
I had a vision of an old man
Sitting by the side of a bed
Looking at an old women
And realized that
I was seeing the future
And the women
in my vision was my wife
And then I knew the answer
that God was giving me
I had to find my way
Back to my wife
And rekindle the love
that we shared
I looked up
and saw my wife’s face
In the sky
I went home and wrote
A long poem for my wife
She was in the military
And in Korea
And I was with the State Department
Stationed in Mumbai, India
And I called her up
And began talking to her
For the first time
In a long time
And I told her what was on my mind
And told her that we had to decide
Would we continue as a couple
Or would we continue to drift apart
Somehow I finished the conversation
And fell asleep with the peace and contentment
Of God’s presence filling my heart and soul
The feeling of being connected with God
Faded over the time
But the conviction that God had spoken to me
Never really left me
I asked God
whether God was the God of Jesus
Or Allah or Brahmin
And I realized
that God is God
And the universe is God and I am God
And that was the end of the story
And my last time I prayed to God
The Cosmic Dog from Goa
My final time with God
Happened a year later
I was staying down in Goa
With my wife
Enjoying being with her
After our reconciliation
We stayed at the Taj Mahal Goa
Living like a King and Queen
Just for a few days
High up on a hill
Overlooking the beach
Every morning I went
down to the beach
And did yoga by the water
While contemplating life
And every morning
I saw the same Dog
Not just a Dog
But a cosmic Dog
Filled with the divine spark of God
And the Dog recognized me
And spoke to me and I knew
That God was present once more
In the face of that cosmic dog
Kindred spirit
perhaps to the cosmic cat
that had saved my soul
in Berkeley so long ago
I told the dog everything
And he just looked at me
With those soulful eyes of his
And I knew he knew that I knew
That he was possessed by God
God had sent him to me
To make sure
that I was on the right path
That the reconciliation that God had promoted
Was on track that I was back with my wife
And that everything was the way it should be
Again I asked God
whether he was Jesus or Allah
Or Brahmin or Ganesh or Buddha
God the cosmic dog
just stared at me
I finally asked him directly
Say if you are God the God of Jesus
Bark once
The Dog looked at me and barked
I said well if you are
Allah bark twice
The dog barked twice
Well are you Buddha
then bark three times if yes
The God Dog barked three times
Hmm well are you Satan
The dog growled at me
And I knew I had gone too far
Finally, I was at peace
And for the next three days
The God Dog
was my constant companion
And I knew God for the final time
In my life
Buddha Cat of Edsall Road
I had another encounter
With the divine recently
Another Cosmic cat perhaps
Perhaps not
who knows what cats are
are they aliens
from another dimension
or was he channeling God ?
I called him the Buddha cat
For the cat loved
Sitting in a meditative pose
Not moving
Just starting at me
With his soulful deep eyes
Boring into my soul
exploring all my secret thoughts
the Buddha cat does not move
does not react, as he is so deep
into his interior mediation
truly in tune with the cat universe
and the cosmos as well
the Buddha cat
seems to be one with God
one with Buddha, Allah, Ganesh
and the billion names of God
Known and unknown
The Buddha cat can teach us all
About the art of meditation
As he zones inward
And loses his soul
Joining the cosmos
And becoming the Buddha cat
The Buddha cat
Lives in a modest Town house
In a modest suburb
The Buddha cat reminds us all
To look for God in the everyday
All around us
If we but have eyes
To see God everywhere
Dream Poems
By Alan Catlin
May Day Dream Poem
We’re in a place that feels
like Japan. I assume we are in
Tokyo because of the congestion,
the neon, the sensation of being
with millions.
I’m with an Albany Poet,
Dan Wilcox, and we’re in
a car trying to find our way
to the baseball stadium.
I sense we may already be late
for the opening ceremony
which we don’t want to
miss.
We’re in a kind of Uber vehicle
and our guides are two Russians
who look disturbingly familiar.
Like Lev and Igor from the Mueller
Report fiasco and they are clearly
jerking us around. We manage to lose
Lev, as Igor seems to know where
we are going. It seems to take
forever to get there, in slow motion,
but we do.
My wife is already at the game
and she has scored a cool, in English,
replica of a team jersey with the number
of one of the players we loved,
from another era, on it though it isn’t
clear which team it is or what player
the number represents.
I’m obsessed with finding a Suzuki
jersey but they don’t have any in my
size. The sense now is, the only reason
we have come to Japan is to score
souvenirs. A feeling of abject despair
is overwhelming.
Dan has done the sensible thing,
found our seats, and is sitting down
to watch the game. I am hitting up
all the vendors on this futile quest
for souvenirs that don’t exist.
I’m not sure which teams are playing
or who to root for. I used to be a Giants
fan but I heard from a friend who knows
about these things, that the Swallows
are better.
It gets dark early and there are no
lights. I realize the game is over
but I don’t know who won.
I am alone in Japan looking for a
Russian Uber driver that knows our
language, areal spirit guide. I don’t
think he exists either. I’m beginning
to doubt I’ll ever find a way home.
Sleepwalking in a Dream
Recently, I started sleepwalking
but not in a regular, normal way.
I was not wandering about in
measured way but as a form of
exercise in response to meeting
my wife’s daily goal for me of
10,000 steps taken. If, for some
reason, I fell short of my assigned
amount, the sleepwalking regimen
began with a vengeance. Some days
I would wake feeling as if I had not
rested at all. Other days, I felt fine.
However, once winter began,
I’d often fall way short of the required
amount given there was no way
anyone would have gotten outside
even if they’d wanted to. Let’s face it,
there are just so many times you can
pace the floor plan and climb up
and down the same two flights of
stairs. I came to dread weather events
like thunder snows and temperature
inverted freak outs. The weather had
become so much more complicated
once they started naming stuff and
creating new terms and distinguishing
one kind of storm from another, that
used to be lumped together under one
easy to understand term: “bad weather”.
Now they are called Events like they
were staged stuff for a reserved place
that was eagerly awaited like a traveling
circus. Right. During these liquid days
I would fall short anywhere from two
to eight thousand steps. I began having
severe dread deficits in my restless
attempts to catch up. Soon, I was so far
behind it was as if I had never slept
and I’d get out of be looking like Dracula
during a blood shortage. Finally, my wife
made me see our doctor. After hearing
the complaints, as described by my wife,
he concluded I needed more exercise.
Either that or I should be exorcised.
I could have killed him on the spot but
my wife intervened. “What did I tell you?”
She said. I decided to kill her instead.
-------------------------------------------------
On the endless road that leads nowhere.
Under El Greco sky, through Burchfield trees.
Emerging from wind breaks into fallow fields.
Concrete slabs where the houses were. Cracked
into fissures where the weeds are now.
Anthills
storage spaces
for dreams
-----------------------------------------------------
Bare trees in stunt growth marsh.
An aching rain cold as ice floe, cold as
bare skin beneath a midnight sun. When light
arrives, even the earth retreats. Fresh mounds
of bones where the animals lie down.
Nothing grows-
Northern lights
fade
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Ground water/ ponds layered by
viscous scum. Seem mercurial, quick limed
in dawn’s half-light. Death machine runoffs
stifle life. Pebbled beaches rank with pale,
discolored fish.
Seagulls scavenge
what
remains
The Night Café
Green ghost lights
in the café of too many
shadows. Stale scent
of spilled, spoiled spirits
in smoke tainted, rank
air. The artist’s corner
table, empty now, smells of
turpentine, linseed oil
and residue of absinthe
spent dreams, all sketched
with coal on smudged foolscap.
Three Acrostic Sonnets
by Mike Mesterton-Gibbons
Professor Emeritus
Department of Mathematics
Florida State University
On Christmas Day
On Christmas Eve, there were no toys to see.
Next day you were hard pressed to see the floor.
Consumerism piled around the tree—--
How splendid for the owners of the store! ...
Relations whom you asked to be restrained
Ignored your pleas and stacked their presents high,
So when your children saw how much they gained,
The glut perplexed them, and they asked you: "Why? ...
May we return some toys we got today,
As there is far too much for us to take?—--
Some kids will have no toys, since Santa's sleigh
Delivered theirs to our house by mistake!" ...
And then you smiled with pride to realize
Your kids, though very young, were yet so wise!
The Covid Crisis
The Covid crisis won't recede from view.
Hair covers me and quarantines my face.
Eclipsed from you, I'm knotted through and through,
Combs failing daily in my cloistered space.
Once when hair care required my car to run,
"Vrrr-ooom!" was not a sound that found my ear.
Instead a batt'ry dead from too much sun
Declared: You have been spared, just stay right here!
Can I have trust the barber must just know
Risk's down in town to zero on this day?
If I come by the courage there to go,
Suppose my nose meets Covid on the way?
Is care for hair the risk my car believes? ...
So far, my car has earned my curls reprieves!
You Got Cher, Babe!
You should not pen a pining pachyderm,
Observed to be still grieving his first mate—--
Until a second mate to date long-term
Gives him the eye, he'll mope, and put on weight!
Once heavy both in body and in mind,
The elephant becomes a sickly beast:
Cher found Kaavan both lonely and resigned.
Her goal became to have her babe released ...
Eats changed to fruit and veg from sugar cane.
Renditions of Sinatra filled the air.
Babe——Cher’s Kaavan——slimmed down, to board a plane,
And smiled once more to hear songs sung by Cher ...
Because of Cher, Cambodia awaits—--
Enticing Babe to chase prospective mates!
Ring Out, Wild Bells
From In Memoriam
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more,
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
Ring out the want, the care the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
Auld Lang Syne
By Robert Burns
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne!
For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne.
We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.
And surely ye’ll be your pint stowp!
And surely I’ll be mine!
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.
We twa hae run about the braes,
And pou’d the gowans fine;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit,
Sin’ auld lang syne.
We twa hae paidl’d in the burn,
Frae morning sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
Sin’ auld lang syne.
And there’s a hand, my trusty fere!
And gie’s a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll tak a right gude-willie waught,
For auld lang syne.
For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne.
We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.
New Year’s Morning
by Helen Hunt Jackson
Only a night from old to new;
Only a sleep from night to morn.
The new is but the old come true;
Each sunrise sees a new year born.
Jill Clark
is Children's Educational Director for Taylor and Seale Publishing in Daytona Beach, Florida. Her poetry book Loose Balloons was released in 2019. Her follow-up poetry book Where Do Balloons Land? will be published in 2021. Jill teaches online K-5 lesson plans to public and private schools.
The wise woman that I know is one dulled
By Brendan Faithfull
The wise woman that I know is one dulled
of a quick wit or fast tell of people,
and she, the wise woman, has her head filled
with a certain knowledge invincible
A woman who beyond her scripts and tomes
blunders in her speech to embarrassment
and wise enough laughing at herself knows
only very little self sentiment.
This wise woman though is possessed of strength
who knows just when, as she does, when to fight
and would struggle whatever be the length
for all that she loves, for all just and right
This wise woman I know trucks some knowledge
and knows when to apply her great courage.
Brendan Faithfull is an emerging poet who grew up in the village of Malmsbury in Central Victoria, now living in Melbourne. During his formative years in Malmsbury he was first exposed to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Banjo Patterson’s Man From Snowy River, and most importantly Byron’s poetical works. Brendan studied Politics, Economics and Literature at La Trobe University in Bendigo in 2010, before transferring to the University of Melbourne in 2011. Here Brendan continued his studies in Literature, but importantly focussed on Poetry after meeting Emeritus Professor Kevin Brophy. Brendan has featured in Melbourne Writers Group 2018 Anthology Heroes & Villains, and most recently has been published by Grand Things. Brendan continues to study and write poetry in his own time between modelling, political and election campaigning and managing his LARP, Exodus.
Toddler, Guide Me
By Padmini Krishnan
I felt your kindness
when you gently dropped
an abandoned caterpillar worm
amongst the layered leaves.
I saw your generosity
when you shared your
bread slices with a
shivering sparrow,
dripping wet,
taking shelter in
the balcony
My heart melted like ice
under my feverish body
when your tiny arms
hugged me.
I see in you not
my child, but
my mother,
ever compassionate
ever giving, guiding me
without words
whenever I slip into
my world of selfishness.
Padmini Krishnan writes short stories and poetry. Her works have appeared in the Plum Tree Tavern, The Heron's Nest, Writing in a Woman's Voice, Potato Journal, World of Myth, and the Stonecrop Review. Her e-chapbook was published in Proletaria. She blogs at https://call2read.wordpress.com/
Three Acrostic Sonnets
by Mike Mesterton-Gibbons
At Thanksgiving
A table set for two still says Thank You.
The places that aren't set say so much more:
There's never been Thanksgiving when so few
Have gathered here at home——not once before!
Across the Pond, our family FaceTime in.
Now we can share a meal, though far away.
Kind words are still exchanged with closest kin.
Still pumpkin pie's the special for the day ...
Guest rooms remain unfilled, though, for this year.
In lockdown, we must share thanks from afar:
Virologists advise to not be near.
In truth, we're glad things aren't worse than they are ...
Now we just hope that we, next year, can all
Give thanks around one table in the fall!
Octopus Teacher
On Netflix there's an octopus whose charms
Conceal the most intelligent of minds.
Two thirds of her cognition's in her arms,
One third in her main brain is all one finds.
Pyjama sharks regard her as a meal,
Until they find they're easy to outwit,
So craftily she moves: nine brains reveal
That smarts all in one place are not most fit! ...
Encephalon is singular in us,
And though an extra brain did not evolve,
Combining brains, just like an octopus,
Has still been humans' only way to solve
Enigmas that one mind can't puzzle through:
Robust brain power means both me and you!
I'm Attenborough
I'm ninety-four and still I climb up trees.
My love for apes and monkeys knows no bounds.
Antarctica is where you'll see me freeze,
To catch a glimpse of penguins on their rounds.
The tropics still are where I scuba-dive.
Exotic species all know me by name.
No creatures bat an eye when I arrive,
Because they know I love them all the same ...
Oh dear, oh dear! We reap what we have sown:
Rare species I once snuggled on your screen,
Or marvelled at in such a soothing tone,
Unless we act may never more be seen ...
Go forth and be a veggie! Ride a bike!
Hug trees! Love bees! Use solar and the like!
Two Poems by Dr. Meena Srinivasan
1.
Metanoia
---------
Broken when 'love' left
Empty soul hurt, bereft
Meaning was hard to decipher
Of the present or future
Fondness seemed far-fetched
On the face, sadness was etched
Music lost its charm
Even friends seemed out to harm
Trust undermined, expectations pear shaped
Felt gloomy and disenchanted
Happiness far yet misery so close
Promises lost their grandiose
True love but painless, is a myth
Real and intense hurts, not when blithe
Self belief was the relief
A change of heart did imbue
Good sense did shine through
Meena
2.
Long to 'belong'
Feel relevant
Feel wanted,
Bonded, when belong
I'm mighty strong
Offended, pride shatters
To others, it actually matters
Feel related, appreciated
My presence if makes a difference
Love, power or lust
Nothing's permanent
None is life's determinant
To 'belong' is a must
Feel a sense of purpose,
Motivated, included
Feel involved when accepted
Even wordless
Excluded, systematically ignored
A misdemeanour that developed
Growing with time
Becomes a heinous crime
Social exclusion, discrimination
Begets disintegration, disillusion
A vicious cycle, rendering the mind idle
Fight this wrong, let's belong!
Meena
Halloween Trilogy
By Meg Smith
For All the Mummified
A song is unfurling in the blue gauze,
an alphabet of things undone,
a bloodless hymn of histories.
There is no time left for sleep,
but only, the music of the lyre,
and the pop songs in Khan El-Khalili --
the cats are drawn out, from every corner,
and the one scarab I have found, digging
with wise claws, for every clue.
For all that is raised up, to dance,
all the falls again, unfurled in secrets.
All will come to know. Only this can love.
Worthy of a Ghost
This is the night of election --
like an apple, rolled through the doorway of a dining room,
disturbing the conversation, the board game.
It is not to be undone.
With words that cut, fall, darken -- you have carved
that doorway, ragged, and open forever.
And through this point will pass, backward, and forward,
the haunted things, hearts redrawn, that forget nothing,
and save nothing, yet live in everything.
Bone Canticle
I could not go to this garden, anymore;
such bodies held fast by the grip of the vine;
this gives their only height, their only being.
It's easy to fall away. It's easy to breach
the surface of soil. It will be done, slowly,
or in the rush of thunder and a rain tearing
the surface. Then, will come singing, hands,
knuckles, teeth, reaching, upward.
Then will come only the blood of light
from a late-setting moon.
Three Acrostic Sonnets
By
Mike Mesterton-Gibbons
Professor Emeritus
Department of Mathematics
Florida State University
Trick-Or-Treater
The doorbell rings. You answer it. Who's there?
Red Riding Hood? The Big Bad wolf? No, no—--
It's neighbors' kids who hope a friendly scare
Can fill their bags with chocolate to go!
Keep loads and loads of candy by your door—--
Or you may short an Alice or March Hare,
Rapunzel, Robin Hood, a Dumbledore,
Tyrannosaurus Rex, or Smokey Bear! …
Remember when you wondered if you'd got
Enough supplies to last for Halloween
And so you bought another giant lot?
That meant too much——the kids have now all been! …
Excess amounts of candy on a shelf
Remain for you to eat tonight yourself!
I'm Notorious RBG
I'm scarcely five feet high but I stand tall.
My stature towers far above my size:
No one dare claim that my achievement's small
Or doubt my luster in my nation's eyes!
To girls, I've blazed a trail they too can ride
One day, provided they work smart and hard,
Refusing to let justice be denied.
I've shown them that no future role is barred! …
One caveat is not to think new laws
Upholding equal gender rights worldwide
Should be cheered only by the women's cause:
Remember, my success helps either side!
Both men and women own this truth to tell:
Good law for girls is good for boys as well!
Critical Worker
Coronavirus rules the world today,
Respecting neither privilege nor rank.
In my case both are low, though many say
That when a life is saved, it's me they thank.
I feed them, clothe them, nurse them back to health,
Concerned less for myself than I should be,
And overlook disparities in wealth,
Less harmful to my patients than to me …
When this pandemic's over, will you go
On taking me for granted, or instead
Raise pay for work I do? You surely know
Kind words do not provide my daily bread!
Essential as I am, must I implore? …
Remember who kept Covid from your door!
Picture above of Charles E.J. Moulton in the original production of Roman Polanski's musical "Dance of the Vampires"
Raimund Theater, Vienna, Austria - 1997
Bloody Vampires
Poetry Collection by Alan Catlin
Three Stooges Celebrate Halloween
They carried shot
glasses door to door
imploring, "Trick or
Drink" to astonished
homeowners who
either couldn't take
a joke or could,
filling their glasses
with what was on
hand: store brand
Vodka, no name
English Gin, Dark
Puerto Rican Rums,
Old Rot Gut Rye,
Bourbon, Scotch---'til
they were three stooges
stumbling over sidewalk
cracks, low curbs,
Elm tree roots, sick in
nearby shrubs or behind
parked cars, white as
spirit ghosts set free
for a day of the dead.
Shadows
“You have no shadow, now. It is
somewhere else doing whatever it
wants to do.” Peter Rock
Once the skin has
been unzipped and
the essence inside escapes
only the body remains
to be buried in crypts
with life-line bells
close at hand
coffin lids removed
just in case the person inside
decides to return
Shadows blend with the night
lurking nearby, plentiful as
ground fog except on full moon lit
night when they gambol and play
like water spouts and sprites
By day, they change from
assuming limbs and trunks
like trees or street light poles
humming with an electrical charge:
the closer we become, the further
apart we are. There is no joy in this.
Books of Demons and Devils
After Dante, no one
was surprised
how many levels
of hell there were
What was surprising
was how many devils,
demons and Satan’s little
helpers there were
Who knew they needed
so much staff
to manage and
maintain the place?!
Luckily there was a
whole volume of written
work enumerating
and classifying
all the various
evil ones with pictures
and brief bios for each one
so you could compare
the two and identify
I learned an awful lot
from that book
More than you could imagine
Ghosts, Transparent and Otherwise
“People, the ghosts down in North-of-the South aren’t
see through.” Diane Seuss
Depending on their tribes, on their location,
they may be guiding lights like hurricane
lamps in a perpetual storm or sky scanning
beams over airports attempting to penetrate
thick cloud covers. Other ghosts, in arid
areas, are illusions, are like oases perceived
as watering holes with sustenance and shade
where nothing exists. On event horizon beaches
they are like Dali silhouettes framed against
a seascape with something else inside,
something like a crowded bazaar, good for
sale market places where ghosts are terrorists
wearing long black robes with suicide vests
strapped tight to their bodies, underneath.
waiting for the appointed time to blow stuff up.
Bloody Vampires
There they sit, at the bar, these
beautiful young things, hell’s lounge
lizards in togs that cost more than
the gross national products of third
world nations. These never-in-distress
damsels and their cunning stunts
such as providing Cherry Kool-Aid
for their drinks of choice: Triple Shots
of Morgan spiced added to the kiddie
porn drink, shaken, not stirred, of course,
strained, over ice and garnished with
two cherries, a cocktail called the Bloody
Vampire in their honor. Even ossified,
they look as if they were posing for Cosmo
candid shots layouts or On the Town
New Yorker gossip features. Are as
unapproachable as decadent royals or minor
deities on holiday in human form on
Planet Earth. Have more platinum in
their clutch bags than custom jewelers,
rare metal dealers suggesting they have
no know limits. Don’t so much leave
the bar as dematerialize.
Bloody Murder
Everyday must have
been a practice session
for Halloween costume parties,
traveling Charade games that
were so bizarre, you'd be hard
pressed to guess what it was
he was supposed to be dressed
as. I thought maybe he was
trying to win a Dennis Rodman
in drag lookalike contest, even
if he was about a foot and
half too small, and in need of
some heavy tanning sessions
plus a better hair colorist.
I had to admit I'd never seen
a man wearing that kind of
lipstick, not even in a Fellini
movie, but he either had never
heard of Federico or was
playing dumb, not that
I really cared either way.
I responded to his
suggestion to make him
something good with:
"Anything in particular?"
"Surprise me."
"The last guy said that ended
up in ER."
"You're a really funny guy."
"I've been told that."
"Ok, big boy, make me what
you made him."
He looked dubious when
I placed the drink in front
of him sd."What's that?"
"A Bloody Murder."
"What's in it?"
"Chilled Vodka with Cinnamon Schnapps."
He made a face but drank it anyway.
Raimund Theater, Vienna, Austria - 1997
Bloody Vampires
Poetry Collection by Alan Catlin
Three Stooges Celebrate Halloween
They carried shot
glasses door to door
imploring, "Trick or
Drink" to astonished
homeowners who
either couldn't take
a joke or could,
filling their glasses
with what was on
hand: store brand
Vodka, no name
English Gin, Dark
Puerto Rican Rums,
Old Rot Gut Rye,
Bourbon, Scotch---'til
they were three stooges
stumbling over sidewalk
cracks, low curbs,
Elm tree roots, sick in
nearby shrubs or behind
parked cars, white as
spirit ghosts set free
for a day of the dead.
Shadows
“You have no shadow, now. It is
somewhere else doing whatever it
wants to do.” Peter Rock
Once the skin has
been unzipped and
the essence inside escapes
only the body remains
to be buried in crypts
with life-line bells
close at hand
coffin lids removed
just in case the person inside
decides to return
Shadows blend with the night
lurking nearby, plentiful as
ground fog except on full moon lit
night when they gambol and play
like water spouts and sprites
By day, they change from
assuming limbs and trunks
like trees or street light poles
humming with an electrical charge:
the closer we become, the further
apart we are. There is no joy in this.
Books of Demons and Devils
After Dante, no one
was surprised
how many levels
of hell there were
What was surprising
was how many devils,
demons and Satan’s little
helpers there were
Who knew they needed
so much staff
to manage and
maintain the place?!
Luckily there was a
whole volume of written
work enumerating
and classifying
all the various
evil ones with pictures
and brief bios for each one
so you could compare
the two and identify
I learned an awful lot
from that book
More than you could imagine
Ghosts, Transparent and Otherwise
“People, the ghosts down in North-of-the South aren’t
see through.” Diane Seuss
Depending on their tribes, on their location,
they may be guiding lights like hurricane
lamps in a perpetual storm or sky scanning
beams over airports attempting to penetrate
thick cloud covers. Other ghosts, in arid
areas, are illusions, are like oases perceived
as watering holes with sustenance and shade
where nothing exists. On event horizon beaches
they are like Dali silhouettes framed against
a seascape with something else inside,
something like a crowded bazaar, good for
sale market places where ghosts are terrorists
wearing long black robes with suicide vests
strapped tight to their bodies, underneath.
waiting for the appointed time to blow stuff up.
Bloody Vampires
There they sit, at the bar, these
beautiful young things, hell’s lounge
lizards in togs that cost more than
the gross national products of third
world nations. These never-in-distress
damsels and their cunning stunts
such as providing Cherry Kool-Aid
for their drinks of choice: Triple Shots
of Morgan spiced added to the kiddie
porn drink, shaken, not stirred, of course,
strained, over ice and garnished with
two cherries, a cocktail called the Bloody
Vampire in their honor. Even ossified,
they look as if they were posing for Cosmo
candid shots layouts or On the Town
New Yorker gossip features. Are as
unapproachable as decadent royals or minor
deities on holiday in human form on
Planet Earth. Have more platinum in
their clutch bags than custom jewelers,
rare metal dealers suggesting they have
no know limits. Don’t so much leave
the bar as dematerialize.
Bloody Murder
Everyday must have
been a practice session
for Halloween costume parties,
traveling Charade games that
were so bizarre, you'd be hard
pressed to guess what it was
he was supposed to be dressed
as. I thought maybe he was
trying to win a Dennis Rodman
in drag lookalike contest, even
if he was about a foot and
half too small, and in need of
some heavy tanning sessions
plus a better hair colorist.
I had to admit I'd never seen
a man wearing that kind of
lipstick, not even in a Fellini
movie, but he either had never
heard of Federico or was
playing dumb, not that
I really cared either way.
I responded to his
suggestion to make him
something good with:
"Anything in particular?"
"Surprise me."
"The last guy said that ended
up in ER."
"You're a really funny guy."
"I've been told that."
"Ok, big boy, make me what
you made him."
He looked dubious when
I placed the drink in front
of him sd."What's that?"
"A Bloody Murder."
"What's in it?"
"Chilled Vodka with Cinnamon Schnapps."
He made a face but drank it anyway.
POEMS BY PAULA BONNELL
REINCARNATION
In the next life I’ll be an opera singer
I won’t be able to add or subtract
You’ll be my manager
I won’t know whether to love you or hate you
The biographers will be fighting about it
for books to come
We’ll give each other such a dazzle of yeses and nos
as will put to shame the infernal maybes of this life
CHANGING THE PAST
One of those things – like being
in two places at once – that probably violate
the laws of physics. Not a good idea
unless you want to risk implosion
or disappearing through the vanishing
point or whatever is the natural
consequence of such a violation.
The laws of physics don’t have to
be enforced; they simply state what’s
inevitably going to happen under
certain conditions. They describe,
not prescribe.
But just for a moment
let’s consider that when you said,
“You can’t possibly meet respectable
people this way.” (through
an ad in an alternative newspaper) I’d responded,
“You mean you’re not respectable?”
And for another moment, think also
about your asking “Are you a snob?”
and my replying “What do you mean
by ‘snob’?” or “Snobbery takes place
in class societies, like England or
most universities, where everyone
has a standing above and below
others; they’re ranked.
This is America; we’re all equal.”
And I really don’t know if you intended
to insult me by your first question or why,
if you believed what you said, you had
decided to place or respond to an ad.
I’ll just put it down to lack of social
graces. Or maybe, taking into account
what you told me later about how late
it was in life that you had your first
meaningful relationship, that you were
something of a solipsist, not particularly
social.
Nevertheless, despite this unpromising
start and the brevity of our companionship,
something tried to happen. I would say
your (avowed) mind-body problem got
in the way. Since then each of us abides
separately, you relating extensively to
the laws of physics, I merely speculating.
Copyright © Paula Bonnell 2020
The Double Parking Aliens
Poetry Collection by Alan Catlin
What Children See
Children take turns looking inside
the pin hole of the painted egg.
They see an incipient winter storm,
grotesque snow men, patterned after
a lifetime of nightmares in a locked
white room turning black. They see
a world out of control spinning upside
down, that makes them feels ill at ease.
They see the future reflected in a broken
mirror pocked with pin holes.
Radio Free Albemuth
He stood rubbing
the graying stubble
of his weather beaten
face with the stumps
of his fat, dirty fingers
wrapped in torn,
filthy rags, peeling
small black scabs
from the crags of his
face, as he slides
small exact change
across the wood for
draft beer said,
"My handle is
Radio Free Albemuth.
Bet you don't know
anything about the
book or the place
that inspired it.
I've been receiving
transmissions from
outer space long
before any one of
you ever arrived
on this planet, and
will be, long after
you're gone."
I thought, maybe,
this guy was doing
some kind of Martian
two step through the tulips,
it was better to refer him to
a higher authority outside,
closer to the landing site of
the next divine invasion.
I'd even give him change
for the public phone, on
the corner of Quail,
if needed to call home
collect for a pickup.
The aliens
double park by the primo, fire lane,
by-the-front-door-of-the-bar, space,
intending to stay for five, place a bet,
grab a number, have a brew, instead
stay for an hour, oblivious to traffic
nightmares outside, the honking of
the horns, the denting of the bumpers;
wear Ted Bundy Fry Day memorial t-shirts,
the mass murderer’s handsome, smiling face
inside a circle, red line overprinted,
simulated heat waves circulating all
around, “dead to the world but alive in our
hearts”, imprinted on the back for all to see;
proudly proclaim, after crashing family
barbeques, outdoor cookouts, that they,
“don’t just have a record but a fucken album;”
think all boundaries are made to be torn
down, all rules to be broken, endlessly
demonstrating, “that an order of protection
is about as useful as a string of garlic;”
think that life is just one long Clint Eastwood
movie they would be stars in, never expecting
to end up perched on a wobbly wooden cross
in a graveyard with a noose around their necks
or on the wrong end of a “make my day”
ultimatum; are always surprised when bad
things happen to evil people, as if, for some
reason, they might not deserve the worst possible
redress.
Blue Yonder
They bring things that are
of no use, not to them,
not to you, not to anyone:
broken ray guns, death star
storm trooper masks, tricorders
for contacting space ships long
ago taken out by Vulcan war
ships, cracked hoses, watering
cans with no spouts, a Zen garden
rake; all this stuff they want to
pack into the overloaded truck,
the space where the back seat
should be, all that junk lifted
from landfills and roadside attraction
dumps. A pry bar would be useful
for arranging latest acquisitions but
none are available at any price,
still the collecting goes on, after dark
by the lights of their short circuiting
dashboard, control panels, the static
from their radio broadcasting secret
messages from the wild blue yonder,
up there, where the stars are.
Future Stars of Network TV Show, Perp Patrol
They are leaning against The Van,
a vehicle that might have passed
state inspection once, but not in anyone’s
recent memory. Stand staring in direction
of free range kids: the boys with home
styled Mohawks, gang banging someone
else’s kids, holding him down and whaling,
until the blood flows. The girl’s looking
like a cross between Raggedy Anne’s worst-
hair-day-nightmare and a street walker in training.
Will bad mouth anyone who refuses their
request for cigarettes, though they are
years away from double figures in time
spent upon this earth.
Mom speed balling thin, chain smoking
no-brand, no-tax Mentholated death butts,
eyes perpetually glazed in kiln fires
by amateur artists, nipple piercings tearing
through soiled tank tops, bare midriff exposed
to better reveal, infected rings, demented
cell block tattoos of mutant butterflies in flight.
The man is chug a lugging PBR’s from cans,
shoulder length hair unwashed for weeks,
faded, sleeves-removed T says, Charlie Daniels
Band. Mother Trucker arm tattoos over swastikas
and White Power logos, his face looking as if
he had been used as a workout bag for a heavyweight
fighter, or, worse, by a biker gang stiffed
in a drug deal.
The free rangers are raising holy hell
in the playground, manning the monkey
bars, commandeering the slides, the swings,
pummeling all who stand in their way,
a veritable force of nature until the Man
runs out of beer and bellows,
“Get your asses over here, like now, or, I’ll cut
you a new one.” And they move, as if electrically
charged, as if they have known worse things
to happen, and could imagine whatever that
was, happening again.
The Future
“So our hope lies in a world without hope,
governed by Satan.”
Ake Edwardson, Sun and Shadow
“Neighborhood girl, 8, killed
by stray bullet while riding
her new bicycle.”
The news article said.
Police canvassed neighborhood
looking for leads but no one saw
anything, though everyone seemed
to have heard the shots. Were on
the street seconds later, and were glad
to appear on local TV offering
opinions about all the things they
didn’t see.
Weeks later a thirteen year old
boy was arrested for the crime.
Said he felt bad about the little
girl. “I wasn’t trying to shoot
no little girl. I was trying to off
someone else. She just be in the way.”
Asked where he got the gun,
he confessed it wasn’t his, was,
in fact, a community gun that anyone
could use, if they had to, as long as
they put it back where it was to be
hid when they were done.
Said, he had to wait until he was 16
to get his gun but guessed, now,
he’d never get his own.
Three Poems by Catherine Lee
Catherine Lee explores poetry’s percussive jazz voice and social change activism by reading solo and performing with improvising musicians “on poem.” Her multimedia pieces — radio specials, original poetry, commentary, and documentary videos — are archived on Soundcloud and Vimeo and research about master performers is blogged on Padlet and Facebook/Jazz Ovation Inn. Her jazz-related poetry is featured in the July 2020 "Music" Issue 5 of the United Kingdom-based publication Northampton Poetry Review, on pages 63-74.
Snooze Alarm: Fallout Secret
Women and Children First
It’s 1955, shoot ’em ups galore at Los Alamos
Nevada Testing Site officials
counting on a bed of sleeping sheep
those for-your-eyes-only experts in the know
don’t say nothin’ but:
not to worry, rural folks
(they aimed blast clouds away from cities, as best they could)
no news, no feed but cheery words
for pregnant mamas living near
the night and dayglowing Utah bedrock
bearing since those special sun-ups
invisible and lethal clouds mushrooming
killer particles and silence
Lucky clockworks counting decades later
’til official word’s released: those radioactive-pastured
Utah ewes dropped dead from man-made-god-like
causes, not natural. Ditto for the stillbirths,
Mormon youngsters sickened, died of cancers.
It’s half a century later, now, long past time to wake,
alarming voices say to listen to
what is NOT said, to what IS revealed and when,
about the mushroom-clouded videocam recordings March 14, 2011 Fukushima Japan;
about Valentine’s Day kiss of what radwaste
blew from inside storage cavern 2014
Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad NM USA
Tune eyes and ears to siren songs of bluefin,
future generations, children sounding
prayerful incantations of
a birthright: truthful, abundant, clean, and
peaceful world where human
animal vegetal and mineral
are recognized, in love, as one
The Half-Life of Deception
Half-life: 1. the time required for half of the atoms of a radioactive substance present at the beginning to become disintegrated <there will still be one quarter of the element left at the end of two half-life periods -- G.E.Owen
2. the time required for one-half the amount of a substance in or introduced into a living system to be eliminated whether by excretion, metabolic decomposition, or other natural process
April 26,1986
25 years ago, and counting
Unit 4 (of 4) at Russian
power plant, Chernobyl
blew up, or was it melted down?
No matter. Both in fact.
The first explosion, one
that blew 2,000 tons of protective
structure off what scientific
experts called “containment”
shot a plume of radioactive smoke
more than 10 kilometers into sky.
Among the poisons billowing from crater:
Iodine-131 (half-life 8.02 days of beta, gamma rays)
Strontium-90 (half-life 28.8 years) Cesium-137 (half-life 30.07 years)
Plutonium, several kinds (half-lives 6,563 to 24,200 years).
These releases only ended 3 weeks later when resulting blue/red fire in
destroyed reactor core was quenched by
soon-dead radiation-poisoned heroes.
What went up did come down.
Mostly in Ukraine, Belarus,
and Russia near remains of plant:
curies quantities times hundreds more
than what rained down with bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Winds blew Chernobyl smoke to Finland,
France, Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, Poland,
Italy, United Kingdom, Sweden.
If you were old enough to understand this news,
recall the Russians only admitted their disaster
some days later when some Swedish scientists
reported measuring much too much
of background radiation.
North Africa was hit with 5% of total, significant contamination.
Another 1% of poison blew in 8 days later,
then fell out on North America.
As for biologic impact of physics gone past critical mass,
who can gauge becoming chromosomal aberrations?
What will be passed to generations who are lucky to survive, beget?
Some affected species die, do not reproduce.
Those that happen to survive will mutate.
Just that one Chernobyl power plant emission did
pollute a hemisphere with radiation half gone in 24,200 years,
three-quarters gone in 48,400 years, seven-eighths gone in 72,600 years.
All gone when human beings gone another place than Mother Earth.
Did they learn a thing from that mistake?
Sure. They named a new invention:
chernobylite, a type of corium,
man-made radioactive lava blend of zircaloy,
the fuel rod cladding, uranium dioxide reactor fuel,
silica from concrete, serpentinite, the melted thermal insulation.
Now there’s Japan’s Fukushima,
6 reactors on an ocean-facing coast
where the word “tsunami” was invented.
March 11, 2011 began another week,
and counting, of failures of containment in Japan,
when experts said “it’s not immediately clear
how much — if any — radiation was released”
by serial explosions, vented gas.
“If any” — that intelligence-insulting,
face-saving failure to contain untruth or wishful thinking,
uncontrolled cascading reactivity of bluff.
Most toxic method ever humanly devised of boiling water,
making steam to generate
electricity th ey — still — are calling safe and necessary energy.
An unfathomable number is the half-life of deception.
Again From the Top
Listen. Scott LaFaro’s bass, Bill Evans’ hands,
Paul Motian’s pulse recording of last hit: two-week engagement June 1961
Can connection be so visceral,
harmonious? Days later Scott’s car
lost control and hit a tree and smashed the bass;
LaFaro died on impact a devastating loss that silenced his surviving
bandmate . . .
but
Mine, in autumn 1980, was not such an ordinary car crash.
Driving back from reading poem with bassist I had such a crush on . . .
I had borrowed someone’s car or should I call it wreck about to happen?
Heading toward the gig late summer Sunday
engine burst in flames
Driving, I was stupefied and helpless
he knew what to do
something coolant
spraying on hot engine
tow truck belt right size
we were fine, like jazz cats do
on time to hit just barely
We did my poem “Charles Mingus Slipped Backstage”
(backstage the place musician spirits wait before they reappear to wail) more I don’t recall
state altered as I was by dream time in the moment coming true
$60,000 contrabass sat easily in big old Buick with bald tires
driving south from North Shore, Mass Salem back to Cambridge,
it began to rain, coat road
93 to Storrow — interchange that never sleeps — steely S turn
started skidding spun out smashed one side
crossed 3 lanes to other curb
bounced again and came to rest broadside
to rushing traffic Miracles: no other vehicle involved;
none hit us nor each other while the totalled heap decayed;
behind us, watching crash unfold, off duty state
patrolman in a van aided by directing traffic ‘til
the right authorities arrived;
[no break]
jazz fan in fact, he drove the unscathed bass and bassist home
leaving girl behind to ride with wreck to tow lot pondering
that repercussions thing.
I marvel at how easily
the bassist charms the rest —
moves one notion
to the next
perfect in the moment
all support, all timing
Odd: said incident had caused no damage
lack of injury – according to authorities – meant it never happened.
Fast forward then two dozen years – big changes:
my bassist is still playing somewhere near Seattle, he has raised a son;
that wicked Storrow S curve gone, less perilous bridge Big Dig installed.
Somehow I happen to discover Live at the Village Vanguard June ‘61
Enter Rocco Scott LaFaro
bassist from backstage ...
Last hit: two-week engagement
Can connection be
more audible,
more obvious?
A few days later his car lost control and
hit a tree and smashed the bass
both players died as wreck caught fire;
a potent, stupefying loss
that silenced his surviving bandmate, Evans, for a while.
Such impact does Scott’s playing have
he amazes, perfect timing,
fixed in moment, still
so young, so virile, full of promise,
listen and
connect
again
from the top
Jean Fineberg
"I am a freelance saxophonist/flutist, drummer, composer and bandleader based in the San Francisco Bay Area, specializing in R&B, Jazz, Soul, Funk, Reggae, Latin, New Orleans and related styles. The JAZZphoria octet has just recorded several of my original tunes for an upcoming album. JAZZphoria plays all original groove based music from Swing, to Bebop, Reggae, Funk, Bossa Nova, Soca and Salsa. The band is comprised of two trumpets/flugelhorns, two saxe/flutes/clarinetss, guitar, piano, bass & drums. All the arrangements feature big band style harmonies, great jazz solos and are backed up by a rock solid rhythm section. I'm about to add new videos from our last gig at the California Jazz Conservatory in Berkeley, CA."
Jean Fineberg, https://jeanfineberg.com/
***
Poems by Jean Fineberg
1) IN THE SHADOW OF FAME
(condensed version published in online Scarlet Leaf Review, June 2020)
I was a legend
in my own mind,
an anonymous star
in a big galaxy
I shot an album cover
eight women wearing only silver paint
and posed for People Magazine
painted waist up
I did a live TV show
from a theater in the round
on a rotating platform
while high on mescaline
I opened for big stars
in stadiums and arenas
for tens of thousands
who never knew my name
The band gave me a feature tune
We rehearsed it for weeks
and when the tour came
We never played it
I was locked out of a motel
and slept in a tour bus
when the manager spent our money
on drugs
I was stranded in an Acapulco hotel
with no ticket home
when the promoter said
he was broke
I was 23
and did what I thought
a star should to do
I seduced groupies --
The doe-eyed teenager
with “help me” scratched on her stomach
The lesbian wannabe
who gave me her rent money
The waitress who took me home
and cried all night,
The sweet bikini girl
who slept with all the boys too
When the shadow of fame grew long
and the big stars deatomized
some morphed into holograms
and started GoFundMe campaigns
I went back to playing bars
The groupies are older now
but they know my name
and still buy my CDs
I’m a big star in a tiny galaxy
world famous in my town
It’s not so bad--
after all, it beats anonymity
***
2) BRAGGING RIGHTS
(published in online Scarlet Leaf Review, June 2020)
My father wanted me to be a doctor
but he lost bragging rights because I’m a blues musician
I play him my latest recording
He shuts it off, saying the drums are offensive
They remind him of those awful boys with gold teeth and backward caps
who pull their cars up too close and blast their so-called music
I snatch back my CD
At his 80-year-old friend’s dinner party, I give it to the host
Who passes it around and proudly plays the whole thing
really, really loud
Inside Out
Microsstory by Anna Maria Dall'Olio
The first time I left a disco, all that glitter - inside out.
Lucy in the Sky
60s Poetry Rock by Robert Cooperman
Druggie Songs
So smirky when we quoted
druggie lyrics in “White Rabbit,”
aside from the lyrics, the flute
hypnotic as a swami summoning
a cobra from its basket,
or in “Lucy in the Sky,”
the acid reference inescapable,
the trippy melody taunting
anyone over thirty to figure out
what the song was about.
If music wouldn’t save the world,
it was at least our secret code
from parents straight and dull as rulers,
speakers exploding with narcotic decibels.
Those lyrics, our sacred texts, deeper
than Milton, Homer, Shakespeare,
the King James Bible, the sum of all
knowledge, all wisdom, the highest--
pardon the pun—of high poetry.
Well, we were young, believed
we’d invented sex and drugs,
and of course, rock ‘n’ roll.
The Lid
One night, six of us
smoked a lid of grass: an ounce;
young, invincible, and stupid.
We played the Beatles’
White Album, over and over,
“Helter-Skelter” blasting away,
its hortator-insistent beat
smashing from speakers, friends
confiding I was twitching
like a frog hit by an electrode:
“Epileptic seizure!” they gasped,
half terrified, half in awe.
God knows how many brain cells
I tossed away that night.
I joke now that if not
for that weed orgy,
I might’ve rivaled Keats.
Well, at least I have enough
gray matter left to make dumb jokes
Jimi: 1974
Spelling his first name like Hendrix’s,
he owned the neighborhood head shop:
incense a Hindu temple, display cases
of rolling papers, hash pipes, bongs, hookahs,
Indian blouses, serapes and ponchos;
posters of Hendrix, Dylan, Otis Redding.
He was possessed by the original Jimi’s
riffs snaking from the PA system; me obsessed
by the Dead; every now and then, we’d part
the bead curtains to where he and Delores
cooked, ate, and made love; we’d toke up,
Delores packing weed into Ziploc bags.
When I left for grad school out west,
Jimi and I hugged, and when I returned
for Christmas break with Beth, whom I’d marry
and love forever, I stopped in to introduce her.
“Bob!” his bear hug levitated me.
and gently shook Beth’s flute-playing hand.
“Man,” he confided, “you left at the right time,”
catalogued the shootings, the shop owners
robbed, the one murdered, and opened the drawer
under the old fashioned cashier register,
revealing a shiny-deadly pistol.
“Delores left, Man, couldn’t take the bad vibes,”
he shrugged; neither Beth nor I able not to see
the hidden pistol, summers of love over.
"Born to be Wild" - Life in the 60s
Poetry Collection by Alan Catlin
The Elements: The Band
They were wannabee
rock stars, prototype
punkettes with spiked
hair, blank eyes, and
voices rasped by razor
blades. Claimed they
were three screaming
banshees from hell
but were actually from
Syosset. Were backed
up by four guys voted
most likely to die of an
overdose by their junior
high classmates.
The drummer losing
a spot for a heavy metal
band gig to a guy who
was rumored to have
spontaneously combusted,
leaving behind nothing but
a singed set of sticks and
a brutally abused cow bell.
Did club dates in places
health inspectors wouldn’t
go. Lost fans to characters
straight out of movies like
“Under the Skin” and
“The Hunger”. Flamed out
long before their singles went
gold on albums that had
no names as much due to
a lack of interest than
creative differences.
They won’t be missed.
Lounge People Listening, Waiting for “The End”
Young America 1970, half wasted
drinking from the keg of perpetual
flowing beer, sacred font open 24 hour
a day, for charter members of Roosevelt
Drive Social Club, duplex of dharma
bums, a month away from graduation
and a letter of greetings and salutations
from Uncle Sam draft board;
black robes and mortar board hats in May,
jungle fatigues by October, flag draped
coffin by the first of the year, full military
honors; it had happened before and it would
happen again. No one mentioning what lay
ahead, but everyone aware of the elephant
in the crowded living room, the Woodstock
Live album on so loud Jimi Hendrix made
ears bleed the national anthem, taking you
higher as Sly and the Family Stone and
the hydroponic weed smuggled in from
who knew where, classes some kind of Kent
State nightmare no one bothered with any more.
Interiors so crowded early spring afternoons
relocating all the furniture outside on the lawn
under the high flying drinking flag: a martini
with olives on a cresting wave, seemed the only
way to fly, all the summers of love over,
young ladies on the daybed/couch dressed
in funereal black, white skulls on gold chains
around their necks, dead eyes and too red lips,
all the gone tomorrows, today, that seemed to
say, abandon hope all ye who enter here.
Number 9 Dream, Just Before Finals, Winter 1969
After all the cafes have been
closed, the beatniks busted,
hipsters, gone cats, have all switched
from smoke to hooch, three piece
suits, suburban commutes and thirty
year mortgage nightmares,
only the black walls and hollow
shells of the fifties left behind.
Happening bistros are now dive
bars with names like Horny Toad,
Happy Hobbit, Emergency Room,
graffito encouraged in black light
back rooms, glow in the dark phrases:
“War is not good for children and
other living things”,
“Sterilize LBJ-No more ugly children”.
Slogans fading in real light around
last call, overseas war images on
black and white TV at end of well-
carved, cigarette burned bar.
Doors “Crystal Ship” segues into
Jim Hendrix, “All Along the
Watchtower”, long haired, deadend
crew’s, final shooters for the road
washed down with warm, flat beer.
Outside, snow falling, a foot on
the ground and more to come,
nowhere to come from here but
home.
The Times They Are a Changing':
Summer Late 60's, Death & Transfiguration Blues
Brush cuts and slacks transformed
into long hair & bell bottoms, jeans
patched over worn through holes,
ripped fabrics becoming functional
art forms, wearable works in progress,
underage drinking pints of cheapest
Vodka available to young men, drinking
it straight or with warm Coke mixtures
replaced by roll your own dabs,
communal water pipes, filtration systems
containing bottom shelf white wine,
sharing a smoke of many dreams, deep
sixing beers, wild laughter in the dark,
near hysteria, wired on acid rock, protest
songs, folks singers socially aware &
Vietnam no longer some way out there,
unimaginable place in the back of stamp
albums under French possessions but a
subject for subterranean homesick blues,
songs of sorrow and lamentation for picket
lines & protests, summers of love drowning
in blood, an alcoholic purple haze, secret
agent's orange, mushroom like clouds, what
did it matter? What was that sound? Draft
riots and FBI files, Big Brother & His
Holding Company, register with your draft
board, pick a number & die, Uncle Sam
a skeleton with Death Watch Beetle eyes,
a paranoids worst fears realized, up against
a wall mother faker, 'it's all over now, baby
blue', 'it's alright now Ma, I'm only bleeding','
'blowing' in the wind,' blues.
Visions of Johanna
I don't remember the first time
I saw her
Not exactly
The last few years of the 60's are one long,
stoned, alcoholic blur of darkened bars,
concert venues, frat houses subterranean
homesick blues
"Sunshine of Your Love"
the song of doomed youth I most recall,
her saying, "You look like Donovan.
Before he sold his soul to a record label."
But what I was had more to do, had more
in common with being an exploding ticket
holder on a drunken boat to nowhere
drinking because I was depressed,
the more I drank the more depressed I was,
than actually selling my soul
I was thinking she was some kind
of acid angel who could rescue me from hell
on an endless weekend afternoon of substance
abuse and self pitying gestures that made me
feel as pathetic as I was
Could see her pied beauty face across a dance floor,
barroom, streaked by strobe lights and day glo paints,
coming colors in my mind and I thought
I could reach out and touch her but when I went to
touch, she wasn't there
She wasn't anywhere, was lost in some electric lady land
dream of the 60's, a stolen muse, a siren song;
sometimes I wonder if she was real
Summer of Love
Lightning over the water,
over the docks where inboards
are moored in their slips,
sailboats battened down for
the inevitable storm and inside
the vine covered house, Gracie
and The Airplane are singing,
"When the truth is found, to be lies,
and all the love within you dies----"
pot smoke as thick as candle wax
on the wicker based Chianti bottles,
so strange to be 18 going on 19,
strange as the surrealistic pillow
sounds, the images of Nam jungle
of never ending war, all hell broken
loose on sound-turned-off tube in
the darkness, naked to the waist,
blowing excellent demon weed and
washing it away with flat Filipino
beer, San Miguel and M., one screwed up
chick on a mission to burn baby burn
like a city, like Newark in flames,
Vanilla Fudge dropping down onto
the turn table, "You keep me hanging on---"
in half time, a warped acid freaked
chorus of long haired angels singing
and playing for the dead and the soon-
to-be dead, M. exhaling a lung full
of weed in my face, leaning closer as
if to kiss; race riots in one eye, jungle
war scenes in the other, rolling thunder
all around.
“like the songs you used to hear on late-night radio”
Late night FM radio in the 60’s,
no cool jazz or silly little love songs,
no top 40’s hits, bubblegum music
or Montovani but real cuts from deep
inside the political scene, unrest and
protest, music from the mud at Woodstock,
from the killing fields of Kent State,
pagan princes, stoned goddesses,
acid rockers tripping through city
streets eight miles high and falling
fast the Altamont horror like a chainmail
monkey on their backs. Killer lyrics
and dead rock stars, doom sayers of
a police state, military-industrial complex
out of control, righteous music of long
haired hippie heads blissed out way past
midnight on the promise-of-sex-blessed voice
of Alison the Nightbird, WNEW on your dial,
free form radio: whole sides of Sergeant Pepper,
Moody Blues, Clapton and Cream, Bonnie
and Delany, Yardbirds and Crosby Steals
the Cash and Runs, maybe some Monk
and Miles mixed in, music to burn draft cards
and flags to, music for making bombs,
music to die for.
Born to Be Wild
We rode when the moon
was full, stoned freaks in
some top down convertible,
long hair blowing in the wind,
speeding down unlighted narrow
switchback roads, drinking beer,
standing as tall as we could,
singing along with 60’s protest
songs, barely hanging on,
a suicidal psychopath at the wheel,
driving dead center through
blind turns into straight-aways
daring what was coming to come.
Switching AM stations, we become
The Dave Clark Five, singing, “Catch
Us If You Can” singing, “Glad All
Over” singing Steppenwolf, “Born to Be
Wild,” the refrain “Never going to die”
extra loud; that’s how young we were,
how crazy, how stupid, how wrong.
Poetry Collection by Virginia Chase Sutton
Abandoned House
Snow begins to fall into this deserted
house and you stuff clothes into
broken windows. No heat, no electricity,
no water, no sustenance of any
kind. Tonight I wish I could see
inside your heart. It has been dashed
to bits then badly glued---family
mistreatment, bullies, all the women
you held in your arms only to watch
them dance away in red pointy shoes.
It made you muscled, lean. But
that is muffled beneath the weight
of snow as it piles up on the roof.
Over in the corner, where mice tickle
ancient newspapers, white blindness
keeps them sheltered. I am on the old mattress
on the floor. Surely it has held all kinds
of lovers---perhaps as distant as you are tonight,
shivering in your fleece jacket. Come to bed
I whisper, my voice drowning in the cold.
Come to bed. Your sleeping bag, unzipped
and spread open, reeks of newness. Mine
a beat-up piece from home hundreds of miles
away. It is good I tell you. You turn, a smile
forming on your heavily whiskered jaw.
Joining me, we toss our clothes atop the bag
to keep them fresh. Our bodies shiver in the dance
that rocked this mattress so many times before.
Such drama in this room, now the silent rampage
of snow as it tumbles through the roof.
Beneath you, I watch your eyelids as they flutter,
the moment you give over to passion. I will dress
for warmth later, after more love. I will tell anyone
who does not believe how one body stuns the other
at climax, my shoulders laid bare to the cold.
Perfection
We are all beautiful at 17, our flawless
skins attached to willing bones and sinews.
Some of us are waiting for our chance,
for someone to say I want to make out
like teenagers or for the stranger with
a bottle of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine
he will share though I am underage.
Or the joint passing between us,
making me happily relaxed in the pink
lace bra I am willing to shed for
the unknown, the chance at real love.
I do not know yet how lovely I am
with soft brown hair and blue eyes
flecked with squiggles. And though
my body is not like the striking grace
of cheerleaders back home, it stuns
with dazzling breasts and big areoles
that men will kiss and love. I will learn
of this loveliness as I discover those who
are worthy. Later, my friends will grow
into their flesh as I grow away, already ahead,
open and waiting, discovering a taste
for a certain sort of man. He will hurt me
with his attention/inattention, leaving
me alone some weekends when I want
his body and crazy kisses. What
he suggests as we love. It is all so new,
this perfection, a body that happily does
as I bid, no thought or chance of illness,
destruction or loss. Love gorgeousness.
It will not come again---this purity
of spirit, this holiness, this beam and shine,
beacons from my eyes, my eyes.
Just a Fling
My bad boy reads stacks of comic books I toss
into the garbage. I allow you into my apartment that comes
with an evening job at the college library. You want to get high,
do vodka shots, go out all the time. Many dull evenings
at work though I adore the swish of card catalogs in their sweet
openings and closings. I stare at Grant Wood murals painted
on library walls. The one I like most, a tense landscape, across from
the checkout reflects our courtship. Our sex life is tawdry mornings
when the sky has rolled away the darkness. Now you leave small drawings
with words I cannot read. Playing your kalimba badly and artlessly, irks me.
You carry it everywhere, made of expensive wood, keys twanging,
hollow interior echoing across the entire floor of the teetering Victorian.
One night you are stinking drunk again, flopping on the ground, on the verge
of alcoholic collapse. You hand the kalimba to me. Finally, furious
with you---finally, overwrought, I toss it onto an overflowing dumpster.
In my deepest fury, we are over and done. I am still obviously
lightning-strike-stupid about you but I do nothing. One twilight you slip
into the library, prying open a window screen in the fourth-floor stacks.
You fling book after book, spinning, pages ripping, ruined,
covers flapping like flocks of colorful birds as their wings open
and close before they smash into the summer-baked ground.
Five Cocktail Napkins from a Dive Bar
There is an unnamed bar on the railroad tracks
that cuts the center of this Midwestern city,
a place where men get wasted on watery beer.
I come here, always the only woman, with
my almost-straight boyfriend, because we do not have
much cash. It is a cold night and patrons sleep
outside the bar which empties onto the tracks.
Trains hoot warning blasts, traveling a glacial pace,
give drunks time to roll back to the sidewalk.
Paul gathers a stack of cocktail napkins from the bar
when he collects 2 shells of beer at 25 cents each.
Grain Belt. And we begin to record tonight’s escape.
He is like that---wanting to remember everything
about us, writing even as the cigarette-pocked table
rocks. No one ever approaches us, each patron
lost in misery, cold, and beer. Comfortable
in working class duds and youth, we should be
more compassionate as the door slams. But
we are underage, do not think of anything other than
ourselves and our perfect friendship. I am so in love,
I would go anywhere with him. Less in love, he brings us
to this place of sadness where we write notes about adventures.
A drunk stumbles, knocks over a table and falls. Another man
helps him up and they leave. The ancient jukebox has a variety
of tunes from before our time. For every nickel, something
plays. Popular is Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree,
a song with a positive spin on finding home after a man
has done his time. Paul heads to the bar for more beer.
Go get it yourself is the motto here. Five napkins later
we have tonight’s story to keep, long as paper lasts.
Flushed with drunkenness, we clasp hands to remain upright
and carefully step over bodies---nowhere for them to go
but brief unconsciousness beside the bar’s door.
Shivering, they get some relief from a warm puff
as it flips open. We always return. We always write
the present, even as it is the past, all for a couple of bucks.
Sunlight becomes her
By David Thorpe
Sunlight becomes her,
glimmering tresses of burnt sienna,
their sensuality holding in captivity
the side wards glances of enchanted eyes,
unrepentant of lascivious thoughts
Sunlight becomes her,
piercing into her quiescent heart,
resuscitating the dormant fire,
to melt the icicles of inhibitions,
between her breath and mine
Sunlight becomes her,
its shadows of mystic darkness
shrouding her charms, to be revealed
on nights when thirst of longings
are finally quenched
Yet daydreams evanesce come eventide,
thus forth I venture to love´s embrace,
she tilts her head to greet me,
her smile a garland on her lips,
a smile which becomes her so
David Thorpe©®
Love Among the Ruins
By Alan Catlin
***
Love Among the Ruins
During the air raids
we used to hide
in out storm
cellar
It was so exciting
making love
that way
After the war
it was never
the same
When smoke gets
in your eyes was the theme
of their love affair in black
and white, something they
conducted in out of the way
cafes, those cigarette smoke
filled nights of Humphrey Bogart
movies on silent bar TVs,
way too loud public speakers,
designer cocktails, excuses
to get crazy, drop their trousers
while husbands, spouses,
significant others, were away on
business, visiting the sick, having
affairs of their own.
Afterwards, the scent of cigarettes
a dead giveaway nothing was as it
seemed.
Diary of a Mad Housewife
If the truth be known, she took all those,
Visiting Poet/Writer in Residence gigs,
just to get out of the house.
Her old man could have cared less what
she did with her writing as long as she
gave him space for his true passion: making pots
of money designing Brutalist buildings
and making love to all the nubile interns who came to
worship at his drawing board.
Every semester on the road for her, promised
potential new bedmates, as sex with her husband
was as dismal as it was rare, generally a farce
of nature after too much wine, good food, and
occasional recreational drugs.
Of course, they had children, conceived in what
appeared to her now as: forlorn hope disguised
as love and a deluded optimism for a future neither
one of them believed in.
They had grandchildren, as well, kids she spoke of
often to convey to her listeners that she was
in a committed relationship but she was willing
to be flexible as long as it went no further
than a brief, but memorable, affair.
Maybe there would be a body builder among
the latest acolytes, this occasionally happened,
even established poets worked out, as she did,
every morning to clear her head and flex muscles
she might need later on for more intimate
encounters. A Martial Art expert would be a
refreshing change; the poetry was awful but
the sex was great.
Most of the hopefuls would be women.
There was no avoiding that.
She had tried one or two out for trial runs but
they were unsatisfactory as she just couldn’t swing
that way.
All of them shared one trait: unrealistic expectations.
There was no avoiding it and most of her job
entailed letting them down gracefully and with tact.
Hell, you never knew when a great line might sneak
into a dreadful poem, a line she could steal and
pretend was her own.
If someone complained, who were they going to believe:
a neophyte nobody or the visiting writer in residence?
The White Giant’s Thigh
All the bar girls loved
his poor boy at the party
good looks: shaggy hair,
a few inches too long,
curling iron teased,
his weeks-without-shaving
beard made to look like
six o’clock shadow,
his half glasses for reading
verses scammed from back
pages of college texts or
the ones he memorized like
“Do Not Go Gentle Into
That Good Night” or
“The White Giant’s Thigh”.
All those words he made
his own with rich recitations
in deep baritone voice,
whiskey edged and cigarette
rough, a pint a poem he never
pays for. All of the breathless
women dying to run hands
beneath bleached-to-a-stylish-
fade t-shirt that said:
Poets Do It With Words.
After he’s made love to them all,
he returns to his spot along
the rail with the battle tested
boys who buy him rounds
for last call, savoring all
the details he tells and whatever
he withholds: Into Her Head
Lying Down, dreaming of
the land where their ancestors
lived and they were young
and wild and the world was
full of promise for a greener day.
In Paradise
In Paradise, the 24/7 nude revue is well
under way. All the men are standing three
deep around the horseshoe shaped bar,
downing ten dollar well drinks, watching
the Amateur Night girls shed their clothes
on sweat-stained stage, gripping slick silver
poles, listening to the Rod Man sing,
“Do You Think I’m Sexy….”.
The strippers eyes are all aglow with a pinch
of angel’s dust and industrial strength weed.
Every one of the women is a winner,
an eleven on a scale of one to ten, all the tips
folded Franklins stuffed into stretched-to-
the-max black garters. All the men are macho
hunks, rough riders, special forces black ops
on R&R, one assignment away from being
enshrined in a heroes hall of fame. In Paradise,
the lights behind the bar always dazzle,
the music hard driving loud and the Gates of Hell
are always locked and secure, the smell of
sulfur and burning souls muted by the scent
of freshly sprayed perfume, all of it blown
about by the best air units money can buy.
In Paradise, even the virgins are dying to
make love.
Painting by Scarlett Neumann
The Tigers of Venus
Poetry Collection by Charles Rammelkamp
A Night of Passion
When I say
Kendra and I spent
a night of passion,
remember, we were on Venus.
The only two on the mission,
like a Space Age Adam and Eve,
it was like we’d quarantined ourselves
in our own Garden of Eden,
millions of miles from humanity.
With the slowest rotation
of any planet in the Solar System,
it takes two hundred and forty-three
Earth days to spin on its axis.
You do the math.
In the intimate dark
we lay in each other’s arms,
exploring each other’s body
for that entire night,
Kendra whispering deliriously
a word that rhymed with “Venus.”
Our Daily Haunt
Give us this day our daily ghost,
or maybe it's only a memory assault,
a guerrilla attack from the irreversible past,
our old friend regret clogging up the gutters,
forcing a disturbance up the pipes.
My father appears before me,
gazing at me through the inscrutable slits
his eyes have become from late-night reading.
Is that disapproval in his glance? Disappointment?
Oh, how I used to let him have it
when I was in my insecure twenties.
But he always forgave me,
and I wonder if it's the forgiveness
I always hated the most.
My former girlfriend,
dead ten years now I recently learned
from some casual remark
in the college alumni magazine.
Did I drive her to her grave?
She stands before me now, naked,
that condescending smirk twisting her face,
the same look of superiority
she always showed me.
It’s as if I’m summoning tigers from the air
and watching them disappear again,
beings from nowhere accusing me
of coming up short, missing the mark,
and worse, infinitely, terribly worse.
Or is it I who am less substantial than a ghost,
haunted by a past empty of a future?
The One-eyed Monster
We called the next door neighbor Cyclops
because he put his left eye out
hammering nails, the hammer shattering
the lens from his eyeglasses on the backswing,
sharp shards piercing the eyeball, a dagger in a jellyfish.
Cyclops' only child, Roxanne,
became a groupie for a country western band,
followed them around the country,
gig to gig.
Everybody assumed she slept with all of them
but nobody ever asked.
Roxanne finally got a job in a bank,
married a widower with three sons.
Cyclops retired from the furniture store
a few years after she settled down.
So we all thought things had worked out,
if not a fairy tale ending, at least
everybody was taken care of:
Night after night we heard laughtracks
spilling out of his house,
the endless loop of half-hour television comedy reruns.
But one night he ran out of his house
in the middle of a "Friends" episode,
erratic as a headless chicken
screaming he was dying,
his life an absurd joke,
Who is killing you, Cyclops?
we shouted, just as urgent,
Why are you dying?
"No man!" he shouted, his anguish
tragic as a sob,
"No man! No man is killing me!"
The House of Malediction
By David Thorpe
Ere the gathering storm
the evidence of the crime eradicated,
the abandoned footprints,
crawling clandestinely over the sentinel sand
to reach the tide in ebb,
shrivelling up into itself
as it murmurs profane curses
to the fleeing crows,
squawking abhorrence
of the witnessed felony,
their echoes resounding
without clemency
in the wounded silence,
where only drops of blood were heard,
dripping in morbid consistency
throughout the house of malediction,
ascending to its judgement
into an ethereal welkin
David Thorpe ©®
The photo courtesy of Jerome Coppo
SAFARI NOCTURNO
Bilingual Poem in Spanish and English
By Daniel de Culla
La banda de heavy metal Kiss
Con su “The Creatures of the Night”
En el tocadiscos se ha rayado.
Yo, Yo mismo y Yo, sólo Yo
Y todo lo que llega a la Vida
Como diría Janet Devlin
Nos cubrimos de noche y pasión
Mientras el eterno borracho
Sale del bar echado a patadas
Pues mirando a una camarera
Con ojos rojos y sangre fría
Le dijo mordiéndose la lengua:
-Si tú quieres, te amaré a besos
Y te daré muerte a mordiscos.
Como él, soy un gurú de la noche
Un santo cura de cementerio
Que caza almas inmortales
Con un claro cazamariposas.
Un santo y pecador amado soy
Que hace, en sus noches, un safari
Santificando el vino reluciente
Con los rayos de la Luna
Abrazado a mi hembra de Amor
Que desfallece en mis brazos
Como esa muñeca de plástico
Comprada en ese Sex-shop
De la Calle Dante llamado “Infierno”.
Escuchad conmigo, si estáis despiertos
El susurro de los amantes entre sábanas
Haciéndose memeces, caricias y Sexo.
Sentid el respirar de la muerte
Tronchando cabecitas de esas aves
Que posan en las ramas de los árboles:
El Cárabo común, de visión nocturna
El Búho real llamado Bubo Bubo
Cuya hembra pone seis huevos
El Autillo chillón, que impregna miedo
El Mochuelo común, aceitunero altivo
Pues le gustan mucho los olivos
La Lechuza común con su disco facial
En forma de corazón.
Más, quedaos en vela y temed mucho
A ese eterno borracho de la noche
Que camina por donde nadie le vea
Que hoy pasa de largo su casa
Marchando a casa de la suegra
Disfrazado de Sacamantecas
Pues piensa acostarse con ella
Y beber el último trago de vino
En su preciosa calavera.
NIGHT SAFARI
The heavy metal band Kiss
With their "The Creatures of the Night"
Scratched and torn on the record player.
Me, Myself and I, only Me,
We still all come to life,
As Janet Devlin would say:
"We cover ourselves with night and passion
While the eternal drunkard
is kicked out of the bar
Because he gazed at a waitress
With red eyes and in cold blood
Telling her while biting his tongue:
-If you want, I will cover you with kisses,
Biting you to death.
Like him, I am the midnight guru
A holy cemetery priest
That hunts immortal souls
With a clear butterfly net.
Holy, sinful and beloved that I am,
I am on a safari through your nights,
Sanctifying the sparkling wine
With the rays of the Moon
Embracing my female love.
She fades in my arms
Like that plastic doll
Bought at that Erotic-Shop
A place on Dante Street called "Hell".
Listen to me
If you are awake
The whispers of lovers between sheets
Getting down, they devour each other
Feeling the breath of Charon,
Decapitating the ravens
Posing on branches:
The Common Tawny Owl of night vision,
The Eagle Owl named Bubo Bubo,
Whose female lays six eggs,
The screeching owl,
That permeates fear,
The Little Screech, haughty olive,
Because it really likes olive trees,
The Owl in the Barn with its facial disc.
But, heart shaped,
Furthermore, I stay awake, terrified,
Of that eternal drunkard of the night
Who walks where no one sees him,
That this house he passes by today,
Marching to his mother-in-law's house
Disguised as Sacamantecas (Takelards),
Because he plans to sleep with her,
And drink the last gulp of wine
From her precious skull.
Three Short Poems by Meg Smith
A Summer Witch
Twilight shifts, in the sandy park --
a swing set sings a rusty anthem.
Words work magic,
but my song is silence.
Some laughter below
to an audience, of flitting wings --
this is the limit of flight.
This is the limit of a night's
last spell.
Betelgeuse
I ask for
a star that won't fail me,
sky-blood, some pulse,
mine, to yours.
From a Lunar Calendar
The moon rises
on the other side
of a torn screen,
a bruised eye
glancing back.
Meg Smith's poetry books,
Dear Deepest Ghost, The Scarlet Dancing and Night's Island,
are available on Amazon.
Two Poems by K.A. Williams
Night Caller
Mist entered the open window
and hung in the air
transforming into a vampire
with a red-eyed stare.
Moonlight shone on the
woman lying in the bed.
The vampire glided forward
and bent over her head.
Startled, the woman screamed,
then looked at her clock.
"You're late," she scolded.
"And you forgot to knock."
Cal And Kay
His name was Cal,
he lived by night.
If you met him,
you'd get a bite,
and wished you had
stayed in till light.
He met a girl,
her name was Kay,
but not like him,
she lived by day.
He sought a witch,
and had to pay.
The spell did work,
his fangs won't grow,
and his eyes lost
their bright red glow.
Cal looked for Kay,
she had to know.
Where did she go?
Cal had no clue.
When Cal found Kay
her new fangs grew,
and her eyes had
a bright red hue.
Poe's Nightmare
Poetry Collection by Alan Catlin
Nocturne in Blue and Gold: The Falling Rocket (no 50)
after J.M. Whistler
Night sky alive
with colored
showering the white
light and the gold
What was once
propelled free
falling now;
darkness
crowding in
Southern Gothic: A Romance for Ambrose Bierce:
Our Lady of the Moors
A waft of gown, ethereal
and as insubstantial as ground
fog rising in deep, humid
night; a consequence of heat
lightning, the rarely seen
made visible, tangible as
thunder, shifting layers
beneath the earth, a whistle
of breath, the raw, savage
voice of the lady-once-loved
now-left-behind and the death
mask that she wears.
Night
Train sounds seem endless
just before I fall asleep,
the dog is shaking beside
our bed and the room is
filled by moon shadows,
heat thunder rips through
night pressing us together
inside these walls
Long past midnight,
the milk train's
sound
is muffled
by a drifting
snow
lulling passengers,
as dreamers,
awake
Dreams claw under
drifts beneath
expansive
fields of
white
close to the subtle
dark,
those unlit
tunnels
for night
trains to be
swallowed in
The Obscene Bird of Night
Each landscape is a silent terror
like anticipating the aftermath of a fire,
sliding into a territory of black ice
with no reference point for up or down,
just a fractured sky, a bent horizon
waiting for the obscene bird of night
while restrained within these pale,
antiseptic walls, strapped down
to stiff metal cribs, leather things
for chewing on, everything flexible
wired into place, force sustained even
in coma inducing sleep; rare moments
of lucidity, artistic release: mixed media in
charcoal, india ink and water colors all
washed by an antiseptic solution, gray.
“Last night I dreamed this would happen”
Repressed as memories revealed in a dream.
I am five years old, seeing the world through
a rain smeared window. A tropical rain in a
tropical place. An invasion of wind toppling
massive palm trees and the sound of a
struggling, tethered white horse within
the arc of where the trees are falling.
In the fever dream of no escape on
an island in an ocean there is nowhere to hide
when the unnamed storms arrive. Nor can there
be a way to describe how it feels to be drowning
in the deep end of a hotel pool while your soon-
to-be mad, unaware, mother smokes unfiltered
cigarettes, lighting one from the other assured,
in her dream, that I am safe among the water babies
in seas of dusk and fog.
Or what it feels like to be riding down from
an island plateau on a no pavement, pothole road:
no lights, no shoulders, no seat belts, in army issue jeep,
pitching from side to side on ess curves, driving blind.
And there, just ahead, beyond a dip in the road,
in that place where the rain won’t go, what windshield
wipers won’t wash away.
Awake on bad dream beach,
colonies of bats swarm from
below seawater-logged decks.
Fullness
By Colette Tennant
Someone tie-dyed this Oregon sky,
tie-dyed it pretty.
The hummingbird, her tiny feet tucked
just below the canticle of her thrumming heart,
suckles the lilac’s full blooms,
and the fir tree that was almost decimated
by an ice storm a dozen years ago,
has recovered so each bough is tipped in new green
and waving in the spring wind,
and its spine looks impossibly straight now –
straight and true as prayer.
And the red fullness of the rhododendron
swoops up to meet the Japanese Maple,
the two of them shoulder to shoulder
just outside the front window.
Watch how each May
they renew their secret vows.
Flower Songs
Poetry Collection by Marianne Mersereau
***
A Bundle of Gladioli
“I must have flowers, always, and always.”
~Claude Monet
Standing on the platform by his seat
I rode with my dad on the red Ford tractor
down our gravel driveway onto the paved road
toward a farm by the river
where a widow grew acres of flowers
among vegetables, tall deep red, magenta,
orange, yellow, violet and purple gladioli.
She cut a large bundle and handed it to me
so thick I could hardly embrace it,
the stalks almost as tall as me
the colors painted on my memory making
that the moment I knew I could not live
without flowers. It was the moment
Monet’s obsession became mine.
Day Flowers
I’m glad I asked your favorite
flower and song before
the day that you were gone. Your answers
were the simplest: Jesus Loves
Me and the morning glory – a wild
flower some call a weed.
Shades of blue violet magenta with
star shaped centers climbing the
fence row tangled in barbed
wire blooming and dying in a single
day. And you, like them, acquainted
with the night, rose each
day to embrace the light.
At Twilight
In summer,
he performs the evening ritual -
stops the tractor in the meadow
to pick a bouquet of wildflowers
purple Ironweed
black-eyed Susan and
field daisies.
Never mind the cows
waiting for their supper. He gathers
the blooms before pitching
the hay, holds them up in
fading light – flowers for my mother,
his Gracie.
He finds a mason jar, fills it with
water from the spigot and
carries it into the kitchen
where she stands
stirring soup beans on the stove.
He kisses her and sets the jar
on the table – a testimony at the
closing of the day.
Marianne Mersereau grew up in the Southern Highlands of Appalachia and currently resides in the Pacific Northwest. She is the author of a chapbook, “Timbrel” (Finishing Line Press, 2013). Her writing has appeared in The Hollins Critic, Bella Grace, Entropy, Still Point Arts Quarterly, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Deep South Magazine and Seattle’s Poetry on Buses; and is anthologized in Public Poetry Houston’s Anthology, Enough. She was awarded a Second Place Prize in Artists Embassy International’s Dancing Poetry Contest in 2018.
Her Light
By Connor Orico
a score of dawns and dusks you have kept watch,
battlements crenelated with banners of purpose,
weathered walls outfitted in sun’s splendor,
steadfast with veiled serenity in storm;
falcons buttress towers
and doves gather in courtyards
finding rest for weary hearts
and counsel for wandering minds
as the gates open and laughter tolls.
elegance is the architecture that colors
your strong skeleton in pastoral radiance
with courage clasped about your nape
you said your faith is the fount by which you plant flowers
and cool the calloused feet of the labored
whose virtue you admire like the lovingkindness
of dew that quietly dances in new mornings.
for a score of seasons you have endured
and as the moon continues to chase the sunlight,
the smile etched in your soul will beckon,
as a beacon, the faint home.
A Thorny Relationship
By K. Williams
Here you come again with
thin gloves and short shears.
I guess you didn't learn
from the last two years.
I don't like being pruned
and I've many a thorn,
so the clothes you have
on are about to be torn.
Sorry about the tear
in your long sleeved shirt,
and the thorn in your finger.
That's gotta hurt.
I know you've just brought
me food and water.
To make amends,
I'll offer this barter.
I'll grow lots of buds and
get them ready for bloom.
Soon I'll have so many petals
no more can find room.
Shakespeare’s Flowers
A Poetry Collection by Alan Catlin
Shakespeare’s Flowers
Marigolds, lavender and savory
for a Winter’s Tale
Woodbine, musk roses, eglantine
for a Midsummer’s Night Dream
Columbine for a thankless lover,
the woe begotten, the forsaken
”Sow fennel, sow sorrow”
sayeth Ophelia to her brother
“And here’s rue for you and
rue for me...” sayeth Hamlet
Henbane for Hamlet Sr. and hemlock
for Macbeth’s witches brew
Lady smocks, pied daises, and cuckoo
buds for Love’s Labour Lost
Violets for a Twelfth Night
Cowslip for The Tempest
Strewing herbs, curly mint, sweet marjoram
for All’s Well That Ends Well
Primordial Dreaming
insists upon the ignition
of fossil fuels, geysers
of crude refined by exposure
to rarified air, burning in
wide sweeping arc, raining
white phosphorous on
the exposed skin of roses,
the raised beds of flowers
pressed into seams, the stripped
mines of a bountiful night.
White Whales in Fields of Wildflowers
The wind turning back the white
heads of the Wildflowers, turns
down the bladed lips of grass, these
thistles, engorged, tremulous with
a breeding presentment of wind;
an acknowledgement of whales,
breaching the crests of hills, clear,
vital gouts of spume fitfully propelled,
geysering above the wild, ruined fields,
this crystal night of fragmentation
grenades rain bowing the bowed,
unhindered growth of fields, crouched
in an attitude of fear, stung by spontaneous
combustions, ravaging fireweeds,
red ants, a tumultuous flare, electric
as St Elmo's Fire illuminating the severed,
flowering heads, those disconnected gold
pieces hammered to the fractured masts
of whalers sent to an inland sea;
the white humps of the encroaching
gather of herds, undulate, a shimmer
of unnatural refracted light just above
the surface of fields, taking air for
the third and final time before the
breathless plunge.
Poe dreams
of a house
of the dead,
rooms all his
loved ones
expired in,
without cut flowers
to mask the scent
of fatal disease
having its’ way
with a body:
the natural mother
and the step one,
the brother then
the wife,
a sister and more,
pale and consumptive,
life blood spewed
in a basin.
Like Keats
he could foresee
the future
in a cough.
Red Daffodils, White Rain
after Stephen Hannock
Vermillion sky, empurpled
as a bruise, the dark stain
of alluvial soil along the edges
of an open wound,
red fields of wild flowers:
hybrids, mutant species
chemically enhanced,
their roots drilled into
night shaded bone,
impervious to weather,
these rose madder blooms,
these acres of daffodils
from another life.
Caustic Flowers
Outside the greenhouse
the cold is a hand pressing
down on stained glass
panels that shed flecks
of lead paint like dander
from weeds or flowers
from the outside world
in search of fertile ground
to grow roots in.
New breeds of plants are
being born, ones that defy
naming, that shrivel and
shrink when touched but
leave wounds on uncovered
hands that fester and bleed,
burning to the bone like
something best left extinct,
if reborn, will be determined
to exact a virulent form of revenge.
A Chance For Your Heart
By Lucinda Berry Hill
In your embrace,
You hold close, your heart.
Sparing it pain
From falling apart.
Closing a door,
Building a wall;
Not letting it feel,
You think it won't fall.
There's always a risk,
Always a chance
In every step
There is with romance.
Life holds many loves;
That makes who you are.
But there's one who was made
With a song for your heart.
How tragic it'd be,
To not take the chance.
In shielding your heart,
You may miss the dance.
Lucinda Berry Hill Author of Coffee With Jesus ©
The Dancing Freak
Poetry Collection by Alan Catlin
The Sadness of Dreaming
late summer rain at
a lake on well chilled
mornings, the loons crying
each to each as they dance
across the rippled surface
unseen within the shadows
cast by overhanging evergreen
boughs and the silence that
follows them every time when
they go.
El Amor Brujo
Sailors offer her vino rojo from cracked
lips of half gallon jugs, whisper passages
from arcane manuals of love in her ears,
press their fingers to her parted lips,
smear the face that demands lost souls
in an open boat, the high not navigated
seas she commands; enslaved, they kneel,
watch the gitano dance, that solitary tango
peeling layers of desert from unpainted walls,
spreading sand on hardwood floors, building
a dense Black Forest for lovers from which
there is no escape.
Three Farmers on the Way to a Dance
They look as if they were
characters of a Beckett play
stuck in some no man’s land
between one of those places
where people are buried up
to their necks in refuse or worse,
and another, where all the dwellings
have been burned out and partially
rebuilt, then abandoned once
the will to go on flagged and couldn’t
be revived. The ill-fitting suits
they wear convey a message:
we’re here at the wake for the food
and drink and we’ll gladly sneak
out behind the seen-better-days
cottages for a snog with a lass
or maybe dance a jig if music
should happen in between toasts
for the dearly departed, “May he go
in peace and always have the wind at
his back.” None of them do bereavement
or real joy either, but they will take
a drink, if offered, maybe two or
three and then, whatever chaos ensues
will make what remains of the night
a memorable one. They have no clue
what any of this means or whether
they are in it for the long haul or just
passing through. It’s a long walk
from where they are now to wherever
it is they are going.
Dancing Freak
Maybe they were teaching
ballroom dancing over at
the Psyche Center and his
section had let our early or
else he had made his escape
by way of the Frances de Sale’s
shop and scored some tux
and tails O’Malley’s Funeral
Parlor had stopped using for
display purposes. I half expected
most of the suit to be missing
in the back like one of those
hospital gowns he got to wear
around the ward, not exactly
a fashion statement to be sure,
but what he was used to. Or else,
it was his lucky day to score
the whole suit for his ambition,
for his dreaming Fred Astaire
fantasy, though he wasn’t likely
to be scoring any Ginger Rogers
for his partner for those dance
tunes he imagined were waiting
on the jukebox for the right couple
to be stepping out to, not that he
had a buck for playing songs, real
or imagined, or that he could read
anything more complicated than
a Dick and Jane primer despite
claiming to know Dick real well
and Jane too, back in the good old
days before Ginger, Top Hat and
the Great War that ended it all.
Watching Amy Winehouse Recorded Live on New Year’s Eve
She seems almost out of time
and place, so young and alive
in too short party dress, get-your-
attention-made-up mascara mask,
in your face tattoos, a study in four
parts: part sweet 16, part Queen of
the Greasers, part streetwalker on
the make, part diva, backed by all
black band, sidemen, dancers, doing
a cool version of the stroll, as she
accepts a drink from a fan, ad libbing
not –so-funny, no-rehab-for-me lines,
then singing a mean kind of low down
white trashy blues, living rough
the only way she knew how.
Great Tortoises in the Discotheque
"on the plain of skulls, God's golden
eyes silently open." Georg Trakl
creeping, undetected along the prefab
dancefloor scuffed by a multitude
of feet, sheen muted but still translucent,
reflecting the spinning overhead orbs,
white light caught in various degrees
of descent, multi-colored strobe
flashings discoloring smoky haze, faces
of the revelers co-joined in seeming
rhythmic agony of dance, propelled by
deep, dread, soul shuddering bass,
"I need to love you, love you baby"
lyric lines, great tortoises ignore,
chewing on long strains of dried choke
weeds, cloaked in body shielding armor,
tensile necks and heads wary, anticipatory,
as they come, discerning eyes scanning
unnatural night.
Web of dark intrigue
By David Thorpe
A birthday feast for Herod`s pleasure,
his wife and queen a devilish plan conceived
to revenge her tarnished pride on a vagrant prophet,
imprisoned for condemning her illicit marriage
Her means, her daughter, Salome,
to ensnare her husband royal
in her web of dark intrigue.
Her gift, Salome`s dance of seven veils,
a salacious performance for honoured guests
who, captivated by every veil discarded
their hunger they forgot,
their eyes by her beauty feasted
The last veil fallen, her charms for all revealed,
Herod in ecstasy bid her to name a desire,
half his realm would he forfeit.
To his displeasure, her wish her mother`s prize,
the prophet`s head, served on a golden charger plate.
the bond was honoured that very hour,
the severed head, an offering of bloody aspect
This saint, who had exhorted his followers to be baptized,
a sacrifice of Salome`s female seductiveness;
she later to rule as Queen of Chalkis,
on the Island of Euboea
David Thorpe ©®
The Death Of Ophelia
The sweet gloom of darkness captivates
the paleness of her face...
The Death Of Ophelia by Theresa C. Gaynord
Stretches of water melted in a blue mist
as the night air lightened echoing her
shrieks of hysterical laughter.
The sweet gloom of darkness captivates
the paleness of her face,
dark hair an upswept tousle of curls.
Futility straightened her rags
as she drowned without any desire
for servility.
Framed in dusk with clasped hands
full of white lilies a string of twinkle lights
transforms into a flower chain of crimson
blooms.
Footprints through the dust bring water
to the gardens sprouting them with pleasant
pride as Ophelia assimilates to the shadows.
The rivers are to be trusted within their own
conventions ,as we within ours, with sufficient
allowances made for inherent temptations.
Theresa likes to write about matters of self-inflection and personal experiences. She likes to write about matters of an out-of body, out-of-mind state, as well as subjects of an idyllic, pagan nature and the occult. Theresa writes horror, as well as concrete gritty and realistic dramas. Theresa is said to be a witch and a poet, (within the horror writing community) and she has been published in a number of magazines throughout the years.
An enchantment
By David Thorpe
I stopped my ferris wheel,
slid down a moonbeam to reach her,
she was running away with my dreams
stolen in the darkness of an eclipse
She turned around and waved goodbye,
my ignorant eyes reflected in her tears,
she vanished, startled by a gust of wind
without revealing the reason for her haste
Had she not divulged all her secrets?
Making love in a shower of stardustour bodies melted one into the other
consumed entirely by an enchantment
David Thorpe ©®
Three Poems by Juanita Rey
IN MY STEAD
I let the book flop onto my lap.
My face turns away from words,
eyes stare blankly
as my mulling mind
stops the story in its tracks.
What have I been reading.
Poetry? A chapter of a novel?
I dress comfortably,
white blouse,
deep-folded dress, a greenish brown.
My arms are long and brown.
One loosely grips the discarded pages.
The other buoys my head.
Introspection, melancholy...
the feelings interweave.
A sigh rises up in my flesh
like the ribbon in my hair.
And then it deflates,
dangles like rings from my ear-lobes.
This is how it is with me,
when I’m reading,
when I’m doing nothing more
than breathing –
at once, loosened, tightened.
a radical complication,
a recognizable image.
FORWARD AND REVERSE
I wasn’t sure
yet there he was
holding me in his arms.
It did feel comforting
so I thought of it as kindness.
Actually, despite how
tight he clasped me,
I was floating.
It felt more like a parachute opening
than touch.
Whatever the effect,
it adapted itself quickly to passion.
A kiss came out of it.
Like the best food,
the kind that doesn’t pass the mouth.
And that only increased that sensation
of being suspended in midair.
Yes, everything was a contradiction in terms
but a corroboration in reality.
We stayed like that until midnight
when he had to leave.
So every kiss, every embrace,
reversed itself
until we were back at the beginning.
Except that now I was sure.
AFTER OUR ARGUMENT
I rushed out of the room,
slammed the door.
So what did I leave behind?
More of your screaming at me?
Or utter silence?
Maybe I didn’t have to run ten blocks
to my friend’s apartment,
cry on her shoulder,
sip her mint tea,
take up her offer to stay overnight.
That last word uttered in anger
could have been the last.
The heat may have already cooled.
The heart-racing, hands-trembling.
and ear-aching could have
already been in remission.
Your glare may have been
about to let go of your eyes.
But I slept on a couch anyway.
I left you to wonder where the hell I was.
My girlfriend reckons I snore.
There’s something to be said
for the least of my troubles.
Juanita Rey is a Dominican poet who has been in this country five
years. Her work has been published in Pennsylvania English, Opiate
Journal, Petrichor Machine and Porter Gulch Review.
Poetry Collection by Alan Catlin
Coney Island Roller Coaster Nights
1-
edging up
the looming
Cyclone
roller coaster
ramp;
frantic,
jolting eyes
before
the plunge
2-
phantom
roller coasters
shake,
hurtle over
the edge;
screams
linger
behind
3-
painted horses,
sliding
metal poles,
merry‑go‑ round
calliope
music,
reach out
for the brass
free ride
ring
4-
Fleet,
flying swings,
sleek
metal chairs
impelled, arcing
outward,
swaying faster,
faster,
faster;
someone is
waving,
quick,
wave back
Post Card to Thompson August 13, 2019:
Nelson Algrin walking on
the streets of Chi Town
Dreaming Simone: Chicago’s own
Monarch Beer, neon wilderness Liquor sign,
blur of street car, beat down, fare game, red
lights hustlers; slumlord pay by day
flophouse rooms, candle lit and cigarette
smoked, bedside table, overflowing ash heap,
peeled label, long necked brown bottle empties;
Dago red, vino stained, chipped glass containers,
tipped high hat johnnie red, amber colored pints;
Darktown, saloon nights and rumpled sheet days,
jazzed police reefer raids, speakeasy johns and
sharp duds pimps; man with a horn, man with a
golden arm, man walking the wild side, loaded dice
game defeated, beating a portable royal to death;
novel ends and no new beginnings, doomed-to-
fail transatlantic affair, oceans of morbidity and
grief, his love token hers to the grave.
Post Card to RT in the Afterlife Jan. 29, 2019: The Wild One
Remember that iconic image
that was on every male college student’s
wall, next to Bruce Lee, of Marlon Brando
on his motorcycle from the Wild One?
That was you, wasn’t it?
Or how you saw yourself, though
you later acquired a Jap bike you dumped
more than once. At least, when I knew you,
back in the 70’s, when we were primo amigos.
I wonder, were you ever able to walk again
without a limp?
You loved that poem I wrote about
you way back in the tavern days, “What I Would
Do If I Owned a Motorcycle”. The last lines
were, “Bleed our the whole Goddamned road,
yes I would, if I owned a motorcycle.”
It was all about dying young, in a
spectacular fashion, not the way you went,
slowly, from a long illness, at 67.
That must have really put a dent in
your self image. If you still had one. I wouldn’t
know, one way or the other, as you effectively
disappeared in the 80’s and no one much saw
you since. I’m not sure if I want to hear the
details. The preliminary search I did for you,
yielded so many questions of a catastrophic
nature, I thought, maybe, it was better to remember
you when you were young, driving the top
down, bright green pleasure machine/ death car,
Triumph sports model, or the Jap bike, the wind
in your face, bugs in your teeth, and a Belle
Star helmet scuffed from road rash and who
knew what else? It was fun for awhile and
then, well, it wasn’t. Ride hard into the ozone,
my friend. It’s where you always wanted to be.
LA Woman
I hear Jimbo singing on some eternal jukebox
in all the dark back alley bars
and night clubs in my mind,
stoned and drunk and falling
off the stage, the mike stand a weapon
he might hurl any minute,
his dull eyes getting duller
with each verse he can barely recall,
a bottle of Jameson's Irish at the ready,
for on the ground rocket flights
to uncharted heights new depths:
“Mojo Risin Mojo Risin”
And we're hitching a ride on some open
box cars into a gold mine,
but the cars aren't for ore,
they are for the dead killed in whatever
war we are waging, some eternal conflict
that never seems to end.
When we close our eyes to drink deeper
from the Irish, the cars becoming hansom cab hearses,
all draped in black crepe,
riding the rail some kind of demented,
no-longer funhouse ride,
a roller coaster funicular railway ride,
into the deepest pits of hell.
a fiery pit on the other side of the arcing night.
Special forces rangers are carrying the scalps
they gathered raiding Indian country, dressed up
as the night, they come in:
this death from above, mining mission,
from the killing fields of acid rock music.
We become eternity's tunnel rats
palpitating the stone effigies carved into
the columbarium lining the cave walls,
adytum for the grateful dead chorus singing
from the shores of the flaming pits
of nuclear wasted hell:
“LA Woman LA Woman in the Afternoon-----“
rocking the whole dead scene
so loud and surreal we are carried all the way back
on the shoulders of all the dead we could not leave behind,
all those we killed and left in our wake by our carelessness,
just another weird scene inside the gold mine
from which there is no coming back.
Season of the Witch
His idea of a fun that Winter was
jumping naked from a second story window,
into a six foot high snow bank outside the dorm
window, screaming at the top of his lungs as
he flew and threatening to do it again until,
“He got it right.” A blanket, a few blasts
of cheap bong wine, and another stick of primo
Cambodian Red and he was flying right,
wrapped in some blankets and seeing
the kind of flying monkeys who came for people
who didn’t live righteous lives; visions that,
obviously, had nothing to do with him.
Someone suggested taking a spin in his wheels,
the used hearse in the parking lot along with
all the others, “No man, it’s cursed. She put
a hex on it.” She was the witch he’d been screwing
since he arrived on campus two years ago as
a second semester transfer freshman, with hair
down to his ass and the most dynamic
sound system in a way-beyond-it’s-useful-life,
rig. “Man, everyone has a hearse. It’s the 60’s.
Or a Beetle. But mine has a reel to reel.”
A game breaker for a witch who rode shot gun with
the devil, always in black, pentagram amulets and
wild gypsy hair, dead things in her crocheted
shoulder bag along with great weed, mystery powders,
and spell casting shit. “That girl was wild, Man.
beautiful and a heart stopping body once you got
rid of all those clothes. I don’t even think she, like
owned, underwear. Only goes with guys who have
a hearse. Says she dug the vibes. And the music.
Man, I loved her but she blew me off. Said I was
dragging her down. Stole all my Donovan tapes.
‘Season of the Witch’; that’s her life story.”
It would have been funny if everyone hadn’t seen her
around, climbing in and out of those vehicles,
late at night and the sound of things dying inside
that could never have been misinterpreted as something else.
Born to Be Wild
We rode when the moon
was full, stoned freaks in
some top down convertible,
long hair blowing in the wind,
speeding down unlighted narrow
switchback roads, drinking beer,
standing as tall as we could,
singing along with 60’s protest
songs, barely hanging on,
a suicidal psychopath at the wheel,
driving dead center through
blind turns into straight-aways
daring what was coming to come.
Switching AM stations, we become
The Dave Clark Five, singing, “Catch
Us If You Can” singing, “Glad All
Over” singing Steppenwolf, “Born to Be
Wild,” the refrain “Never going to die”
extra loud; that’s how young we were,
how crazy, how stupid, how wrong.
A Roller Coaster Ride
By Lucinda Berry Hill
A boy on a coaster
With high points and lows.
Sharp turns and sudden twists,
But bravely he goes.
He could be at the top
But soon he might find
He could be at the bottom
Or rounding the side.
Sometimes He may scream,
Holding on for his life.
Sometimes He will laugh,
Enjoying the ride.
Life, like a coaster,
May rattle and shake.
The way to survive?
Let God have the brakes.
Three Poems by Robert Ronnow
For Spring No Hesitation Is Great
Today is April 1st. Transit strike.
Mayor Koch accepting the fact. Myself,
far from crisis central, in North
Manhattan, measuring the temperature
of my apartment. In the sun it is
warm. The crows have returned again
for Spring.
Today life and the city are o.k. Watching
cat in the morning sun. Drinking tea.
My 1300 dollars will melt like summer
snow, but in the meantime, like samurai
I do not show my fear. I remain still
as on the subway and prepared to fight.
I am sitting under the emergency brake
when a coiffured Latin woman rushes aboard.
The doors close but she decides she wants
out. She bangs on the door as the train begins
to move. I see it happen on her face,
she finds the red cord and pulls,
no hesitation.
Maybe someone’s hand or foot was caught
in the door. Maybe she’s just selfish and
impetuous, got on the uptown not the downtown
side. Maybe the friends she could have
been with didn’t get aboard. Whatever
her reason, she acted and the train obeyed.
Some of the passengers sit through the
whole thing, some of us stand. Myself,
I stand, look for the hand caught in the door.
Later, walk home through the pouring rain.
Today is April 1st. Transit strike.
Sky blue, temperatures mild. Democracy
is great.
At Basketball
Basketball stands for war or battle.
That’s why I think about the players’
personalities, in my foxhole or squad.
Danny and Ben are fast and smart. Dan
especially can pass making him master
and commander. To defeat them as we did
is very satisfying. Ben’s five year old son
is intelligent but distant. Disdains to answer
my question Why are you you?
But I’m not here
to catalogue the men’s personalities.
I like them. But each of us has moved on
many times, when _______ suddenly died
the games went on with hardly a mention
and his name has since been forgotten.
But even this, absolute mortality
of not just our bodies but our names
and souls is not what I came
to talk about. Yesterday, between games,
I asked Joe how Molly his daughter likes
the high school. He mounted an impassioned
defense of reading as the indispensable skill
when I suggested math, the scientific method
and history are essential too.
Also between games
Bob diffidently asked why my kids are bald.
I was moved by the care he took to satisfy
his curiosity, concerned the subject might be
difficult. He’s a political science teacher so
I took the opportunity to ask What ails
the republic? Of course I answered myself
wanting mostly to hear myself talk about Iraq
and how empire is self-correcting. For once I was amusing
I thought, treating the subject with a light touch
heretofore lacking.
But none of this is what I came to say.
A new guy, very big and strong, a
bulldozer under the boards with a good
outside shot if needed got into a dispute
with the other Bob who likes to tell people
what to do sometimes, about an offensive
foul Bob called which we almost never do.
The new guy said If you can’t take it don’t
play under the boards which is what I say
when I’m pissed and don’t give a shit.
Bob said You’ve been pushing and shoving me
all day. I said He doesn’t want to be
pushed and shoved which got a wry
smile out of Danny as I put the ball in play.
Troy and Desanda
Learning disabled, hopelessly unemployed
Troy McBride can’t write the address for his next interview.
Warehouse stock, 331 Tiffany Street, in the Bronx.
His girlfriend, Desanda Gaddy, also unemployed,
with one child by Troy. She’s much brighter
but probably doesn’t realize it. For one month
she worked an evening cashier job until her mother
refused to babysit at night. Wants to go out, live
her life, too. Desanda made numerous appointments
yesterday, can write and find the addresses o.k.
Troy has nowhere to live, has been crashing
with a woman in the Bronx. She’s on public assistance,
they share the bed. How Troy reconciles this woman
with Desanda doesn’t matter. Survival precedes love.
Troy can’t meet the rent although she gives him
subway fare. He dresses well enough in the youthful
style, dark shirt, thin dark tie. At least no sneakers
or a stocking over his head. Smokes cigarettes
but so do a lot of people. Hedging bets on life.
Desanda is tolerant of Troy. Understands his
predicament. No stable home, no money. How
does she feel about her kid? At least she has
someone to love her now. Troy forgets
to record the names and phone numbers of companies
he applies at. Burned out on angel dust. Wants
a job that pays and offers benefits. Too old
and desperate for a work experience/basic education
program. Needs a living wage, not a stipend.
But can’t read or write or even speak coherently.
Interestingly he’s not desperate enough to work fast food
at age 22. So the woman on public assistance is
a surer source of income than we think. Good.
Security guard may be the way to go with Troy.
No police record, requires no writing skills, just
stand there and be big. A job with no security
for the guard. Troy’s mother threw him out
four years ago, although she helps out now and then.
He dropped out of high school in the tenth grade
kicked around the house and streets two years
doing drugs and partying. Met Desanda, got her pregnant.
Does Desanda have a contraceptive in place?
We don’t know. As employment counselors, is that
our business? Only if Desanda brings it up. On
the bulletin board there’s plenty of information
about family planning clinics. When she lost that
cashier job, I was completely frustrated, but not Desanda.
Takes it all in stride. I gotta admire her cheerfulness,
but why shouldn’t she be happy? She has friends, family,
a community such as East Harlem is, not the worst,
and a purpose for living and acting in her kid.
She feeds the baby, negotiates living space with her mother.
Troy and Desanda wake up, late August morning,
hot and humid New York City. They have interviews
planned as well as personal business and pleasures
today. They have responsibilities, society puts
survival on them, never mind their disadvantages.
It is tough and it is good. Desanda will land
another cashier position, maybe today. Troy
will go for security jobs, I figured it out, the
uniform will make him feel better, the check
too. The work boring, easy, slow, perhaps fulfilling.
For Spring No Hesitation Is Great
Today is April 1st. Transit strike.
Mayor Koch accepting the fact. Myself,
far from crisis central, in North
Manhattan, measuring the temperature
of my apartment. In the sun it is
warm. The crows have returned again
for Spring.
Today life and the city are o.k. Watching
cat in the morning sun. Drinking tea.
My 1300 dollars will melt like summer
snow, but in the meantime, like samurai
I do not show my fear. I remain still
as on the subway and prepared to fight.
I am sitting under the emergency brake
when a coiffured Latin woman rushes aboard.
The doors close but she decides she wants
out. She bangs on the door as the train begins
to move. I see it happen on her face,
she finds the red cord and pulls,
no hesitation.
Maybe someone’s hand or foot was caught
in the door. Maybe she’s just selfish and
impetuous, got on the uptown not the downtown
side. Maybe the friends she could have
been with didn’t get aboard. Whatever
her reason, she acted and the train obeyed.
Some of the passengers sit through the
whole thing, some of us stand. Myself,
I stand, look for the hand caught in the door.
Later, walk home through the pouring rain.
Today is April 1st. Transit strike.
Sky blue, temperatures mild. Democracy
is great.
At Basketball
Basketball stands for war or battle.
That’s why I think about the players’
personalities, in my foxhole or squad.
Danny and Ben are fast and smart. Dan
especially can pass making him master
and commander. To defeat them as we did
is very satisfying. Ben’s five year old son
is intelligent but distant. Disdains to answer
my question Why are you you?
But I’m not here
to catalogue the men’s personalities.
I like them. But each of us has moved on
many times, when _______ suddenly died
the games went on with hardly a mention
and his name has since been forgotten.
But even this, absolute mortality
of not just our bodies but our names
and souls is not what I came
to talk about. Yesterday, between games,
I asked Joe how Molly his daughter likes
the high school. He mounted an impassioned
defense of reading as the indispensable skill
when I suggested math, the scientific method
and history are essential too.
Also between games
Bob diffidently asked why my kids are bald.
I was moved by the care he took to satisfy
his curiosity, concerned the subject might be
difficult. He’s a political science teacher so
I took the opportunity to ask What ails
the republic? Of course I answered myself
wanting mostly to hear myself talk about Iraq
and how empire is self-correcting. For once I was amusing
I thought, treating the subject with a light touch
heretofore lacking.
But none of this is what I came to say.
A new guy, very big and strong, a
bulldozer under the boards with a good
outside shot if needed got into a dispute
with the other Bob who likes to tell people
what to do sometimes, about an offensive
foul Bob called which we almost never do.
The new guy said If you can’t take it don’t
play under the boards which is what I say
when I’m pissed and don’t give a shit.
Bob said You’ve been pushing and shoving me
all day. I said He doesn’t want to be
pushed and shoved which got a wry
smile out of Danny as I put the ball in play.
Troy and Desanda
Learning disabled, hopelessly unemployed
Troy McBride can’t write the address for his next interview.
Warehouse stock, 331 Tiffany Street, in the Bronx.
His girlfriend, Desanda Gaddy, also unemployed,
with one child by Troy. She’s much brighter
but probably doesn’t realize it. For one month
she worked an evening cashier job until her mother
refused to babysit at night. Wants to go out, live
her life, too. Desanda made numerous appointments
yesterday, can write and find the addresses o.k.
Troy has nowhere to live, has been crashing
with a woman in the Bronx. She’s on public assistance,
they share the bed. How Troy reconciles this woman
with Desanda doesn’t matter. Survival precedes love.
Troy can’t meet the rent although she gives him
subway fare. He dresses well enough in the youthful
style, dark shirt, thin dark tie. At least no sneakers
or a stocking over his head. Smokes cigarettes
but so do a lot of people. Hedging bets on life.
Desanda is tolerant of Troy. Understands his
predicament. No stable home, no money. How
does she feel about her kid? At least she has
someone to love her now. Troy forgets
to record the names and phone numbers of companies
he applies at. Burned out on angel dust. Wants
a job that pays and offers benefits. Too old
and desperate for a work experience/basic education
program. Needs a living wage, not a stipend.
But can’t read or write or even speak coherently.
Interestingly he’s not desperate enough to work fast food
at age 22. So the woman on public assistance is
a surer source of income than we think. Good.
Security guard may be the way to go with Troy.
No police record, requires no writing skills, just
stand there and be big. A job with no security
for the guard. Troy’s mother threw him out
four years ago, although she helps out now and then.
He dropped out of high school in the tenth grade
kicked around the house and streets two years
doing drugs and partying. Met Desanda, got her pregnant.
Does Desanda have a contraceptive in place?
We don’t know. As employment counselors, is that
our business? Only if Desanda brings it up. On
the bulletin board there’s plenty of information
about family planning clinics. When she lost that
cashier job, I was completely frustrated, but not Desanda.
Takes it all in stride. I gotta admire her cheerfulness,
but why shouldn’t she be happy? She has friends, family,
a community such as East Harlem is, not the worst,
and a purpose for living and acting in her kid.
She feeds the baby, negotiates living space with her mother.
Troy and Desanda wake up, late August morning,
hot and humid New York City. They have interviews
planned as well as personal business and pleasures
today. They have responsibilities, society puts
survival on them, never mind their disadvantages.
It is tough and it is good. Desanda will land
another cashier position, maybe today. Troy
will go for security jobs, I figured it out, the
uniform will make him feel better, the check
too. The work boring, easy, slow, perhaps fulfilling.
2020 -- Memory of Lawton 1963
By John F McMullen
I was in the Army at Fort Sill, OK
in what then seemed a colossal waste of time
but, in retrospect, was really
a very important part of my life.
The town adjacent to Fort Sill, Lawton
had no industry
but it did have
bars, clip joints, hookers, and whatever
else could separate a soldier from his money.
It also had
an Indian section,
a Mexican section,
a black section,
a white soldier section,
and a white real people's section.
In New York City,
we had “neighborhoods”
Italian neighborhoods,
Jewish neighborhoods,
Irish neighborhoods,
Black neighborhoods.
But we never thought
of New York City as segregated.
(Maybe we should have.)
But Lawton was
definitely segregated!
Anyway, my platoon had
an “IG Inspection”
and did exceptionally well.
My platoon Sergeant,
a very sharp soldier,
who I respected,
gathered us together
and said:
“I'm proud of you.
You did very well.
The Supply Sergeant and I
just bought a bar a mile out of town.
Come on down.
The first one's on me.”
No dope, he!
If we started drinking
a mile from nowhere,
we were there to stay.
As anyone knowing us
might expect,
Warren (from the old neighborhood)
and I were the first ones
from our unit to arrive.
I was into around my third beer
when Bob (also from Inwood)
walked in with two other folks,
both black.
The bartender saw me greet them
and said to me
“I can't serve those folks”.
(It was obvious that he meant
the black folks).
I explained that my sergeant
owned this place and
invited his unit down for a beer
and that these folks were
part of the unit.
No good!
The bartender said that
“they should have known that
the invitation didn't include them”.
That, of course, set me off and I
was soon as persona non-grata
as my black friends.
Out in the parking lot, I said
“Ok – where can we get a drink together?”
-- only to be told,
“No place in this town”
So “they” went to “their bars”
and Bob, Warren, and I went to “ours.”
I was reluctant to say anything
to my platoon sergeant.
He was, after all, my superior.
But, four weeks later,
after I was transferred to another unit,
I was sitting in a bar with a book
and a pitcher of beer –
not an unusual sight
when Sgt. Jones came in the door.
I waved him over to my table,
poured him a beer,
and told him the story.
He said “I feel terrible.
I hate to cause anyone
to be embarrassed”
Great! He wouldn’t let
it happen again in his bar!
But he added “We really
don’t mix down here”.
I plunged right in.
“What do you think of
Sgt. Lowery (his black superior)?”
“He’s a fine soldier and a gentleman.”
“Would you have a beer with him?”
“I have in the NCO club. He’s good company”.
Undaunted (and not knowing when to quit),
I went on.
“Would you have him to your house?”
He looked at me as though I was
bereft of my senses.
“I have a wife and daughter”.
I had no idea what to say.
I mumbled something,
changed the subject,
finished my beer,
and went on my way.
That was fifty-seven years ago.
Things may have changed greatly.
Barack Obama has since commanded
the armed forces
but
are we really different?
Copyright John F. McMullen 2020
Poetry Became My New Basketball
by John F McMullen
From the time
I was twelve
to over sixty
basketball was
the one constant
in my life
It took me through
changes in
schools
aspirations
careers
marriages
parenthood
residences
I was small in
high school and
only grew too late
to play in college
That didn’t stop me though
I played
for Catholic CYO teams
for a local Episcopal church
in a league at the Jewish Y
in leagues on Wall Street,
Westchester, and Inwood
and pickup wherever I could
get a game
I went from a
fair player
to a
pretty good one
to a
good one
to a
very good one
back to a
good one
and then a
fair one
and then
done!
I only consulted, taught and
wrote columns on technology
for about 5 years and then,
through a quirk, poetry
entered my life
grabbed me by the throat
and consumed me
Other than my wife and children
it became the number one thing
in my life
In short, it has became the basketball
of my mature life
But wait!
Basketball gave me
what’s known medically
as “ARFURA”
“A Really Fucked Up Right Ankle”
No tendons or ligaments
Arthritis
Bone spurs -- that won’t keep me out of the Army
And caused a ruptured tendon in my leg
Additionally I have had
Two minor knee operations
Jelly pumped into both knees annually
Arthritis in both hips
While it was all worth it
basketball has crippled my body
Will poetry
do the same to my brain?
Copyright 2019 John F. McMullen
David Thorpe presents...
A brief affair in Berlin
The story is inspired by the film “I am a camera”, yet with some of my own fantasy.
In the late 1920´s on a business trip for my father´s
textile mill, in the Yorkshire Pennines,
I found myself as a young Englishman,
in the bustling and enrapturing city of Berlin,
heading towards its twilight of the gods,
but that is another story
A young American singer of undiscovered renown,
the luminous star of the smoky Kit- Kat -Klub,
where, dressed in gaudy costumes, she aroused nightly,
her mainly male audience, with her songs of illicit love,
she was to awaken my hibernating libido
in a most unpredictable and unforgettable way,
this is our story
Berlin 1930
Sauntering back to my hotel in the early afternoon,
a sudden cloud burst over the avenue “Unter Den Linden”
obliging me to dash to take shelter in the nearest entrance,
a boutique for extravagant attire for emancipated ladies,
one of which I then collided head on,
just as she was leaving the establishment,
balencing precariously a pile of fancy decorated boxes.
Needless to say the boxes were scattered,
the lady in question falling into my arms
as we both stumbled indecorously to the ground,
much to the amusement of passers-by,
forgetting their haste to escape the downpour,
not so being my unfortunate accomplice,
whose tongue in no uncertain manner,
made that quite clear
I helped her to her feet and we viewed the disaster,
she then gathered her boxes, I helping and apologising,
both holding our cargo of boxes and much to my bewilderment,
she burst out laughing and I decided to accompany her.
I politely enquired if I could be of further help
and blinking those long eyelashes
over those mesmerising eyes, she suggested:
”Yes, you can invite me to a cup of tea
in a sweet little café here in the neighbourhood”
Delighted at the thought of making her acquaintance, I accepted
The rain had now baited,
we set out to walk towards the Brandenburg Gate,
she doing most of the talking, I the listening,
still in the middle of her life story she exclaimed:
“Here we are!”
We were standing in front of the Hotel Adlon,
the top address for nobility visiting Berlin.
She marched into the foyer, I in tow.
We were greeted by doormen and page boys,
who obviously thought we were residents.
The `sweet little café´ was of opulent magnificence,
taking the luxury for granted, she had us seated at a window table,
where, whilst savouring our Darjeeling, she detailed enthusiastically
all the celebrities who had wined and dined
within these sacred walls of affluence, including Josephine Baker,
being her idol and mentioned various times.
She divulged to me her name, Sally, I introduced myself as Chris
Sally and I became lovers that very evening, a passionate affair,
a journey which took us through the labyrinths of sensuality,
stopping at every station to enjoy the view.
Sally was my teacher in a personal two week crash course ,
which opened the door to a world of the sensibility of life.
I returned to Yorkshire a man reborn, unknown even to myself.
Our mutual story ended here, yet our stories continued
Yorkshire, May 1960
I never saw or heard from Sally again but often reminisce about our brief affair in Berlin,
and wonder if she returned to America before the storm clouds burst over Europe.
I ask myself, if by chance we were to meet again, would we gaze at each other and smile,
once again I being enchanted as I look into those mesmerising eyes.
David Thorpe ©®
Angels for Jack
By Lucinda Berry Hill
Jack is a donkey
That was tied to a tree.
Nothing but his eyes
Could the rescuers see.
The water was rising
In a fast-paced manner.
Towns were all flooding
In Louisiana.
But that didn't stop
Some men that were brave
From facing the water;
A donkey to save.
God sends his angels
To those who're in need;
A child, a dog,
A donkey indeed.
Jack, he was blessed
On that wet summer day.
New life, new friends,
And a new place to stay.
Lucinda Berry Hill Author of "Coffee with Jesus" AND "A Second Cup with Jesus" ©
Three Poems by Sanjeev Sethi
Doxies
Recycling of shame
disrobes her,
scuffs her self-esteem
with blights of disgust.
These are inventories
of démodé imprints
drawn in with
quotidian ardor.
Lay of lastingness
revivifies her from languor
of narcolepsy.
She gleans
she is as charming
as her credentials.
On the dais of her mind
she cast Him.
His radiations
direct her
to be her best reading.
Sanjeev Sethi
Next>>
Improv
Accentuated by whimsies
of the moment, recumbent
leg on leg, didn’t require
the embellishment of the moon
or makeup to ignite the impulse.
No parleys with the purlieus, too.
Soniferous expirations added
the background score
to the spontaneity
of the session.
Sanjeev Sethi
Next>>
Peewees
(1)
Seeing one’s latest snap, one hums, nah.
Years slip on: later while rummaging
one locates it and lips, eh nice.
(2)
Hachure of shared noise carries
fluent urgencies. Orbits rotate.
It is no longer only about me.
(3)
How do the unblessed
have the brass balls
to bless others?
(4)
Another angle:
is it your face?
Am I drunk on you?
(5)
Wishful of swiping rashers from someone’s
reality isn’t an unusual impulse. Are you
fain not to forfeit the other pieces?
Sanjeev Sethi
***Over***
Of Time Machines, Sword Fighting
and Pied Pipers
Sit down, folks,
Alan Catlin
invites you to listen to his goodnight stories.
It's ...
Story Time
In the Iliad
strange gods
and headstrong men
fought obscene
wars
for a woman
for honor
and now
my son
hears
swords
and battle axes
furiously clashing
hears
spears and arrows
singing
as they fly
into the wind
hears
the screams of wounded,
dying men
the still trees
the myth,
the moon on a
field of black
#
When the man
who sharpened knives
came to our door
my son
was frightened
by his wild red hair
his fire blazing eyes,
and
by the way he said
"Knives,
sharpen your knives
real cheap"
and, then,
the grindstone
singing in the barnyard
Abe Lincoln
If Honest Abe were alive now he’d probably
freak, then die of shame, considering what
the party he represented has become.
The term “rolling over in his grave” would
probably apply, if that were an option for Abe.
But it isn’t, as he is buried under something like
sixteen feet of concrete to prevent grave robbers,
sometimes known as Resurrection Men, from
stealing his body. Once something like that
gets started it’s tough to stop it. I mean,
let’s face it, what do you do with something
like that? It’s not as if you could stick a dead
body just anywhere, in a box, or not. And Abe was
a giant of a man for his time, in many ways,
just ask his wife Mary. So there would be
this big, odiferous box, what to do?
“Just stick it in the cellar, guys, on the cobblestones
next to the barrels of beer.” Someone was bound
to notice. One of the co-conspirators, in a partially
successful body snatch, was a bartender
who owned a pub. You can’t trust a barman,
can you? Or you could: to come up with the most
outlandish, ridiculous ideas ever. And after a few
pints it would sound like gospel. Good thing
there aren’t more bartenders running for office,
though, these days, who can tell the difference?
Well, after the last time the plot was foiled,
it was decided to put an end to stealing Abe’s body.
An infinitely better idea for a movie than the one
that was made and won all those academy awards.
Hence, the concrete grave. Mary, however,
was not deterred. She consulted mediums
who could see a cukoobird coming from a mile away,
and tried to establish contact. There is a “picture”
of Mary with the spirit of Abe enveloping her
that hasn’t been established to be the first instance
of photo, image manipulation, but ranks right near
the top. Poor Mary, all those tragedies: her husband
being assassinated, their favorite son dead of a
dread disease, another son dead young, but the
sole surviving son, Robert did quite well, despite
having to deal with these life tragedies and Mary
totally around the bend. Robert achieved
success in business, fame, fortune and ended up
owning a historic house in Vermont you could
visit today. Mostly the younger Lincoln avoided
politics and who could blame him? Politics
is a killer. Still there is a story floating about
that president William “The Big Round One”
Howard Taft got stuck in a tub while bathing
at the Lincoln abode. Explain that to the press!
Pied Piper
All the illustrations of this classic tale
are of this beguiling youth, playing a pan
pipe followed by a gang of skipping,
jumping, running after this guy, kids.
Places like pediatric hospital wards
and offices have these murals and such
but the really crazy thing about the
whole scene is: this is a parent’s worst
nightmare. The pied piper is the kind of
guy you tell kids not to take candy from
or get into his car so you can help find
his lost puppy. In fact, he is a vengeful,
scheming dude stealing the children of
Hamlin and taking them to who knows
where, to what kind of unknown, awful Fate.
So much for free range kids, huh!
Who was it? Donald Bathelme? or
was it Robert Coover? retold the story.
Both of them were forever redoing fairy
tales and such, emphasizing the inherent
violence or nastiness implied by them.
In a harmless seeming, mock-serious voice too.
They would enter the mind of an archfiend,
someone like the pied piper (soon to be
a major motion picture, by the way, starring
a computer enhanced, younger looking
Gary Oldham as the Piper and Kristen Stewart
as the young mother who refuses to give up hope.
If you can remake Little Red Riding Hood as a
werewolf story and Abe Lincoln as a vampire
slayer and Jane Austen’s Bennett family
as trained ninja warriors, obviously, nothing
is sacred) and create a nifty variation on a
theme, usually in a modern setting, that will
curdle your blood. Nothing harmless about
a Coover rewrite. It’s about what you would
expect from a guy who titles one of his books
Pricksongs and Descants. And when you look
pricksong up in the dictionary to see what it means
it says: A descant. And you look up descant it
says: A pricksong. If that’s not cheating, I don’t
know what is.
Time Machines
Begin and end with H.G. Wells, though most
people these days only know the novel through
that cheesy movie made way back in the 60’s.
There is one aspect of that movie that cannot be
denied: it set the low bar standard for devices.
That particular machine looked like one of those
take your picture machines that used to be everywhere
before everyone had a cell phone with a camera, sans
the curtain. Given what selfies have become, it makes
one long for those machines, but that’s another story.
The hero of the movie, Rod Taylor, didn’t have much
to work with, but he did keep finding himself propelled
through a blurry time warps into the past where he had
many, so-called adventures. Still, the machine he had
at his disposal wasn’t nearly as flimsy as the cardboard
control room Flash Gordon had! Between that, and
the sad excuses for ray guns old Flash had, it’s a wonder
Buster Crabbe could keep a straight face while working
on the set. And those early state of the art TV
monitors. Brings you back. Makes you think of those
early K-Pro Computers with their double sided,
double density floppy disks, post card seized monitors,
incredibly hard-on-the-eyes green lettering, and
that heart beat cursor that could give an epileptic
actual fits. But it had like 400 something k memory
and easy to remember commands that make you long
for the good old days every time a new version of
Windows is released. Still, the Time Machine movie
wasn’t nearly as bad as the sleazy, maybe even,
daft “Island of Doctor Moreau” movie with Marlon Brando
clearly under the influence of , well, something.
And then there was “Slaughterhouse Five” which shows
the perils of mucking about in time could bring:
you could end up in a disaster film with every aging,
has been star on the decline, or worse, a young
Joan Collins. Better to imagine an area where Wells,
Conrad, Henry James and Stephen Crane were virtual
neighbors. What they could have done if they had
worked together. What Crane might have done of he
lived another ten years to the ripe old age of say, 40.
Poetry Collection by Jessica Goody
Offending Shadows
Inspired by the film Dead Poets Society
Possibility leapt in the air.
Anything, everything, lay at your feet.
You danced in the sheer sensation of it,
rapt and open, your eyes lit like commencement candles.
Magic lived there.
The enchantment did not reside in the painted backdrop,
but in your eyes: so seldom did such freedom
fly its flags upon your face.
For once, the world was crystalline and perfect.
The snow fell peacefully that night,
unaware of the blood that would be shed,
marring its pristine whiteness.
Every movement was deliberate.
At any point you would be discovered
in the dark, yet time seemed loose and limitless,
a calendar of blank and useless days.
Your final, and only rebellion:
If you could not choose your life, nor live it deliberately,
then you would choose its end.
That night the gun fell from your desperate hand.
For your golden moment onstage there was only awe.
Your Puck-wreath was a symbol of defiance,
its twigs and berries woven in your dark hair:
king of the forest glen, the magical fairy-grove.
Rehearsal
Threading along the dark recesses of the theatre,
through the rabbit-warren of wings, the black skirt
of the curtain drawn like a sail unfurling stands a
backstage tableau of stacked chairs and scattered props.
A scrim of sawdust felts the flats; folded ladders
lean and slouch. Dark knots burn like sightless eyes
in the wood, unpainted and splintering. People skulk
and scurry backstage, as darkly-clad as cat burglars;
specters presiding over a rummage-sale hodgepodge
of objects, assembling and rearranging worlds with
every scene. Actors stand poised in the wings, straining
for cues. They grin with fierce hilarity, struggling to remain
silent with all the desperate necessity of Anne Frank
in the attic, struggling to engender microcosmic lives,
tasting the flavors of the words on their tongues,
savoring the precision of a perfect phrase.
Backstage
Backstage, a no man’s land
stacked with wooden flats and instrument cases gathering dust,
ladders, card tables, stacked chairs, and puddled canvas.
A theatrical junkyard full of pieces to outfit worlds,
scattered objects like the refuse of a shipwreck,
the flotsam and jetsam of past performances,
the valuable and the mismatched, pieces of other lives:
Golden beaches and frosted mountains
beckon from sticker-studded suitcases,
their achieved destinations shining like merit badges.
Luggage crammed with bright print dresses,
a single opera glove, a musty feather boa,
stray nylon stockings etched with runs,
foaming petticoats, and a silver pocketwatch long-unwound.
Costumes glitter like the plumage of tropical birds,
winking sequins and frothing whitecaps of tulle.
The gowns appear brighter, seeming to glow in anticipation,
as if they know they are about to be worn.
Hats perch like birds’ nests along dusty eaves,
wig heads staring as blindly as Sibyls.
Swaddled in the bat-wings of dark curtains,
busy as ants as we sort and arrange,
outfitting make-believe lives with authenticity.
Within the microcosm of stage and set,
an ethereal creature is born.
Like an insect it lives for one night,
shimmering, ephemeral, only to die
when the solar system of spotlights are dimmed.
Poetic Prose from the Twilight Zone
By Dan Gallagher
***
Title: “This Cemetery is a Garden Party”
This cemetery is a garden party,
and I am a landscaper, except I draw human figures,
and by “draw” I mean like flames to a moth.
The columns of light, like human figures, scanning the atmosphere, but rooted to each owner
are each a three dimensional video
interviews recorded by their friends or videographers,
waiting for me to brush up against them, maybe ask them a question.
Their databanks: how long do superficial details stay relevant – a century?
While their deeper emotions seem less personal, pressing,
most men and women recorded these memories to make their lives entertaining.
Like the song “The Entertainer”, at first you can hear the scale as they practice,
but then it moves faster and faster, until you can no longer hear the method.
Because a holographic image isn’t always convincing.
Most older faces lose definition in some way – it’s nature
And I’ve heard the thought of death makes people more conservative – more certain?
If I held a mirror up to describe my own image,
there would be words missing, outdated, but you’d get the picture.
Sometimes, among them, I like to shout out a word like “Happiness”
and see who among them answers fastest
because what they’d said once on camera was short and incisive,
or just watch all their expressions change separately.
They are as unguarded as children or blind people,
although they all kept their secrets, all of them,
and I want to remind them: history also remembers the villains.
Gossip needs its victim.
It’s better than sitting in a Parisian cafe, tables all jammed together,
Where you’re thirsty, never enough coffee delivered
to hear everything at once without somehow despairing.
These videos are no different than living,
except they live their memories more consciously than ever,
preparing answers the way professors write papers, but more effectively.
Some of them spent years in retirement, measuring the past from their window,
the way scientists sought out high points in exotic places to measure the meter.
From the briefest answer I know if they had grandchildren or held important positions.
If they almost died several times – in military engagements or accidents –
I never hear the details. Some are like the French, silent or pensive.
Maybe they couldn’t afford the best list of questions.
Maybe they had a rule against stating the obvious,
which by their age was everything.
They are sometimes like students of a foreign language,
all of them trying to answer without understanding the question.
The strangest times are when they start answering each other’s answers,
as if they are having a conversation and I’m the only one here who’s not living.
Many visitors leave feeling their loved ones are busy.
So sometimes I am even their leader,
though the trick is to get them all to say the same thing unanimously.
At least all of them hailed from the same area, and even talk about it in passing.
Though it’s a strange effect to see one of them hear their own name
issuing from the mouth of a neighbor.
Most don’t respond, never remembering themselves in third person, unlike some politicians.
This gardening of mine is like finding someone’s old bookmarks,
which get pressed colorfully, on page 2 or 3 , in most volumes of history.
We do have a useful historian here. And someone who helped build Wikipedia.
They answer almost anything, but they bring up death and taxes
with that smug smile of television newscasters.
If you want to start the others crying or laughing,
ask those two to define the present.
But mostly we just talk about flowers and seasons,
because so many here love their garden of memories.
***
Title: Reliving a Second Childhood Through Tourism
I have dozens of new mothers and fathers, in all shape and sizes
Even the teenagers and I’m not embarrassed
I shout at them in simple English
Asking them for help, or staring at them,
Wide-eyed and expectant, although I am 57
And have seen everything
Without realizing it.
I didn’t have a childhood, at least not one
Where I didn’t feel like a foreigner
Lost and ignored but too young to realize it
Now I’m old enough to know I’m ignorant
And will stay that way unless someone, anyone
Makes things explicit.
Sure the answers become unintelligible,
Which I find familiar and comforting
Since the chat seldom drifts away
From simple directions
I feel safer in foreign countries
Where everyone is watching me like a zoo exhibit
Foreigners are the only ones left who treat strangers
Like members of the family
Out of duty, not friendship or understanding
Am I childish, staring at landmarks
Nodding to explanations which sound like nonsense
Even if I showed some interest in the language they live with
Or explored the world for history and context?
At times I get paranoid, like a child who can
Lose his privileges by showing too much independence
But I’m never in danger of learning history, architecture,
Or even photography merely by seeing
And asking directions for mysteries
***
Title : On Process
I used to watch cooking shows
The way dogs watch women wash dishes
It was a distraction, a comforting ritual,
a poor man’s Confucianism.
An overly-confident Brit makes edible trinkets
One channel over, a man plays darts, robotically efficient
Painters paint the same tree on different landscapes
And I, at home in my pants, sit still transfixed
Getting my minimal daily fix, strange motions,
That mythical chemical potion, e-motion
Until I’m convinced the world can be made bigger with just a flip of the switch
A process has steps, everyone says
Like false entrances to Norman fortresses
A pointless, shallow ascent
OK, step 1 is some mix of onions and dip
I even feel superior, skipping several steps ahead
Honestly, we’re all skipping steps in our head
“I wasn’t here for the accident, but I wonder what will happen next?”
A counting game for children
A placeholder for living
Endless white papers, unfailingly numbered and empty
A game made of replays, with blind refs
A man counting steps to dance hall success,
a man on a mission
But we, still virtual children
in our imaginations
still associate recess with education
and having no great will
run in every direction
someone else clapping the rhythm
pegging our pace, but not our attention
transforming our increasingly predictable rhythms
into almost theater for the almost living.
Thespian Souls
Poetry Collection by David Thorpe
If not I
If not I,
who is then worthy of her love?
too often did I ask myself,
yet an answer remained elusive
in winter´s frozen sanctuary
My feelings were the most sincere,
never did I have a doubt,
together with the shortening days
her eyes of autumn shades,
lost their warmth midst nights of frost
Snowflakes bury my bruised pride,
morning mists hide my foolishness
to believe I played a leading role
in the theatre of love´s carousel
Neither, to let oneself be loved,
nor to believe in one´s own vanity
are requisites for lasting harmony,
but rather as a vintage wine,
to first be treasured
ere delighting in its bouquet
For him and he alone
Again to the shoreline she ventured,to marvel at the spectacle,
a water colour masterpiece,
as darkness melted shades of crimson,
the sun´s final bow ere night fell
Reluctantly the horizon faded ´neath a veil
of autumn´s gathering mist,
yet the lapping of a returning tide
brought caresses of a cooling breeze,
evoking the release of a fugitive tear
Selene and her glistening entourage,
discreetly their presence this time did hide,
her nostalgic sadness of that moonlit night,
two actors on their sensual stage, where
hearts above stardust clouds took flight
Ever his whispered words she hears
within the chambers of her mind,
still burn his kisses on her desert lips,
yet within a cocoon of ice her libido,
for him and he alone preserved
Actors on a mundane stage
You and I
we spend our time decoding,
a glance, a gesture, a gaze,
deciphering words for meanings,
camouflaged
A game of losers we play
masquerades of pretence,
a charade of hidden feelings
to be guessed or ignored
on purpose
Life they say
is not for beginners
both ever apprentices
actors on a mundane stage
never learning our roles by heart
David Thorpe ©®
Thinker
By Thaddeus Hutyra
An old man with long grey hair and a grey beard
Bending over a book bound with goat skin
In his starry mind, the paths of the wise men
Whose works he had already read thoroughly.
Eureka! * ... Cogito ergo sum ** ... Wisdoms of predecessors
Brilliantly glow in the universe of his mind
Not as a directive but as navigational hints
For in his opinion there is no ultimate truth.
He picked up his pen, leaned over his book
"Man!" - He wrote. "No philosophy or dogma
Are the definitive truth. They are but your nourishment."
"Man!" - He continued. - "They are only molecules
like the Higgs boson enabling you to discover yourself
in the spirit of freedom, in which you are an eagle in its skies.
So… Don’t be too serious with your philosophy
Don’t be too serious with your religious views
We all are roses of Jericho, sent by the winds
To four points of the world, then resurrecting
Having new lives, time upon time, upon time.
World healing is you and me, all of us
Taking into our hands precious stones of peace
And holding them as a reminder the world is us.”
„Man!” - Exclaimed the thinker in the end
„Be the cosmic rays of healing
Here on this starship called Earth
Take care of you, of us all, be angels of Earth
For we all are a family, one called humankind!”
„Man!” - Let’s open our hearts, let’s heal the world
Let’s free our minds, have fun, enrich ourselves with freedoms
May the lights of peace, lights of healing light us forever
And be our eternal way of life, so help us, God!
* "Eureka" comes from the Ancient Greek word εὕρηκα heúrēka, meaning "I found (it)", an exclamation attributed to Ancient Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes. ** "Cogito, ergo sum" is a Latin philosophical proposition by philosopher René Descartes usually translated into English as "I think, therefore I am".
Like Fine Wine
By Lucinda Berry Hill
I'm much like a bottle
Of fine wine on a shelf.
I've been here so long
I'm filled with great wealth.
Each wrinkle, a lesson
From mountains I've climbed,
From valleys crossed over
Time after time.
I have red spots and brown spots
And a few extra pounds.
But I don't let my battles
Keep me held down.
My eyes aren't the best.
My hearing's impaired.
But I'm a survivor
By faith and much prayer.
My memory is weak
But my heart perseveres.
I've endured all life's conflicts
With plenty of tears.
And each strand of silver
That covers my head
Is a sin that's forgiven;
A debt that's been met.
I consider the years
And the trials I've faced.
Yes, I am aging
but inside I am great.
It takes years of struggles
With victory each time
To become like a bottle
Of chosen fine wine.
Author Lucinda Berry Hill, of Coffee with Jesus ©
Poetry Collection by Randal A. Burd, Jr.
Armed with Imagination
Imagination armed this youthful knight--
A plywood shield and sword of sapling wood
Created echoes in the neighborhood
Of backyard battles fought in fading light.
Envision how we must have been a sight
To see—a panorama understood
By only we who fought each chance we could
While lacking rhyme or reason for a fight.
The best of memories those days remain:
Each noble quest and faux chivalric deed.
Forever will they be accompanied
With yearning for just one last grand campaign.
Overthrown
I slowly cruised our former neighborhood:
Locations once familiar now are strange.
Most houses there are worse for wear and change;
No laughter echoes from the nearby wood.
When everyone grew up and moved away,
Our plywood platforms rotted in the tree.
No Robin Hood remained to climb and see
His merry men engage in daily play.
The paths we made have long since overgrown.
Our wooden forts became the forest floor.
Adventures don't occur here anymore--
Our sacred places have been overthrown.
While Waiting
While waiting for the Greyhound bus,
My dad and I, the two of us,
Recounted pleasant moments passed:
The memories we had amassed,
Experienced, and oft discussed.
Our dialog continued thus--
Light-hearted and extraneous--
Until we saw the bus at last
While waiting.
We said goodbye without much fuss;
I stepped into the ominous,
Uncharted future from the past
Not knowing how my die was cast
And feeling I grew up too fast
While waiting.
Flashes of Mirror-Light
Poetry Collection by Meg Smith
The Hare Queen
You can make this done.
Put on the green
of witchery
and behold,
the bonfire.
Shadows form, and recede,
and only you can leap,
flashes of blue fire.
Night Music
For Stephen Damon-Tilley
Everything
for the shadows --
a room in clouds,
save for one
memory,
one sonata,
threads
severed
and spare.
No more silence,
but measures
will rest,
and play on.
Horse Fly of Grace
Your face reflects
in its summer mask --
mirrored sunglasses,
hair of a sugar forest,
white streak warning,
"I am old.
I am a father."
Such were
the night wings,
black, sleek,
horse fly
on the banner
of the rail trail.
Something is gone,
some holy body.
The horse,
the deer, the barred owl,
all flee.
Flashes of mirror-light,
fall and remain.
The World in Henna
Everywhere
along my route,
I offer my hand,
my wrist.
Here, inscribed.
It's a quiet,
of carrying
a dance,
a whisper.
Endures,
like a friend,
like many friends.
Endures,
like the
sacredness
of song.
Alan Catlin Invites You to Join Him Backstage
Poetry Collection
Shakespeare
Ah, the bard. Everyone knows who he is:
that dude with the pointy beard every high
school student in America who makes
it past the eighth grade, has inflicted upon
him: Friends, Romans and dudes from the inner
cities Borrow me some cash for a stash….
No wonder guys like Baz Luhrmann are
updating and jazzing up the old classics.
Who could resist a lean, mean and pretty Leo
di Caprio with a not-so-nubile, Claire Danes,
doing the dirty deed to “Kissing You!”?
And all those dance like fight scenes. Who needs
something so trashy, and out of date, and lame
as “West Side Story”? Come on Natalie Wood
as a Latina! That’s just so 50’s. Let’s face it,
even the Japanese can make a decent flick
out of Old Willie and not lose anything,
maybe even Add something to the Venerable
One. Watch “Ran” sometime, even ”Throne of
Blood”, and then watch Mel Gibson as Hamlet
opposite a same-age Glenn Close as his mom
in “Hamlet” and tell which one is better:
the one that follows the script or the one
that sets Lear in medieval Japan?
And the really odd thing, the Gibson “Hamlet”,
despite a liberal pruning, and the ridiculous
casting choices, isn’t half-bad. Still the role
is a bit outside of Mel’s comfort zone
established in “Road Warrior”, Mad Max
camp classics, and adventure flicks.
That comfort zone evolved into Mel becoming
a kind of Latter Day John Wayne folk hero,
though no one seems to get the contradiction
of an Aussie playing American Super Patriots.
Well, he’s got the drunken bigot part down and
that counts for a lot in image conscious Hollywood,
where intelligent film making and Film from real
Art subjects are at a premium. I mean, who wants
to watch something foreign sounding like “Titus Andronicus,”
despite all the dead bodies, when you can see
“Mad Max: Fury Road,” where there is virtually
no dialogue at all, intelligent or otherwise.
Albert Camus’s Happy Death
In between bouts
Of TB
After the dissolved love
marriage to a drug
addict
Another marriage
more fruitful
twins borne
A second novel
written published
as the first
“The Stranger” sold
published to acclaim
During The Occupation
Between more bouts
of TB
directing plays:
Shakespeare
Camus as Hamlet
All the ghosts inside
out on stage with
Albert and his wife,
the actress playing
fair Ophelia
To be or not
to be
but not for long
Post Card to Thompson July 03, 2019: Iseult Gonne When Young
“Iseult is mad aygan,” Maud would have
written to Yeats if she were a poet instead of a
revolutionary. Though what she said, was, her
daughter, then a teen, was mad.
Willful is what she meant.
Her mother’s daughter.
Yeats expressed sympathy.
Proposed: to the mother and the daughter.
Having failed to woo his soul mate, the Queen of
Ireland, Maud Gonne, he tried the daughter. Who
he had know since she was a child. Who he was a
kind of surrogate father for. Was even rumored to Be
the father of.
And was refused.
Accounts differ on how seriously she viewed
the proposal. Yeats, no doubt, viewed her rejection as
a scornful, Hamlet rebuke a: from a Hyperion to a satyr.
The rejection of the famed poet/ playwright
probably the most sensible thing she ever did.
Allowed Yeats to marry Georgie, the “automatic
writer”, who would have a major role in his life’s work
as muse, amanuensis and second tier soul mate.
Instead, Iseult, married a younger, feckless,
“imbecile”, according to Yeats. One who would become
a second rate novelist, probably totally forgotten now, if
he hadn’t become a traitor; an Irish Pound, broadcasting
Nazi propaganda for the Germans during the war.
What must have Iseult thought as a single mother,
deserted, at home with two children, no income? Of her strange metempsychosis life: from a young woman a future Nobel
Laureate’s wrote poems about, to a lonely, harried mom,
the kind of woman who harbored a German parachutist/fugitive;
a man she confessed to loving and somehow, still managing
to beat the rap, to be acquitted at the subsequent trial.
No: Berlin Mon Amour, movie made of her life and times.
All of it so weirdly Wagnerian now. A kind of opera
with no heroes, no musical score, no lovers left alive.
Grave Digging to Chamber Music
Mozart for the ground breaking,
formal speeches from Hamlet.
to his mentor, so many years gone,
Dies Irae sung in the original Latin
for the in memoriam, poetic verses
inscribed upon freshly honed
and polished shovel blades,
all the abandoned passions:
Mahler told he must not walk
the heights, may no longer breath
rarefied air;
six feet down and digging,
old age and creative urging are irrelevant,
what matters is excavating the music
that welds us to the world and what
we are meant to leave behind.
Ralph Steadman’s Shakespeare
Mornings after a performance,
long nights spent drinking
porters and ales, looking into
a mirror he sees a character
from “Freaks”, a shrunken head
on too broad shoulders, a kind
of aura surrounding his face
as if a theoretical world was
burning down from the inside
of the glass, out into the other
world, the one he is nominally in,
now, motionless and dumb,
listening to bodiless voices whispering
in his ears soliloquies only he can
hear and pretend to understand.
Images from an Inaccurate Rendering of Shakespeare’s Hamlet
The man behind the curtain
may be Hamlet’s father or
the ghost of Polonius, a man
killed for spying on the young
lovers in repose by an after-the-
funeral banquet, as all the blood
would suggest, tears in the fabric
where short swords could go,
the unsheathed ones and the sheathed,
hung from the ceiling on long black
tethers to reflect candled light,
eyes flecked with egg shells, details
from the elaborate embroidery, wall
hangings, soiled clothes draped over
furniture and chairs, cloaking bodies
and limbs; muted horns offstage
set the scene for the next act,
a public drowning, Ophelia’s symbolic
blooms.
The Winter Gods
A Poetry Collection by Meg Smith
A Field of Frost
Walking is easy --
grass rises
in the white rush.
Nothing to gather here --
oak leaves curl in,
on the breeze.
Nothing to want here --
all are
buried hungers.
I won't stay here,
dance here --
but, leave a light here --
geese rise,
forming an arrow
in the gray sky.
I have fled
this migration.
The Butterfly Tree
For Jezzy Wolfe
This is the way,
an evergreen
in white,
dazzling in
wings of fire.
Here grows
a forest of memory,
paths through
the fluttering
space of cloud-purple
and sun-bright --
all resting,
all nodding,
all free.
Rhapsody at a Wood Stove
We can make
a pilgrim's place.
Sugar maples
are growing us
a spare roof,
all around,
with squirrel's nests
like hermit's hair.
Truly, we are the hermits --
under the clapboard,
closing a crescent
in the glow of embers.
My coat is drying
from the snow.
Then it will
be time to leave.
But, you, my
metalsmith,
math-poet --
move in quick resolve.
"More snow.
I will stop time
with more snow."
Above, above,
stay --
street lights,
and laughter
from chimney tops.
The Snowman Mural
Every year,
Earth recedes and rises,
restless in her cycle.
So, too, those you call
your best loves, grow --
smiling in photos,
before the finger paint facade --
until they too cast down
their shadows to Earth,
to her waiting
spring ground.
The Winter Gods
In memory of Lawrence Carradini
Losing a key
in the snow-covered grass --
how do we keep on?
Larry
yours is the spiral,
in the arms
of the galaxy.
Mine is still here,
in the dark of January,
forgetting,
misplacing, searching.
Saturn trails me
all day.
Larry, your time
comes round, again.
The same key falls,
and the frost grows.
Take a look at Meg's new poetry books, Dear Deepest Ghost
and This Scarlet Dancing, they are available on Amazon!
Seasonal
Poetry Collection by Edward Ahern
Snowfall
Snow settles over me in silence,
muffling the swirling wind
That sweeps it into my eyes.
blurring my stale vision
Of what I think is familiar.
It’s nativity blanket swaddles
An overused ground, soothing
The man-chatter down into faintness.
But like other miracles
Its presence is fleeting
And soon decomposes into
Hard packed noisy crunch
And sooty thaw.
Yule Log Embers
Christmas is a vague time, with
clinging, wool-itch emotions,
and the eggnog and cranberry smears
of pagan feast, potlatch gifts and piety
that line the belly of our self- image,
easing the hunger of our needs
just long enough to recognize
that others also need to be fed
Seasonal
I understand the yearn for constant balm,
but shun a chance to live in ceaseless warmth.
The shift to coldness draws my thoughts inside
the shelter cave of what I hold most close.
The forays back outside become small tests
of how adaptable I am to change,
and how my moods endure the darkened day.
Resolutions
New Year’s resolutions
are meant to be broken
as soon as we realize
that deprivation and muscle strain
are not our natural state,
and that a comforted body
yields placidity of mind.
Noel
Mixed emotions like good wine,
blendings of intensified taste.
Christmas stirrings of affection, greed and piety,
great nose, rich savor, bittersweet finish.
Ed Ahern resumed writing after forty odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. He’s had over two hundred fifty stories and poems published so far, and five books. Ed works the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories, where he sits on the review board and manages a posse of six review editors.
https://twitter.com/bottomstripper
https://www.facebook.com/EdAhern73/?ref=bookmarks
https://www.instagram.com/edwardahern1860/
New Christmas This Year
By Dan Gallagher
You can’t miss someone who doesn’t exist yet
But I forget myself, telling you this
And resetting my holiday programming
To something random and Mexican, music piled with Mayan symbols
While watching movies from maybe Armenian festivals
Or maybe just greeting the season the way animals experience it
Starting with Crazy Frog in the basement, but progressing rapidly to mountain
creations
A hike and maybe even quiet, to be savoured later
When the past goes silent
Thinking back with nostalgia, years later,
to the year I was born and my Mayan period ended.
Sentiments
By Alexandra H. Rodrigues
Most important to me YOU are
No matter if you near or far.
May you be blessed with knowledge and fun
Guided on earth by light of moon and sun.
There might in the future come a night
When the stars shine especially bright
Allowing our vibes to mysteriously meet
At some quite unfathomable speed.
What the future for either one of us might hold
None of us yet has been told.
In the stars men’s destiny is maybe chiseled
Only guessed at when by the wind it’s whistled.
The earth, the firmament and the universe
Protect and astound us since the day of our birth.
Let’s be open to surprise
As long as the moon sets and the sun does rise.
Jan.2019
Voicing the Spirits
A Poetry Collection by Alan Catlin
False Dreaming
where the syntax is
wrong a fracture
of light occurs and
asphalt storms are
lathered with concrete,
a colorful apocalypse
of star burst honeycombs;
each inner path ends
in a cul de sac.
To Kingdom Come by Paul Grillo: an impression
The acolyte is a conjure man,
his unbuttoned shirt and bare
skin signify the unrestrained
flesh of sacred snakes coiling
about in the goblet used for
imbibing alchemical pills shaped
like miniature soccer balls. These
are easier to ingest than ones made
of sun-flower petals, dried seeds, and
pod pollens gathered from the ex-
tended family homestead. The rings
on his raised hands are gifts bestowed
by necromancers, simple amulets
reduced in size, and made portable
for conductive medicine, sleight-
off-hand tricks of traveling side-
show display. An illuminated matrix
is introduced for special effecting,
one made by sample rubbings of his
rings that contains wooden platters
laden with victuals and potent comestibles,
easily drained by funnels into smaller
containers for quick sale and easy
dreaming. His closed eyes and beatific
countenance, are the way practitioners
of black arts must look when dissembling
the concealing arts of appearances,
while searching for the deeper truths known
to lie within. His dreaming, then, is
infectious, made dangerous by stealing
words from ancient codex of divined
mysteries while creating new ones,
such as the futuristic vision of subaqueous
depths containing phantom creatures
of the deepest seas and outer space ones
fused together in an interplanetary union
similar to Siamese twinning. All these
supernatural beings are Emergents, escaping
from cracks in the cosmic egg, a burden
hefted on the bent shoulders of a former acolyte
cast in stone for defying the established
orders of dreaming. Wither the New Age
Man? No one knows exactly but one thing
is certain, the results will be Amazing Tales
spoken of by those impressed for generations.
Heads
Shrunken, dried, displayed in rows
on sagging wooden shelves
Heads, dreaming heads, timeless, sparked
electric, galvanic having a life of
their own
Featureless heads, hallucinating, threatening
as only heads will
Imperfect heads on defaced carved busts
or locked inside marble struggling
to get out
Heads like lights on the edge of sight
Heads bald and smooth, emptied of matter
but vast inside like
Heads carved in the image of a mad god,
capable of speech but not of being
understood
Death heads staked on poles, dried out
or perfectly preserved in mortuary caves,
or beneath killing fields
Heads that come from nowhere and that
return from whence they came
Our heads and all the objects we cling to
such as life and what happens to our heads
when we do
Our heads letting go
Listen to the whistling music heads make as
they deflate, that shrieking that lasts for
a minute or is it a lifetime
The Thing
The guy who did stats for
the local rag said he was
officially listed as seven foot
four and a half inches and weighed
three forty-five. He could have
played in the NBA, if he could
have shot, run or dribbled a
basketball. All of which went
a long way to explaining why he
was marooned on one of the outer
moons of Jupiter playing minor
league basketball, which was what
Albany was to pro hoops in terms
of the NBA. The way he picked up
a pitcher of beer and absorbed it in
his hand, was the way mere mortals
handled a shot glass. After inhaling
three or four of those, he claimed
to have arm wrestled Andre the Giant
and the guy who played the original Hulk
and won, a dubious claim no one was
about to challenge. A few more snorts
of suds and he looked ready to audition
for a starring role as the title character
in yet another bad remake of “The Thing
from Outer Space”. He wouldn’t even
need makeup.
A Better Place
Word had it that if she ever worked
in this town again, it would be in a
movie with a title like, “Bride of
the Thing from Another World.”
“A perfect vehicle for her,” colleagues
suggested, “as she would be totally
believable as a wife of a ten foot vegetable
from outer space. Besides, she’s old
enough to have been in the original
so they wouldn’t even have to use makeup. “
“The original was made in 1951.”
“Exactly.”
She’d been the kind of cast mate that at
the wrap party, her fellow actors would
chip in and buy her an all expenses paid
trip to be a house guest at Baby Jane’s place.
Some suggested crippling her so she could
race about the upstairs with Joan Crawford
until they crashed and both died terrible deaths.
Or so the rumors had it.
All those years of playing the Diva hadn’t
endeared her to anyone, certainly not the seven
gone husbands or the army corps of engineers
she used as gardeners for limited engagements
the way other people changed their clothes.
Eventually, she turned to gigolos like Bill Holden,
though after a week with her, they pulled
a Sunset Boulevard swan dive rather than
continue on the course they were on; even death
was preferable to that. Then there were the plumbers
she called to examine her pipes, the mechanics
who changed her plugs, the siding guys that
cleaned her gutter and her drains, all gone now,
to a better place.
In the House of Spirits with William Blake,
East Rockaway, N.Y. a BxW Still Life 1965
She looks expectant, pensive,
head bent slightly forward
as if reading in the dark was a natural
pose for simulating lost in thought.
Standing, back rigid as a fence post,
her fervent eyes aglow, reflecting
inward behind dark lens glasses,
her head is haloed by the candle light
burning on the brick fire place mantle.
She mouths the words of the Ancients,
summoning spirits, The Undead,
chimerical inner bodies she releases
into her oblong living room box,
rearranging furniture, turning all
the mirrors, pictures and drawings
flat against the wall, drawing black
cloths over the end tables, cracking
the useless unlit bulbs, rending
the drapes and curtains, tickling
the candle flame on the mantle with
her tongues, as she stands, unmoving
amidst the turmoil, speaking The Unspeakable,
voicing the spirits.
Planets of blue smoke
A Poetry Collection by Meg Smith
Planets of blue smoke
Don't give me
a heart dissected,
or flames crippled
in the ash.
Let's rise.
Through sleep,
we are uplifted.
We are worlds
unraveling worlds,
and the strand
completes our orbit.
All done in silence,
All done in this
one, true space.
The Moss Path
In a dimmed room,
a summoning
of a place to ride;
copper leaves and
the nakedness
of waterfalls.
We're going --
black jackets,
thunder wheels/
We made an invocation,
to move,
through these walls,
and we can;
we have worked
and prayed
and cried it all --
It is ours;
in the sunburst
of leaves,
it is ours.
The Rain of Halley's
Larry
looking up
from his bed,
his last sacraments --
the sacred is in
eyes of twilight.
Hale-Bopp flashes --
wild notes of jazz --
though this room
falls silent.
Racing to the millennium,
we laughed, and danced.
Now, some time, gone,
the dust to the stars,
the dust to the furnace,
to the earn etched with butterflies.
Now, some time,
mine, alone,
Halley's falling in fragments.
Someone asked:
"I saw a coyote on the roadside,
and a meteor rushed past.
Is it a sign."
The universe throws together
the coyote and
the comet's last stand --
and both howl, and cry,
in the night-spiral,
whether we fall, like Halley's rain
of ice and stone,
or rise,
like coyote-song, in flames of sky.
Sunset boys
Your dreams
of driftwood
are done.
The shore
is fading
to gray.
A song,
I will
never ask.
of you
I dance
to silent words
into the dark tide.
--
Meg Smith's new poetry books, Dear Deepest Ghost
and This Scarlet Dancing, are available on Amazon!
The World Knows Now
(What I've Always Known)
A Poetry Collection
By Meg Smith
Autumn: A Dance
Stepping
into the circle,
I lift
your gauze,
and fall;
in your scarlet
mourning,
I fall,
but always, dancing.
The light bleeds
through
your straw bride,
The flames reckon.
I alone
ascend
in this veil.
Your vows
and her vows
crumble
in the cold ash.
This dance is mine.
This scarlet
runs to the night
that is mine.
Farthing
Your black cat,
among sunflowers,
wanderer, web --
her eyes in
scarlet mourning,
skin open
in silent meteors --
your emissary,
from your white,
lean house.
The world knows.
The world knows now
what I've always known.
Your sun falls
darkly,
your song hisses
in a scatter of dry leaves.
Labor Day
I sing
your blood
and tears
and you
can never die;
no veins fall,
no bones in chorus.
Just a whisper
across
a green lake.
Ursus Minor
Again, the bear --
they call you --
soft, footfall
in some distant forest--
the fawn, the fishercat,
all know.
Your paws are dark
and sure.
Such claw marks
on the lake shore.
A hundred hearts,
have been given you.
They fall and they fall
into this fire pit.
Slow, shaggy,
lifting a beer --
I dissemble you.
The throat, the jaw,
the great night
claws --
dark eyes.
No one was born.
No night
was born to me.
No one was
alive.
This, I breathe,
no honey,
but winter nears.
The Forest Spirit
We always circle here,
in the green path,
in the laughter.
Sun falls,
rabbits leap.
Birds gossip.
We know our way
from shadow.
We have passed
the same dark.
And we can
dance here,
and you are not alone.
The Cabinet
By Lucinda Berry Hill
Children are so curious
About everything they see.
They open up a door
And find a place to be.
They empty out a cabinet,
Throw all out on the floor,
Enough so they can crawl in
And sometimes close the door.
And without an effort given,
Into our hearts, they climb.
With a smile and a giggle
They nestle there inside.
What is the fascination
Of a cabinet on the floor?
I'll never know, but it's fun
To watch a kid explore.
They climb inside a cabinet
To look, to be, to hide.
They climb inside our hearts
As they bless our daily lives.
Author Lucinda Berry Hill of "Coffee with Jesus" and "A Second Cup with Jesus" ©
PLASTIC PLANKTON AS A UNIQUE DISH
By Daniel de Culla
Between Borneo and the Celebs
And between Bali and Lombock
Between continental islands
& Oceanic islands
Volcanic islands
& motherporic islands
Corpulent mammals had gathered
With some groups of Amphibians
Freshwater Fish and Mollusks
To a single plate table
With plastic plankton
As tasty morsel
Surrounded by birds and insects
Who had flown by:
Insects, Reptiles and small mammals
Arrived on floating objects
Drifting.
They talked about those terrestrial beings
Pilgrims of Life
And for life
From inn, hotel, river or beach
Beings for most of them garbage.
-They eat their own excrements
And believe themselves gods
Said some, and one another:
--One live to smell and others to taste.
They are disgusting beings, obscene, filthy
And ugly as they are lonely.
They only know how to talk about
Christian battles against the Moors.
Their loves as their beliefs and faith
Are a hell of a time.
They love, kill and rape
Like pigs that they are
Not caring if they insert love
Into any of the holes
Of the One or the Another.
-Their desire is to destroy, stain
And bloat everything
Comment one another.
-They look behind a mirror
And to justify their filthiness
Say that they are created by a God
Called Porras
Saying that he forgive them all
When the plain truth
Is that their origin comes to them
Of the crossing
Between bats and rats
And so they are so liars and charming.
A mysticetus whale
That did not reach a complete development
And therefore functional activity
Categorically stated:
--See these human beings
Some earthly and other aliens
Walking along the seashore
Or lying in the sand of the beaches
We can assure
That the origin of all of them
Comes from symbiosis
Between actinias and a hermit
(Pagurus striatus)
Or among the crab Dromia vulgaris
And the Suberites domuncula sponge
That masks it.
How have the face have the ass
Similar to the ass of the cute
Or that of Termitoxenia heimi
Termitephile diptera of India.
A cirriped seated on the shield
Of a sea turtle, said:
-Well, now, happy diners
Do the digestion
Of cellulose and plastics.
And every species for itself.
The Frontier Explorers
Poetry Collection by Alan Catlin
Frontier Explorers Suffering a Relentless Plague
of Mosquitoes
This formerly lost canvas of the mostly
unconsidered plight of frontiersmen is
not unlike the detailing of Romantic
artists of the time, is clearly influenced
by the written words of poets and thinkers,
Hudson River artists: Cole, Church, Cropsey
and all the rest, man dwarfed by Nature,
the heroic scale of Creation and Man's basic
insignificance when faced with the whole
of the animate world: these explorers
climbing thicket laden mountains, bushwhacking
trails, their rude compasses, the sun and their
instincts as guides, pausing at a clearing;
not so much as to consider God's grandeur,
heretofore undiscovered by white men,
not so much to contemplate, but to wave their
hands and arms about, attempting to dispel
an unexpected frenzy of insects attacking
any exposed, unwashed flesh, an ecstasy
of untrammeled beauty admixed with unrelenting
torment, spurring them on to even greater
heights, hopefully to escape, to avoid
a tragic, bloody Fate.
From Mohegan Bluffs on Block Island circa 1650
Unknown dreamtime objects
glimpsed on ocean horizon,
moving landward with
the tides and tail winds:
by soon-to-be extinct
native Americans:
one, two, three, a company
of tall mast ships.
The explorers are
coming with guns.
Edward Moran's Henry Hudson's Entering
NY Harbor Sept 11, 1609
Lone warrior
on Manhattan
Island beach
observing long
ships, sailors
from-who-knows-
where navigating
toward soon-
to-be harbor
site; the first
foreign terrorists
have arrived
"Bless Glenn Gould for throwing the concert
audience to the junkyard."Marshall McLuhan
All night he dials, speaking to colleagues,
friends, associates near and far, at absurd
lengths, even rehearsing entire works in
the hours before dawn, maintaining close
contacts at a safe distance, in isolation.
The true idea of north is contained in the studio,
underground, or overhead telephone wires,
random conversations overheard in truck stop
diners, or, long distance driving, on rock
stations fading out or tuning in, spoken
languages spliced together in polyphonic
rhythms, the symphonic sounds of modern man.
The last frontier is an idea like smoke,
an illusion like Absolute Zero in real life,
terra infirma for explorers in arctic territories
of the imagination, frozen in mid-motion,
no end in sight.
Technology is the archetype the twentieth century
will be remembered by, a Stonehenge of portable
machines, devices that allow us to communicate
our solitude, maintained in the strictest moral
terms; pure art in a vacuum where all thoughts
are unaccountable, are free.
The Idea of North
A Capella
singing;
frozen notes
in the rain
Contra-tenors singing,
voices like ice crystals
shattered by a tuning fork,
high C
Desert sands absorbing
light, refracted colors
betray the spectrum,
implied sounds
beyond hearing
Percussive ghosts:
a cymbal, a timpani,
a sousaphone!
A Glenn Gould Fantasy
Of an oil rig in the Canadian Arctic,
beyond the circle of everlasting night,
a concert grand sitting on a platform
fifty feet high. All around the podium,
orchestra chairs folded on tundra waste,
sound amplified by overhead speakers
hanging from poles buried in permafrost,
accompaniment by inward coming blizzard winds;
a progression of modern music, dark tones
by Webern, Alban Berg, and Schoenberg,
ice breaking notes that shatter the will of sound.
Guggenheim Art Exhibit as Divina Comedia Wax Museum
an incontrovertible
after Quan Barry
The sign outside chambered nautilus halls,
says: You Are Here, on notebook paper,
inscribed by a ballpoint pen and taped over
one that says: Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here
Arrows point down graduated, sloping path,
as if the walkways were a Guggenheim red
chamber dream retrospective, only all the Art
works are wax figures beginning with:
decadent royals, disgraced sports stars,
corrupt convict politicians; all their smiling faces,
almost animate eyes, devoid of characteristic,
licentious greed, and self-indulgent pride,
craven adulterers all. Further down, church
sanctioned inquisitors, disease infected new
world explorers, the executed murderers and
the tyrants that got away. All those deposed heads
of state re-incarnated, making ready to exact
revenge, to rise again.
Ixchel, Lady of the sacred light
By David A. Thorpe
Arising out of a sea of mist
the Island of Women was discovered
on a voyage during the age of exploration
by the Spanish conquistador Hernández de Córdoba,
being the first to see idols and relics of worship
belonging to the sanctuary of the Mayan goddess of the moon,
Ixchel
Her sensual beauty and flowing locks of hair
enticed the lover who became her spouse,
the supreme deity and god of the sun,
Itzamna,
siring thirteen offspring as proof of their fertility
Responsible for the needed rainfall
to provide abundant harvests,
Ixchel took the name of Lady Rainbow,
the lady of the sacred light,
oft depicted with a crescent moon
As goddess of midwifery, medicine and healing
much compassion did Ixchel bestow
on expectant mothers,
the myth, however, has a darker side ,
a jaguar goddess and female warrior
Ixchel´s gaping mouth suggests cannibalism,
the sacrifice of young unmarried maidens
formed part of sacred rituals in honour of her name
From the pen of David A. Thorpe ©®
The last of the summer wine
By David Thorpe
Without our permission
swallows in silence migrated,
fading in the veils of autumn
on their wings patterns
of summer skies reflected
September entered on tiptoe,
not to awaken slumbering leaves
unaware of their forthcoming fate,
to weave a coloured carpet,
humus for nature´s growth
Draped in flowing gowns of mist
the dawn witnesses the return of fog
against the sun a duel to continue,
defeated it slowly retreats with patience
for come late autumn a victory assured
As for ourselves,
with glasses raised
in a savoured toast
to the last of the summer wine.
David Thorpe ©®
Come September
By David Thorpe
Come September each other´s presence we do seek
for tender kisses then a deeper warmth do bear,
with new aromas the pregnant air carries,
those of the enchantment of autumnal herbs
Come September our lips with lingering sips baptised,
a goblet of new wine to share,
its sweetness a flaming symphony ignites
on our heart strings in unison played
Come September under our feet a carpet crisp is spread,
ere the quilt of golden leaf-fall be swept away
by jealous gusts, undressing in fading sunlight
startled mannequins of their autumn gowns
Come September the harvest of our toils we reap,
we pause our inner bearings with care to gather,
a compass for our destined lines of life to follow,
for soon nature will awhile to rest prepare
David Thorpe ©®
Creative Poetic Prose
by
Anita G. Gorman
---Gerard Manley Hopkins
Margaret stood in the woods behind her house. She knew that beyond her house the river flowed, yet she could not see it. She would eventually see the river as she did every winter when the trees were bare. Yet she had not observed many winters, for Margaret was only eight.
On this day the leaves on the trees in her grove (she thought of it as her grove) were golden. It was a sea of gold, and she smiled as she looked at the golden miracle. Here and there leaves were brown or red, but gold engulfed her and pleased her.
And then she shivered as a cold wind passed through the late September landscape. She looked at the trees and saw them as they would be in only weeks: gnarled and empty and old-looking, seemingly dying or even dead. Yes, she would be able to see the river, but she was still sad.
Margaret started to cry as she imagined the trees standing before her without their leaves. Putting her little fists to her eyes, she wept, though she was not sure why she was weeping. Her older sister Jessica found her there.
"Margaret, why are you crying?"
"I, I don't know. The trees are so beautiful, but soon they will look like they are dead. It makes me sad to think about winter. Winter will be here soon, and everything will be dead."
Mother was there, looking at the two girls. Mother was seriously ill, but she had not told her daughters. She looked at the golden grove and wondered if she would see it again the following year. Tears came to her eyes as well.
Jessica looked at her mother. "Mother, are you crying, too? Does the sight of our beautiful golden grove make you feel sad? Shouldn't we be happy when we see something so lovely?"
"Yes, Jessica. But there is also something about autumn that is sad. It's as if the world were dying, and we, too, are part of the world."
Jessica, fourteen and wise beyond her years, seemed to understand. "Yes. My friend at school--Elizabeth--died last week."
Her mother nodded. "I know. Her parents must be heartbroken.. We do not know how long any of us will continue to live in this beautiful world and get to see and enjoy trees and leaves and the river that we cannot see right now."
"Oh, Jessica, how did your friend die? That is horrible."
"She was riding her horse at a great speed and was thrown. She was killed right away."
"Horses are scary. Except for my pony Little Guy. When Little Guy grows up, will he become dangerous?"
Mother put her arms around little Margaret. "Margaret, we live in a beautiful world. It is, for the most part, a safe world. But there are dangers. People can have accidents or fall victim to disease and die. Such things happen, but for the most part people live healthy and happy lives and live to a ripe old age. People like your grandparents. They still enjoy life, even though they are old. Look to them as your example. Follow their example."
"What about your example?" asked Jessica. "You and Daddy are happy and healthy."
Mother didn't answer. She didn't know what to say. She remembered the poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Spring and Fall." Mother's name was also Margaret. She recalled the end of the poem as Jessica and little Margaret waited for her reply.
Margaret stood in the woods behind her house. She knew that beyond her house the river flowed, yet she could not see it. She would eventually see the river as she did every winter when the trees were bare. Yet she had not observed many winters, for Margaret was only eight.
On this day the leaves on the trees in her grove (she thought of it as her grove) were golden. It was a sea of gold, and she smiled as she looked at the golden miracle. Here and there leaves were brown or red, but gold engulfed her and pleased her.
And then she shivered as a cold wind passed through the late September landscape. She looked at the trees and saw them as they would be in only weeks: gnarled and empty and old-looking, seemingly dying or even dead. Yes, she would be able to see the river, but she was still sad.
Margaret started to cry as she imagined the trees standing before her without their leaves. Putting her little fists to her eyes, she wept, though she was not sure why she was weeping. Her older sister Jessica found her there.
"Margaret, why are you crying?"
"I, I don't know. The trees are so beautiful, but soon they will look like they are dead. It makes me sad to think about winter. Winter will be here soon, and everything will be dead."
Mother was there, looking at the two girls. Mother was seriously ill, but she had not told her daughters. She looked at the golden grove and wondered if she would see it again the following year. Tears came to her eyes as well.
Jessica looked at her mother. "Mother, are you crying, too? Does the sight of our beautiful golden grove make you feel sad? Shouldn't we be happy when we see something so lovely?"
"Yes, Jessica. But there is also something about autumn that is sad. It's as if the world were dying, and we, too, are part of the world."
Jessica, fourteen and wise beyond her years, seemed to understand. "Yes. My friend at school--Elizabeth--died last week."
Her mother nodded. "I know. Her parents must be heartbroken.. We do not know how long any of us will continue to live in this beautiful world and get to see and enjoy trees and leaves and the river that we cannot see right now."
"Oh, Jessica, how did your friend die? That is horrible."
"She was riding her horse at a great speed and was thrown. She was killed right away."
"Horses are scary. Except for my pony Little Guy. When Little Guy grows up, will he become dangerous?"
Mother put her arms around little Margaret. "Margaret, we live in a beautiful world. It is, for the most part, a safe world. But there are dangers. People can have accidents or fall victim to disease and die. Such things happen, but for the most part people live healthy and happy lives and live to a ripe old age. People like your grandparents. They still enjoy life, even though they are old. Look to them as your example. Follow their example."
"What about your example?" asked Jessica. "You and Daddy are happy and healthy."
Mother didn't answer. She didn't know what to say. She remembered the poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Spring and Fall." Mother's name was also Margaret. She recalled the end of the poem as Jessica and little Margaret waited for her reply.
A September Poetry Collection
By Alan Catlin
Where I Come From
By Sybil Hunt
From deep inside the earth’s core,
Infinite intensity, clear-hot density,
Perpetual motion ‘mid the stillness of everything
And nothing;
From the hammer-anvil-stirrup, elemental, incremental
Song that sings to your soul;
From the humour that holds open the path to the cortex,
The swirling vortex
That organizes, energizes, synthesizes
All that it means to be sentient – and human,
Metabolic, systolic, diastolic...
From beyond all time,
Inside rhyme,
And with no reason,
I appear
And love you.
Tolerant Isolation
By Edward Ahern
I am genially indifferent
to most of the standards
you try to enforce.
Worship who or what you will.
Eat whatever you can digest.
Make love to whoever’s willing.
Squander or save
your personal or net worth,
your mental or physical health
They’re your calls, after all.
Just please don’t tell me
why I have to emulate you.
Juxtaposed
By David Thorpe
An eclipse
our bearings lost
carried on a monsoon wind
into the tenebrous void
escaping out of a labyrinth of burrows
guided by glow worms into the night sky
juxtaposed
as stars
one to the other
we bestow eternal light
David Thorpe ©®
Moon gazer
By David Thorpe
Deep in bereavement
her search for consolation did she begin,
discovering happenstance a comfort slight,
a verse in a poetry book:
….then ask the stars,
their trillion years of wisdom
might reveal the answer to the enigma,
which taunts the sanity of your mind…..
A telescope did she engage
in the firmament´s void to find his star,
to embrace its fall was her wish,
yet shooting stars only from afar appear
One evening she focussed to the moon,
Selene´s smile did warm her heart,
the beauty of this celestial body
enraptured her each visit more
Each night she gazes at her friend,
confides in her sentiments bitter,
yet finding solace to ease the pain,
of the loss of love her telluric fate
David Thorpe ©®
Three Poems by Barbara A. Meier
Lt. colonel samantha carter
if i were
Lt. colonel samantha carter
i’d understand black holes
event horizons
and neutron stars
gravity
would be a piece of cake
floating on the moon
i’d pluck it like eve
in the garden of eden
if i could play with the
space-time continuum
i’d travel in wormholes
to pyramids built by the ancients
i’d know the tides on earth
sublunar and antipodal
spring and neap
and where Atlantis is buried
instead
i’m pinned by gravity
to this earth like an assassin
bug pinned to styrofoam
and I don’t understand
how stars explode
and die from collapsing matter
"And when I extinguish you, I will cover the heavens and darken their stars; I will cover the sun with a cloud And the moon will not give its light. "All the shining lights in the heavens I will darken over you And will set darkness on your land," Declares the Lord GOD. Ezekiel 32:7-8
Gravity
I feel the gravitational pull of the moon-
stretching, kneading like saltwater taffy.
My body longing for the sublunar June
high tide, overcoming depression with a laugh,
and drowning like some swimmer stuck in a rip
current. Ms. Kate Chopin strolling into
the sweep of the sneaker wave, dipping
to meet the flood current, anchoring her at
the bathymeter, like an insect pinned to
a piece of styrofoam. Gravity that
maintains the atmosphere and air, gluing
me to the curvature universe, mass
determining my matter and my trespass.
The Event Horizon
I am the Black Hole.
I wrap myself in the pull
of gravity, dense
in the fabric of
space, I admit at the fringe
tiny radiation,
Hawking, black-body
at the event horizon,
cloaking myself from
the planets, stars, and
you. Waiting for the moment
spitting out plasma
hot jets of electrons, protons,
ricocheting you away.
5 Poems
By Lucinda Berry Hill
A Big Gray Hunk of Love
I appreciate the elephant,
The giraffe, and kangaroo.
I appreciate the gifts from God;
The things that they can do.
The elephant's ears flap like wings
As they walk across the land.
They use their trunks to give a lift
Cause they haven't any hands.
Elephants hold a lot of water
Then from their trunks, they spray.
Peanuts are their favorite treat.
We seem to share that trait.
I love those big ole pachyderms.
Those big gray hunks of love.
Their babies, so adorable
As the cuddle mama's trunk.
I appreciate the elephants.
Their creator I applaud.
The chameleons, and the panda bear,
All blessings from our God.
Author Lucinda Berry Hill of "Coffee with Jesus" and "A Second Cup with Jesus" ©
Church on the Farm
I wonder if at night,
When everyone's asleep,
Do the animals assemble;
Do they have a meet and greet?
.
Do they gather to have church?
Do they sit on stacks of hay
And listen to the lamb's good word?
Do they bow their heads and pray?
Do the donkeys carry animals
In from 'round the farm?
Do they praise by the light
Of the moon and the stars?
Do the birds lead in worship,
Singing praises to the king?
Do the horses stomp their hooves
While others clap and sing?
Do the ravens bring in bread?
Do they drink a sip of wine?
Do the eagles guard the meeting place
With their keen and watchful eye?
Do the doves carry branches
Of hope and of peace?
Do the animals listen?
Do they trust and believe?
I wonder when the sun comes up
And they leave their bales of hay,
Do they carry Christ in their hearts
And show Him through the day?
Lucinda Berry Hill Author of "Coffee with Jesus" AND "A Second Cup with Jesus" ©
Shut The Door
Noah build a sturdy ark
Just as God had said.
Then two by two up the plank,
The animals were lead.
Two elephants, two bears,
Two dogs stood on the floor.
And the squirrels on the ark cried,
"God shut the door!"
Noah kept on calling
The animals by two.
Two monkeys, two cows,
Two hopping kangaroos.
Two porcupines, two rhinos,
Two bobcats moving forward.
And the rabbits on the ark cried,
"God shut the door!"
But Noah was obedient
And God loved all it's true,
So boarding on the ark were
Rats and spiders too!
Two skunks were fast approaching
With their black and white coarse fur
And the cats on the ark cried,
"God shut the door!"
But not until all animals
Were entirely aboard,
Did God tell Noah,
“Son shut the door.”
God spared all the animals
And those who trusted Him.
He promised with a rainbow
To never flood again.
So when you hear Him knocking
Don’t wait for something more.
Run to God's own loving voice
And open up the door!
Author Lucinda Berry Hill of "Coffee with Jesus" and "A Second Cup with Jesus" ©
Peace on the Farm
Chickens and roosters.
Cock a doodle do.
There's more than just one.
There's more than just two.
Little chicks are chirping,
Looking for seed.
Mother hens have babies
Hid under their wings.
The gentlemen roosters
Are calm for the day.
No fighting here
This side of the hay.
Then in walks a horse,
A dog, and a lamb.
Still, there is peace
Here on the ranch.
A great social balance.
A comforting blend.
We should take notes
From our animal friends.
No one is greater.
Not one is unknown.
All live in peace
'Till God takes them home.
Author Lucinda Berry Hill of "Coffee with Jesus" and "A Second Cup with Jesus" ©
An Angel for Paws
Angels come with harp and lyre.
Some come with a shield.
Ours came with a stethoscope
For animals to heal.
She also tends to those who love
The critters in her care.
When comforting is needed
She's the one who's there.
A vet may treat our gifts from God;
Their tails, their paws, and fur.
Ours is extra special, though.
An angel here on earth.
Author Lucinda Berry Hill, of Coffee with Jesus ©
3 Poems by Robin Ray
Robin Ray is the author of Wetland and Other Stories (All Things That Matter Press, 2013), Obey the Darkness: Horror Stories, the novels Murder in Rock & Roll Heaven and Commoner the Vagabond, and one book of non-fiction, You Can’t Sleep Here: A Clown’s Guide to Surviving Homelessness. His works have appeared at Delphinium, Bangalore, Squawk Back, Outsider, Red Fez, Jerry Jazz Musician, Underwood Press, Scarlet Leaf, Neologism, Spark, Aphelion, Vita Brevis, and elsewhere.
Anatomy of a Worm
When I come back it’ll be as a shameless red
wiggler worm, in love with a shadow I cannot
see, afraid of the dirt trapped in my five hearts.
I’ll writhe in my sleep. And dream. Elastic
thoughts of the flesh. Afternoon of my marrow.
This is how I’ll plan providence – over a deck
of cards. My climate is too intimate for compost.
I’ll hold the poppy field trails in the grooves of
my skin, intensity is flesh. My brother was an
alcoholic, then became a limousine, long, sleek,
black like the hair of a Japanese ghost. Night
crawlers like myself believe the Book of Blood
is an explosion. We all fall down. There’s my
self-portrait as a shell, it’s the wild in me, the
untamed delusion of fantasy. When I come
back it’ll be as a chameleon disguised as a
shameless red wiggler worm afraid of cards.
Red Crow
Regale me, vermilion crow, your desirous
passions of loves lost and innocence pilfered,
of unimaginable cerulean tides and tales ribald
and new. I remain your hapless worshipper, you
who sought adventures in the brotherly seas and
scoured prairillons amongst the tempested copse.
Secure me beneath your crimson panorama
as I hum your psalms of hope revered. Watching
as you cleverly break open cockles and quahogs
on the rock-strewn shoreline by repeated drops
and airlifts, I can easily admit this: your mother
has taught you well.
Nature Study
Carmine teardrops splash in chai cups. Quite
unpretty. When bipolar scarlet tanagers learn
the truth, they fly upside down in protest,
their cheeks flushed deeper than their wings.
Mestizos crush papaya beneath war-torn feet.
Mix sour cream in. Then have the gall to busk
at sunset for copper. Just like that. Caught in a
blender. Scattered everywhere like calendula.
A bumblebee lost its yellow. Colony ousted.
Flew to yellowjackets. No room at dandelion
inn. In Batesian mimicry, roamed aimlessly.
Pretended the world was a pollen basket.
The grasshopper leaped over the picket fence.
Viridian pastures promised. Verdant to the
lingo. Oil slick in rain puddle. Never an exalted
peridot or jade. Crushed like the bug he was.
Blue mountain swallowtails think they’re birds.
Entomologist having fun at their expense. Clipped
wings can’t zip through the azure. Bluer than muddy
waters. Spend their entire lives being misunderstood.
Perennial violas in full bloom. Scent so luscious it
attracts other violas. Violet sea snails. Gifted. Fragile,
anorexic, lavender shells. Allows its scent to be easily
airborne. Attracts other snails. Clever.
A fluttering of wings
By David Thorpe
A fluttering of wings
proclaims the arrival of the forward observer,
at his outlook post on the highest gable.
His head, like some reversed periscope,
surveys below the surrounding territory
in this peaceful and unsuspecting garden.
The dozing tom-cat,
out of his midday slumber aroused,
opens one eye
but maintains his position of nonchalant observance,
his defeat accepted,
even before the scurmish begins.
The secret sign given,
the troops move in,
displacing the pregnant air.
A perfect landing.
On outstretched necks,
four feathered heads appear above us,
awaiting the final command.
With a swish of wings,
swooping down in a kamikaze dive,
they occupy the granite fountain
and encircle the cascade
indifferent to its burbling water.
A refreshing bath taken,
the thirst now quenched,
with a fluttering of wings
the expeditionary force takes flight.
Mission completed,
a successful foray,
the tom-cat stretches,
and closing his eyes,
returns to his interrupted day-dreams.
The pigeons celebrate their victory.
David Thorpe ©®
3 Cat Poems
By Jake Aller
Cats Fighting in Incheon
Watching two cats
Fighting alongside the sidewalk
In suburban Incheon New Airport Town
Completely indifferent
To the humans
walking around them
And the humans
were indifferent to the cats
As they stood there fighting
And screeching at each other
One orange one
One half black
half white one
Both middle age in cat years
As I sat there watching the cats
really getting into it
I wondered
what they were arguing about?
But since
I don’t speak cat
I really didn't know
All I know
is they were really
screeching at each other
And almost look like
they were about
to attack each other
But one cat backed down
As the other cat
stood their proverbial ground
If they were humans
one would have pulled out a knife
Or a gun
And someone would have been killed
But being mere cats
They stared at each other
And walked away
but they kept
glancing at each other
So, I knew the fight
was not over
Merely postponed
until a later hour
Cats truly are the aliens
Who live among us humans
Or perhaps we are the aliens
Who live among the cats?
Watching the black cat
Watching the black cat
Slinking about
I am reminded once again the cats
are not our friends
as I stare at him
an alien invader
From another planet
Mysterious Black Cat Looking at Me
As I look out
At the parking lot
I see a black cat
looking at me with dark soulful eyes
filled with mysterious secrets
I wondered
What the cat
thinks of me?
The cat looks at me
With a mysterious grin
The cat smiles at me
Like the Cheshire cat
He smiles
and runs away into the bushes
three cats ready to go
three cats
at play
they look out at the world
and they are ready
they are born hunters
they are hungry
they are restless
and they want
to escape
from the house
to chase birds
squirrels
and other cats
to do their cat thing
That's the cat's life after all
they tolerate us humans
only because we feed them
But at heart
they are wild things
and wild things
Need to be free
Cats in Paris
Poetry Collection by Alan Catlin
Cats in Paris
They all seem to be
of the same unnatural
breed, something never
seen before except on
the streets of Paris or
on this roof overlooking
a modern downtown
which could be any
city, anywhere, except
for these cats, white
as something kept in-
side for generations, not
exactly a race of albinos
but something bleached
of striping, natural coloring,
something drained,
representing an absence
of shading, short hairs
barely covering their
sensitive skin as they
parade about in the sun,
tails raised, backs arched,
heads erect, taking in
the sights, not dazzled
by unfamiliar light but
exultant in their
preternatural wandering,
the soft purring of these
legions mounting the roof
top, overtaking everything
as they subdivide into
clones, is like the humming
of electric wires pulsating
with a new uncommon life.
The Dogs on the Beach
are all the mixed breeds
of the mind rising from
the sand awakening
from a horrific dream
or lolling seaside, stunned
drugged unable
to summon the energy
of stones others lean
against, looking up at
the sun, tongues extended
lapping up a sullen flash
of light or a wedge of sand
sculpted into a shape
that could be conceived
as a dog giving birth
to a litter of sand,
strange puppies whose
legs are like seaweed
at first but become paws,
the legs and torso, hunching
their backs to feel the stretch
of new muscles; all along
the beach, seagulls are
taking flight, cormorants
dry their wings on the poles
of the pier, their beaks
turning into spouts, their
feathers into the hair of dog.
Squirrels at the Drive-in
Overrun the vacant space,
climbing the cylindrical rows
of poles, dislodging headphones,
redistributing the sound of blank
images flickering the torn white
screen, ascending deserted vehicles,
rusting cars whose spidered
glass windshields can no longer
prevent or contain their invasive
strength, the multiplicity of
numbers. Their coming here is
a veritable disease of seeing,
ground cover that has a strange
tensile grip, a formative shape
like fur rippling the surface tension
of grass. A barely human presence,
window dresser's models, clothed
in out of date fashions as if
placed by all this junkyard debris
as objects in an experimental
test or, that here is near ground
zero, if this were in fact the
trial run site for a new kind
of nuclear wasting bomb instead
of a tactile vision of what tomorrow.
will be like.
Armadillos at the Ball Park
They seem interested in the flight
of balls driven to deep center,
stand, balanced on field box level
seat railings, perched on the roof
of the visitor's dugout or, even, in
seats pressed down for access,
their tiny ears are erect, alert at
the crack of a bat meeting practice
balls arcing deep into the twilit park,
protective nets hanging between
the prospect pitcher and the batter
timing three quarter speed pitches,
pulling them left, right, then hitting
straightaway, seemingly unaware
of the armadillo watching or
of the others, digging underground,
rooting out insects, grubs along
the closely cropped infield grass,
beneath crisscrossing patterns in
the outfield, leaving small mounds,
miniature abutments and pot holes
before the warning track, some with
their snouts and armored backs
tarnished from working the lime
dusted lines, pausing to look, as fans
will, awe struck, this close to the game.
Cows on an Ice Floe
They seem serene, content, despite
the setting, adrift, scattered at different
levels on ice as if grazing in fenced
fields, heads bent, noses touching
an uneven lump of white, foraging
about the edges, teasing thin blades
to masticate what only they can see or
else they stare straight ahead,
unconcerned, chewing whole mouthfuls
of dried weed or grass, transparent feed
brittle as Arctic wind hardened jewels
that glitter like Northern Lights
in their eyes after six months
of unending night.
Snow Leopards in the Abandoned Subway Station
"Nothing is ever really demolished or dismantled
down below, but everything is tentative and
amorphous" Andre Aicman, Underground
Their paws are torn, hurt by cinders,
broken glass, needle points scattered
underground, balance effected, thrown
off in darkness by distant thunders,
shuddering, ground and tunnel walls
temporarily unsafe, quaking tectonic shifts
no light thereafter to lift the hooded eyes
beyond this abandoned place, platforms
for the forgotten, iron turnstiles rusted in
place, sealed stairways and waiting spaces
leading nowhere; walking along dead rails,
mountain cats adrift, rustling the discarded
pennants, crumpled newspaper, torn prayer
wheels and flags.
Which LOVE
By Alexandra H. Rodrigues
Does your “I love you” make you my lover?
Does this thought ever even cross your mind?
As we speak of love each means a different kind.
The love of wine and roses, special caring exposes
While “love to the world” for all to be heard
Into the universe again and again is being hurled.
“You are my lover” we know has a different source
Is used when cupid has taken his course
What if nothing you do lets you mix it into hope’s brew?
For each of us the word Love should be a treasure
To whom we give it and from whom we accept it
We need in each case to carefully measure.
Tim’s Quilt
Alan Catlin's poetic dive into romance during hard times
Poetry Collection
Tim’s 60’s Quilt
Incorporates symbols of the Age,
Peace signs and flower power;
love is the answer.
On the Beach
Shielded by the wind:
campfire debris, empty
bottles, forgotten clothes;
last night’s love nest.
Love in a Time of War
You can see them, the pregnant women, the nursing mothers,
the lovers holding hands
Their ears wired for sound, one thousand songs for liquid days,
a herald angel’s apocalyptic ode
And for some, the bombs are falling now, all the highways are
mined, the mangled fields are as unsafe as any road
The bombs falling are an aphrodisiac, the shock and awe of love
among the ruins; all their exposed flesh burned where it is
touched
Even when the war is ten thousand miles away
Ten thousand miles or five thousand, it makes no difference, war
is simply something just beyond the horizon and love is what
happens right here
Right here where the black hawks are flying, where the bombs are
smart, the missiles guided, precision piloted reminding us it
is not so much how the bombs are directed but where they land
And who they land on that matters, distance is a factor in a time of war
In a time when we have come to love the bomb more than we love our
fellow man, more than we love ourselves
Maybe, what we know is not love at all but something more primitive,
something bestial and impure
Something that causes us to believe that we are no longer descended from
Angels, unless the angels are the exterminating ones, the kind that
fly on the wings of stealth bombers that inflict their death, unseen,
from above
Consider what they have wrought; consider the light from burning cities as a
celestial event, a fireworks display, a celebration for the dead, for love
in a time of war
Love in a time of war is all we have.
Cherish it.
Love Among the Ruins
During the air raids
we used to hide
in out storm
cellar
It was so exciting
being in love
that way
After the war
it was never
the same
Reading Lorine Niedecker in Albany’s Washington
Park by the Statue of Robert Burns
1-
Parade of dogs
on leashes
with their owners
following behind
wait at: CAUTION
YIELD TO PEDESTRIANS
crosswalk
where vehicles
stop sometimes
sometimes not
2-
Families with baby
carriages
fold-up strollers
follow paths
to playgrounds
that closes at
dusk
3-
Young lovers
walking by hand
in hand
and the old
ones too
God has a Name: Spirit
By Charles E.J. Moulton
There is truth out there.
I know that God wants you to seek it.
His truth.
People will follow the leader.
The cliché.
But never the truth.
The spiritual truth.
God is speaking to me right now,
Just like I believe he spoke to Moses.
There are plenty of strange diversions out there.
People will follow what is established.
The will follow the leader.
But if you do follow what your heart is saying,
No matter if people say you gotta follow your mind, man,
If you follow your heart,
Then you will encounter God in your heart,
And you will win every time.
I read Billy Idol’s biography this summer,
And Steven Tyler’s biography this summer,
In spite of drug excesses, they found their ways out of drugs,
Billy calls himself the prodigal son,
Helped his daddy up the stairs at home in Bromley.
Steven cried when his son graduated from high school.
We are all people, aren’t we?
So, where does that leave us?
Follow our hearts.
Please ... take that seriously.
There are signs.
Listen to God.
He is above religions.
Above them.
God lives in your heart.
If Billy Idol admits having an out-of-body-experience,
And Steven Tyler talks about his mother’s soul leaving her body,
Then it’s time for YOU to go beyond religion and become the
Loving, forgiving individual
That you always knew that you could be.
Spread your creativity.
Orpheus at the Breakfast Table
Alan Catlin's Poetic Chat with Legends
Les Troyens
All the Trojan
women
without men
are bound on
the walls of Troy
to be taken
down to
waiting
warships
as whores,
spoils of
the masters
of war,
they who are
blind
to the grief
of the Innocents,
the helpless,
the vanquished
must be
humbled
Long after wars
of independence,
opportunity,
dominion are over
After the foot
lights have
been dimmed
a chorus
of women
is wailing,
keening
for what
is lost,
what can
never
be replaced
New Years Eve in the House of Atreus
The costumed people blow their little
cardboard whistles, wave their metal noise
toys over their heads, drink pink champagne
out of plastic glasses singing Auld Ange Syne
loud all night around the heated pool,
The host watches all the odd couples
dancing, their plastic leis bouncing around
their flushed necks, their conical hats
sliding down their foreheads, costumes
increasingly more wrinkled, stained
and disheveled as the revels proceed
as the head waiter passes out boxes of glitter,
trays of body paint, stick-on tattoos
of mythic creatures, bold warriors from another
imagined age. Poolside, all the steam trays
are laden with homemade foods, exotic dishes
spiced with flavorings no one recognizes or
can resist, loading their overflowing plates
higher and higher as they drink, as their
appetites exponentially increase.
Near midnight, Trojan Women begin singing
the Dies Irae of the Berlioz Requiem,
the gathered revelers fall quiet, anticipating
the end, the old man in his white robes
swinging the sacrificial scythe.
Ulysses After the Rush Hour
Smokes Camel Lights, waiting underground for the El
the Uptown Local, watching summer heat
reinforcing concrete, solidifying dark islands
of soot and dirt, stanchions wavering,
heaving, shuddering, impelled by the cutting fact
of the unearthly subway wheels escaping
from the multilayered darkness, the disgorging
of the cars, passengers dark eyes stunted,
enamored of night, of eternal life underground,
adjust, repel stoned visions of Elysian Fields
carved from rock and steel. Aboard, in between,
buckling transit cars, Ulysses stands, strapped
to the train as it bursts out of the tunnel;
a sudden shock of light, the polluted river
far below, all of the lower Bronx beside him burning,
all he can hear is the sirens singing each to each.
The Metamorphsis of Ovid
After the storm, desolation, drifting wood,
an open boat caught between the shifting
rocks. Looking seaward, he sees the pale
death of life after storm, the cross cutting
waves, eyes stilled by a bone ossifying wind,
he collects the details of his exile in silence.
All winter long he recites them, The Amores,
as he describes a circular path through the sand,
and rocks, unsheltered, never sleeping,
never resting, old age entombed out of doors;
dread visions of the fall of a Holy Roman Empire,
swept away in the eyes of the poet, drifting
inland to a quiet, wasted land from which
there is no escape.
Orpheus at the Breakfast Table
Hung over and unshaven, he considers
the soft boiled egg perfectly balanced
in a porcelain cup. Along the table are
rows of buttered rolls, steaming cups,
hot metal trays, small contained lakes
of fire, wax adhering to a smoke blackened
candelabra and a brown stain spreading on
the linen tablecloth. He sees that he
is sitting at a formal dining table that
stretches into a darkened cavernous hall.
All the stiff backed chairs are locked in place
against the chipped hard wood, carving knives
are being sharpened in the morning room nearby
as the on schedule sick confining smell of
overcooked rotten food fills the room.
Nauseous, he rises, clutching his hand
embroidered silk kimono closer to his chest,
sweat stings his blood shot eyes as he
stumbles; down below, the trembling,
tortured voices begin singing on cue.
Orpheus at the Breakfast Table
Alan Catlin's Poetic Chat with Legends
Les Troyens
All the Trojan
women
without men
are bound on
the walls of Troy
to be taken
down to
waiting
warships
as whores,
spoils of
the masters
of war,
they who are
blind
to the grief
of the Innocents,
the helpless,
the vanquished
must be
humbled
Long after wars
of independence,
opportunity,
dominion are over
After the foot
lights have
been dimmed
a chorus
of women
is wailing,
keening
for what
is lost,
what can
never
be replaced
New Years Eve in the House of Atreus
The costumed people blow their little
cardboard whistles, wave their metal noise
toys over their heads, drink pink champagne
out of plastic glasses singing Auld Ange Syne
loud all night around the heated pool,
The host watches all the odd couples
dancing, their plastic leis bouncing around
their flushed necks, their conical hats
sliding down their foreheads, costumes
increasingly more wrinkled, stained
and disheveled as the revels proceed
as the head waiter passes out boxes of glitter,
trays of body paint, stick-on tattoos
of mythic creatures, bold warriors from another
imagined age. Poolside, all the steam trays
are laden with homemade foods, exotic dishes
spiced with flavorings no one recognizes or
can resist, loading their overflowing plates
higher and higher as they drink, as their
appetites exponentially increase.
Near midnight, Trojan Women begin singing
the Dies Irae of the Berlioz Requiem,
the gathered revelers fall quiet, anticipating
the end, the old man in his white robes
swinging the sacrificial scythe.
Ulysses After the Rush Hour
Smokes Camel Lights, waiting underground for the El
the Uptown Local, watching summer heat
reinforcing concrete, solidifying dark islands
of soot and dirt, stanchions wavering,
heaving, shuddering, impelled by the cutting fact
of the unearthly subway wheels escaping
from the multilayered darkness, the disgorging
of the cars, passengers dark eyes stunted,
enamored of night, of eternal life underground,
adjust, repel stoned visions of Elysian Fields
carved from rock and steel. Aboard, in between,
buckling transit cars, Ulysses stands, strapped
to the train as it bursts out of the tunnel;
a sudden shock of light, the polluted river
far below, all of the lower Bronx beside him burning,
all he can hear is the sirens singing each to each.
The Metamorphsis of Ovid
After the storm, desolation, drifting wood,
an open boat caught between the shifting
rocks. Looking seaward, he sees the pale
death of life after storm, the cross cutting
waves, eyes stilled by a bone ossifying wind,
he collects the details of his exile in silence.
All winter long he recites them, The Amores,
as he describes a circular path through the sand,
and rocks, unsheltered, never sleeping,
never resting, old age entombed out of doors;
dread visions of the fall of a Holy Roman Empire,
swept away in the eyes of the poet, drifting
inland to a quiet, wasted land from which
there is no escape.
Orpheus at the Breakfast Table
Hung over and unshaven, he considers
the soft boiled egg perfectly balanced
in a porcelain cup. Along the table are
rows of buttered rolls, steaming cups,
hot metal trays, small contained lakes
of fire, wax adhering to a smoke blackened
candelabra and a brown stain spreading on
the linen tablecloth. He sees that he
is sitting at a formal dining table that
stretches into a darkened cavernous hall.
All the stiff backed chairs are locked in place
against the chipped hard wood, carving knives
are being sharpened in the morning room nearby
as the on schedule sick confining smell of
overcooked rotten food fills the room.
Nauseous, he rises, clutching his hand
embroidered silk kimono closer to his chest,
sweat stings his blood shot eyes as he
stumbles; down below, the trembling,
tortured voices begin singing on cue.
Electra, Mourning becomes Electra
By David Thorpe
The lamentations of the souls of the slain
echoed through the halls of the heavens,
outraging the gods of Olympus.
A Hellenic tragedy pronounced Electra;
instigation to murder to revenge a murder,
a legacy of the decadence of lust.
The Mycenae king Agamemnon and his Trojan
concubine Cassandra laid smeared with blood,
cut down by the murderous hands of Clytemnestra,
Agamemnon`s queen, and her lover Aegisthus
Electra , obsessed with malevolence
for her mother`s treachery,
aided her brother Orestes to flee to safety.
She then abided her time and waited
Ordered by the Oracle of Delphi, Orestes returned to Mycenae,
accompanied by his cousin Pylades, to seek his justice.
The conspirators three conceived their deadly deed,
the fate of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus was sealed with blood
Electra´s sensual beauty Pylades´ thirst did quench,
their nuptial bed brought forth its fruit,
but ´twas she, Electra,
who had preserved the realm
David Thorpe ©®
Ulysses
By Alfred, Lord Tennyson
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Leading the Expedition:
Paris, Tokyo and the Aliens
by
TS Hidalgo
V
I had seen
this show years ago:
anthropomorphic aliens
surrounded us
(actually lizards
that ate Mickeys);
leading that expedition,
two hot chicks
and a Rubik’s cube;
300 episodes later,
defeated by the land Resistance
in a vague future,
they left at dawn
in their gyroplanes
to infinity.
Spain: it is only night
in this scene.
Everything else is day.
A stroll through Paris
Early in the morning,
I go for a walk
through the Père-Lachaise cemetery:
in search of lost time
I ran into Gertrude Stein
(and on the other side Alice Toklas
it’s Alice Toklas
it’s Alice Toklas),
and into Delacroix guiding the people;
pictures in front of
Oscar Wilde’s tomb
(winged deity
on its front,
work by the sculptor Jacob Epstein,
off of which some collector
cut the penis),
in front of Jim Morrison’s,
by far the most visited,
in front of Molière’s and La Fontaine’s,
adjacent to one another,
in front of the enduring
beauty
of the pantheon
in which
Eloisa and Abelard rest,
medieval lovers,
in front of Piaf,
Duncan,
Callas,
in front of Balzac.
And while hundreds of Japanese
record all of this,
the world
keeps turning
likenothingwasgoingon.
Tokyo, roundtrip
At Christmas it’s cold and time:
in a dark alley, near Shinjuku,
betting my last yens
among interpreters of Russian roulette,
defiant before the theater of the infinite,
all questioning
for a thousandth of a second:
defiant too before all logic,
before all probability,
versus all mathematics,
which is this one time defeated
(exclusive currency, suicidal roulette:
five heads to just one tail
in singular random poetry).
I walk away unhurt
and after luck
my profit is sealed,
which I will quickly have to settle
in the form of successive contempt:
of the goddess Fortuna
(we’ll continue to tempt her),
of my own metabolism
(why is the hotel’s bar
filled with Godzillas?),
and of good habits,
scaffold, perdition, and desire
in prepay neighborhoods,
over going from sun to supporting
(desire to be Tim Duncan).
Through Ginza, Roppongi Hills, and Omotesando
I start raining in a thousand pieces,
and through streets of pain
in worn out Metropolis,
these my blindfolded eyes move,
to not see her,
to not place on them the reflection
of her eyes, her lips,
her little ass, her soul:
shattered tears.
On my way home,
Madrid exhales on me
its enduring breath,
intrusive, related,
the memory of a past,
she and I, both,
in common,
life like a limited sum
of experiences in present continuous:
among others
a summer screwing in Harvard,
blithe as beasts,
blithe as balls,
tante auguri a te,
there were also
hard discount times
(that is,
we admired Fassbinder’s films
-Rainer Wender-
in parallel and ongoing;
sharing sweat and snails
we lived champagne and cramps,
and other times we let time flow
like those who admire Fassbinder).
Everything breaks…
…excepting, of course, eternity:
our last fifteen minutes together,
a scarce portion of human being:
a hospital in pluperfect
(that is, a kolkhoz in Venice).
After I asked
the philosophers’ trade union conclave
about the meaning of life
and they redirected me to Wall Street
clearly distressed,
dying of laughter.
New Year’s Eve
It’s a ball,
summer fish in the boat’s spring.
I’m startled to hear
someone from my country:
he’s reading in the frog’s language
the one of the sad countenance,
like Borges did,
except this one
goes one step further
than the never Nobel winning
Buenos Aires writer
and ensures he did the same
-months ago-
with Amadis de Gaula;
he’s on chapter forty-nine,
on what happened to Sancho Panza
wandering around his island.
I try to find someone I know,
I look in front of me,
Easton Ellis is laying
on the couch
dressed up as Jesus Christ,
the author of American Pscyho
looks here to be 33,
giving away winks
pretending to blink
behind an enormous white sheet,
they ask him mike in hand:
-Who are your favorite three writers-,
and he answers,
icy, emphatic, solemn:
-Easton Ellis, Easton Ellis & Easton Ellis.
I need and order a gin-tonic
-G’Vine, fever, twist of lime and tonka beans-;
on the house tequila shot too,
so we carry out the liturgy of the moment:
salt on the back of your hand,
lick up the salt,
tequila in one swig
and lemon slice for dessert:
totum revolutum,
shining in your guts.
Alien Bird
By Alexandra H. Rodrigues
It was a gorgeous moonlit night
The woods were sleepy, not a deer in sight.
Yet there was an owl with eyes shiny and big
As well as a nightingale busy a song to pick.
Both of them had never of an Alien heard
Surprised they were when in the woods it stirred.
They both knew humans but this creature was not
It did not walk but flew from spot to spot.
It could not get above the ground very high
To gain height on a broken wing it did try
The owl and the nightingale had a language their own
The owl would hoot and the nightingale trill a tone.
“Hello friends – I am hurt, can you see?”
“Can you possibly of assistance be?”
“My name is Robby, I am an alien bird”
Owl and nightingale could hardly believe what they heard.
Robby spread his badly hurt wing
It was so sad, the nightingale started to sing.
The owl asked, “Robby, where are you from
How is it that to earth you come?”
“I do not know, lost my memory during the fall
Out of a spaceship I tumbled is all I recall.”
Nightingale and owl looked at each other in despair
What had happened to Robby was surely not fair.
The nightingale sang and the owl hooted real loud
When all of a sudden on the sky was a cloud.
There was a spaceship they never had seen before
It sailed above them and had a big open door.
Owl and nightingale lifted Robby with all their might
Instructed Robby to hold on during the flight.
Once higher up he could use his healthy wing
To skillfully with owl’s help into the spaceship swing.
When Robby finally had found in the spaceship hold
He waved happily and threw out a big clump of gold.
Since that day on many a moonlit night
Nightingale and owl came back to the site.
They watched carefully over the gold
Their proof that a true story to others was told.
They always hoped to see Robby again
But up to now that did as only a wish remain.
2016/2018
copyright Abracadabra
CELESTIAL ALIGNMENTS?
By Gerard Sarnat
1. “Super Soccer Stars”
While my daughter hibernates
incubating her second newborn,
toddler Liav who rules the roost
with us alone at home like he is
Attila the Hun
when I take him to neighborhood classes
to get suddenly sticky Honey out of
Ma’s hair, this barely terrible two-er turns
toward untoward clingy milquetoast
wants milky ba-ba
as surrounding mainly 3-year-olds
most of whom know nada about
heading, chesting, kneeing, kicking
balls our boychick learns as normal
at the feet of his adored ex-warrior
Israeli now US Abba
still absolutely won’t tolerate shrinking
violet of a non-violent firstborn son
whose hidden brain seems to palely
blend into the gym ‘stead of flowering
like Dad did in IDF* galaxy.
*Israel Defense Force
2. Holmes Sweet Home: Confessions Of An Ex Porn Star
Since May 21, 2010, I’ve send 499 emails
to a friend I’ve never met
who lives up the coast in a camp in a valley
in Santa Barbara County.
The bedroom community town has a flower festival,
pops orchestra, legitimate theater
plus wine tasting but its economy is primarily based
on Vandenberg Air Force Base
which houses LGM-30 Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles
and Lompoc Prison that used to be called Club Fed
and was where George Clooney’s supposed to be in the 1998 movie
Out of Sight also starring Jennifer Lopez.
After about three years the two of us became so close
that I offered to come
up to visit on weekends which were the only times
which were authorized.
I applied for conjugal visits that took two years
to get okayed then it took another chunk
to get married and Wednesday’s the release date
for my man-slaughterer to come home.
3. Encomium: In The Stars
Smartest move
I never planned was
stumbling into Bubbe.
Bumbler had been taken
in by some other girls’
apparent charms
but bumping into
my half century partner
has turned out to be by far
luckiest lightning ever hit me:
her temperament, father’s
superb child-rearing
then PhD in parenting
skills qualify you dear wife
as our Queen of Generativity.
4. Mad Dog” Mattis
Pretty much everybody agreed no Secretary of Defense
Designate could do a better job destroying tough enemies
of the US -- not blinking about nuclear winterizing Korea.
Scholarly but battle-tested enough that getting bogged
down in fog of war is only a last alternative, our country
is was fortunate this four-star general is was at the helm.
Now that you’ve resigned from running the Pentagon,
I have one question: what’s the plan to keep
President Trump away from toggling the red button?
5. Jesus H. Christ Out On Highway 61
“…When the jelly-faced women all sneeze Hear the one with the mustache say, "Jeeze I can't find my knees…"
Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan, “Visions Of Johanna”
from the Blonde On Blond album, 1966
Even though everybody knows H stands for Hebrew
we star-crossed Madison Avenue marketing masterminds
really blew our biggest Jewish account ever
coming up with the Star of David’s
too complex two inverted triangle graphics, while gentile
boosters sent a simple cross up Christmas Tree Lane’s
flagpole along with concocting that loving straight-shooter
Jesus whose icon even got away with hippy long hair
whereas Zimmerman’s mishigas g-d warned Abe,
“The next time you see me comin', you better run"
which combined with love-hate relationships
with a dark-haired only sib named Joan, plus requesting my kids
to play Bobby’s music as I am lowered
into the ground, leads this usually not musically
oriented physician to feel quite profoundly affected.
Then ask the stars
By David Thorpe
Then ask the stars,
their trillion years of wisdom
might reveal the answer to the riddle,
which taunts the sanity of your mind0
Then search the endless universe,
its myriad of heavenly bodies
might guide you to the cosmic oracle,
patiently awaiting your perseverance
Then plead with the Aurora Borealis
to brighten still this heavenly phenomenon,
and shed light on the incomprehensible,
hidden in the darkest corner of the arctic
A distracted dragon-fly flusters in your ear,
the better to accept my confession,
a declaration of an oath before a sacred altar,
made without a compromise
David Thorpe ©®
A Truth in Poetry
Poetic Prose by Raymond Greiner
Sighted my first robin yesterday. A cold day and the bird seemed unaffected as it hopped gingerly in quest of some hearty insect just beneath the soil’s surface. Nice feeling.
The ancient Roman calendar speaks of the “Ides Of March” soon to arrive on the 15th. Doesn’t mean much during these days, as I read the news I feel a sense of beware from moment to moment as if treading on loose gravel. Won’t change much as current conditions display ongoing negativity in all directions as a global social entity. So, I feed the critters, do daily walks with Venus and Oriana and tread the gravel path in a state of ecstasy regardless with a sense of good fortune to be breathing.
Our prime dictator “Money” remains prominent and controlling as I observe the great interest in “scratch off” lottery tickets when I go into a convenience store. The dream of financial wealth remains prominent among societal design. You can buy your big house and new cars and live shoulder to shoulder with the gentry. How fun.
My good girl “Snowflake” is a Great Pyrenees and is the most amazing dog I’ve ever known. One morning during feeding time it was -10 degrees and she was playing with a stick on the frozen pond. The game stopped when she spotted me with her food bucket. She sleeps outside on the snow and rarely goes into her doghouse. If only we humans were as resilient.
The American political system is best described in one word, “chaotic”, and seems to worsen daily. Denuclearization is a prime topic as Trump feebly attempted to negotiate with the North Korean dictator, who is only using the idea as a pawn in a lethal game of political manipulation. How grand it would be to completely eliminate atomic weaponry from the entire globe. Not yet possible, but if we do light the fuse on this complete ignorance it may serve to give denuclearization more attention.
I’m writing a new novel. These novel projects consume my life. The iconic historical novelist James Michener said of his writing, “I can’t wait to go to sleep so I can wake up and begin writing again.” Sums it up well. Michener’s Japanese wife was his editor. Wish I could find such a pot of gold.
I didn’t write a single creative word until age 62 as I was far too obsessed with making money. If I could repeat my life, money would be placed far on the back burner. First published essay Pond Food in Canary Literary Journal. First short fiction Wolf Spirit published in Quail Bell Literary Magazine. What a thrill.
“The voice of destiny often sings off key and out of tempo like a catbird singing in a thorn bush then the sky opens and clouds of doubt vanish.”
From my short fiction Myrna’s Story.
Now is the Time
A collaboration by Hank Beukema
And Alexandra H. Rodrigues
The thread that connects us is very fine
Raises daily doubts about what will happen in time.
Time will go on, that much we know
Does it push us or pull us, do we stop or do we go?
Merciless passes day after day
We remain in doubt about what and what not to say
Ever forward we go blindly through the dark.
Do we leave a trail, do we make a mark?
At no time will I ever your trust refuse
Not every boldness or slip of the tongue has an excuse
The world takes our boldness and tries to knock it down
Calls us foolish till we feel like a clown.
Truth is an illusion, written in the sand!
How much we believe is in our hand
Often the mind vacillates between now and the past
Busy accusations along our future paths are cast.
The answers bring with them more questions
There will always remain a doubt
Have we found the way in or are we left out?
Either one of us secretly for an answer does wait.
Time has come to no longer accept further delay
Let’s move on together or from each other walk away!
We gamble with lives, we gamble with hearts
Do we know if and when a deeper meaning starts?
The Master Has All
the Right Answers
Poetry Collection by Alan Catlin
Questions of Space
for L. Cohen and V.H. Adair
Did they sit together
in silent meditation?
the over 90 nearly blind
late in life lady poet and
the no-longer-man-of-
the-world, self-proclaimed
lady killer, singer, scribe.
Did they sort through
the garbage for flowers,
watching ants on melon?
or are they just sharing
a strange congruence
of time and space?
the human geography
of a Zen Monastery,
the silence between
written lines? the encroaching
darkness that shapes
everything?
The songs without words?
Water Babies
Mother called the hotel
pool the old swimming hole,
saw the world through dark
glasses as something impenetrable,
unknowable as the mermaids
she spoke of as her sisters of
the sea.
Babies born here, on these virgin islands,
were christened in chlorine as all true,
water babies must be, even those
who saw her speaking after dark to
static shadows and heard the answers
to questions impossible to pose.
Questions and Answers
1-
In the bar the man
orders Genny Cream
from the bartender
Squares the label just so
on the coaster so the label
faces toward him
Picks up the bottle
Drinks
A six pack in an hour
No tip
2-
Weeks later, at Omega,
the server sees the man
as Buddhist meditation
leader sitting cross legged
head bowed, silent
3-
The server sits in the room
bows his head, closes his eyes
cannot cross his legs
meditates
4-
The server has all
the wrong questions
The Master has all
the right answers
Showgirls
Her name was on every No Call list
known to man. Said she was: Tracy,
Trixie, Lexi, Tonya, Ashley, Caitlin,
Emma, Tessa, one name for every day
of the week and two for Sunday.
Had outstanding warrants in seven states
that authorities knew of. Had more low
level felonies than a computer could keep
track of and whatever she was on made her seem
as if she had been whaled on by a Toxic
Avenger with a mean streak and heavily into
vengeance is mine. Replied to direct questions
in a kind of gibberish only someone with
a waterlogged brain would say, something
that sounded like the last hours of someone’s
life dripping from a leaky faucet into a
stainless steel sink in a locked room where
no one ever goes.
Student of Philosophy 1926
after a photo by August Sander
Once you are known as
the kind of man who asks
questions and who expresses his
opinions freely, you are the kind
of man who is followed wherever
he goes.
There are no definitive answers
to the problems a perpetual student
poses. In a world where everything
is brown or yellow, this is a dangerous
path to follow.
When they shoot him, they will
do it twice to make sure he is dead.
