Issue 149 Poetry

Our first submissions for our POETRY page are IN!  I hope you’ll spread the word far and wide, to all the writers and poets you know… click to see our GUIDELINES for submission, then share the link with them, please!  A new page will be created for each issue, as long as we get enough submissions from you all!

ALSO!!! – if you’d like to COMMENT about a poem that appears here – FEEL FREE to do so… I can tell you from personal experience that there’s nothing a good writer enjoys more than feedback from readers (keep it civil, of course)!!!

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…and this one came from Duncan Barnett (based on a referral from Nigel Potter (below)…

When did I become old?
When did I change from an authority figure to a thing of pity?
When did my words cease to have meaning?
Why did my world become confined to four walls?

When did I stop being able to think for myself?
When did Jeremy Kyle become interesting?
When did structure become more important than content?
Why can’t I work the TV controller?

When did I stop eating interesting food?
When did I start sitting on my own?
When did I become an inconvenience?
Why do I go to bed at nine?

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Our friend Nigel Potter just sent this one for publication.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Next Note

 

Just on up the road my beast roars into life.

The battle hymns of defiant youth ring out.

Like a ghost,my imagination remote views every note and every face…

 

Just up the road time returns to then

When I was someone else,unafraid.

From hundred watt walls the sound escapes who I was when I was me.

 

Just up the road,beyond the paths I walk.

I couldn’t go there,couldn’t be there

couldn’t breathe and couldn’t think

only ache,stting here

 

It’s like some part of you that’s taken

and never yours again

The kingdom and the crown lost

to ringing silence and the empy space

 

Where I walk,no one knows me

never saw me wield a sword

and only see the weak without

and not the beast within

 

And so it is gone.

And yet still lives

I can’t reconcile the two

Just one more thing to bury deep

 

But every note and word is my blood

you can’t deny the child

if you should ever look beyond the smoke and mirrors you’ll see my name written there.

 

When the last note is played

Ask yourself a question:

Who writes the next one

if not me ?

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These poems are in from Tancy z Bubnam / Dances with Buben

F5

So what, have you seen them already?
All photos of his new one? All posts of what he thinks?
‘specially those with her wonderful body
And hot conspiracy of their opened lips

Have you put all the facts down?
Kinda summary from those 10 albums
Four hundred and eighty five photos. No more and no less
Mark knows – you’ll check them again. God bless 

Every shelve has its books
Every book has dirty pages ‘bout some of us
You’ll be writing and NOT sending letters. Well, how it looks?
It looks they are at your soul’s bookmarks

And as unsent letters’ sign (so close to one final click)
Your heart will dangle around
Till you just say to yourself – how could I stay with this dick?
And the system reboots. And then you calm down.

And you’ll write the best poems ever
Caring not about rhyming verbs
And you will delete the last photo. THAT ONE
And recognize vers libre as art. Well, it is really worth

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BAISAN – M.N.S.K. (ENGLISH VERSION)

these words are in shades
of Moscow and Berlin
the prayers are new
but old cocain’s steel burning

so beautiful angels
are falling and falling
just as the ice-cubes
in soda-with-kremlin

between celebrities
and customs and questions
facing the critics
from east-side nations

another new column
for this happy clover
despair dot com
is behind these words’ lovers

we know all the letters
of Fourth-coming Reich
the land of the Lakes
or the country of Likes?

and our New Sky
is whatever but New
we need no receipts
but a rock’n’roll crew

and our new heroes
endorsing the scaffold
I’m so sorry, mama
I dance on the roof old

that’s how the letters
are forming the news
London bridge ‘s falling
As i turn blahs to blues

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From our friend BRET HART:

 

 

 

 

 

City of Imbeciles – Bret Harold Hart

 

This is a city that
has turned
into a town.

Some predict that it will become a village;

others,
another dusty and gasping,
post-industrial,
ass-hatted,
cocaine-financed
ghost town.

It still prides itself
on being
a city.

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Colors – Bret Harold Hart: 5.14.2010

We are stories.
This is my meditation on color.

My parents are white.
I am white.
My sister is white.
But when I think about the three or four black and white photographs
That I have seen,
Of my Grandfather Hart’s mother,
Cora Mills Hart,
I wonder if I may also be a little bit black.

I consider her powerful build,
The same crossed arms,
The “Just Try It and See What Happens” posture,
That facial structure,
That fierce workplace look,
Under and radiating from her inarguably white skin,
Like a warning.

I remember hearing that when her husband died,
In Cohocton, New York
“During the tuberculosis epidemic”,
As well as her sister’s husband,
Leaving a throng of unfathered cousins
And little hope,
That she took the whole local bloodline in
To her refurbished chicken coop of a home,
Just as black grandmothers so often do,
And provided a spiritual beacon
And a strong back,
At the turn of the last century,
During a terrible economic time,
For that flock .

And my grandfather,
Who was born in 1897,
Looked very much like his mother,
Who was widowed
When he was
Only seven

During the 1960’s,
We would drive the forty minutes
North-west to Naples, New York
To fish for pike and pickerel and sunnies
In one of the Finger Lakes;
Or in that river,
Bookended by fat vineyards,
Where a boy might wrestle-in a battered salmon
Every once in a great while.

And it was magical;
One of many childhood memories that I share with millions of men,
All around the world.
Fishing with Grandfather.

Sometimes we would stop
At Uncle Ward and Aunt Onnolee’s little house.
The mailbox said “Artlip”.
They lived on the Hornell-side of Naples
Onnolee was my grandmother’s younger sister.
During the Depression, they had to move-in with my grandparents
“Ward didn’t like working, much.”
One Christmas, a customer of grandpa’s bakery
Gave him a two-tied box of one hundred Cuban cigars.
“Your Uncle Ward asked me if he could have a cigar
Every now and again.”
The following April,
The top tier of cigars being almost gone
Grandpa lifted out the separating paper-thin piece of redwood
To discover that there were no cigars beneath
In the empty, lower tier
“I think your Uncle Ward helped himself to a few extra cigars.”

These are the kind of stories I’d hear
While returning from fishing.

And then we would be driving back to Hornell
It would be late-afternoon and cooling
And sometimes we’d stop at a produce stand
And buy ripe fruit for baking
For pocket change
From the vegetable man with the slimy green moss on his teeth
And his surreal, hyena-like smile;
And I would get to wrestle a glass-bottle RC Cola,
Out of one of those old, horizontal, refrigerator-sized, vending machines,
To sip on the way home

And Grandpa Hart’s Olds 98 would
Grip the hills like a champ
With those steep slopes to the right
And no-longer managed apple orchards
“Probably no good for eating.”
Thick and grassy dairy pastures
“Hey, Girls!”
And fruit and vegetable farms
In the verdant valley below.
Pennsylvania-Dutch circular mandalas
on many of the barns.

And on one of those farms,
There were often a score of black fieldworkers
In the verdant valley below.
I saw them at intervals;
Maybe during the summers when I was 6, 7, 9 and 11.
Some women and children,
Straw hats and plaid cotton shirts,
Suspenders,
Bent and harvesting.
I always figured they lived nearby.
And my grandfather would
Invariably say the same thing as we passed,
Looking out the passenger side windows at them working,

“Bret, take a look at your colored cousins.”

 

 

 

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      ANCIENT   (Dick Metcalf, aka Rotcod Zzaj)

Ancient featherly treads
Head-dressed
In obscurity rapt
Screams, as red moonrise
Beckons him to tides
Where shadowed nightmare rides
And wind’s razorrush
Through caverned city minds
Turns his absent eyes
To tears that search
Early evening auras
For more
Than echoes
Of reality

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    THOSE  (Dick Metcalf, aka Rotcod Zzaj)

Who would have me
Differently
Than my reality
Is

Really diff’rent
To me!

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                NEEDLE POINT  (Dick Metcalf, aka Rotcod Zzaj)

Crystalclaws glitter
in ivory coldmoon flash, this
Conscienceless razorfang midnight speaker
Incalculate seeks, the
Crimson’s ruby flow…

Darkbreath dragon
Raises the shroud
Revealing sinisters’ cloud, for
Passions predecessor
PANDEMONIUM…

As mercury’s monsoon
Turns to abandoned rapids
Frozen instants, and other
Examples
Of jaded immediacy…

Free in form, this antiquated
Skyraper
Unencumbered earthbreaker shapes
It’s own momentum, and
In jugular approaches
The vain!

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(Dick Metcalf, aka Rotcod Zzaj)

 

Carryovers from those frustrated earlier years lead me to believe
that since garter belts and spike heels have gone the way of most
other phreaknesses, there will come a time – supposedly – (much
later, when senility sweeps ever so softly in upon my senses) when
“Supp-Hose” will be my main attraction… this is the main abberation
standing in the way of more diligently attacking… the monumental
task at hand; blowing the minds of sedimental journeymen with ever
new renditions of red sunset sales and waging war on those wayward
warriors who can only find time for the pursuit of booze, bennies and
broads… those who have so little time for the sweet of (true)
pleasure’s simple, and CERTAINLY no time for auras awash in
abstractia…

…’tis further complicated by the reluctance found on most frontiers
to open up to TRUST; down to the ultimate level, where even spiritual
nudity and its’ inherent vulnerabilities are no longer so horribly
frightening – it is really, then, that our twisted interpretation of
separate existence for those two most valid states (sexual/spiritual)
is what forces us ultimately to the realization that it is ALL
somehow only one big improvisation, anyway, so we ought to just LAY
BACK and let it happen…

With that as our introductory framework for insanity, let us further
consider:

Spiderwomb thought
In silkenthread looms, as
Transience comes clear (I realize)
This age adds no wisdom
To a true understanding
Of the futility
In concrete illusions…

And the dagger
Sharp twinge, cutting image
Quickfades, in mem’ry
Of hesitant (near innocent) approaches
To the nova
Heat of her
Desire!

Transience being the mystery in this complicated weave of
improvisational EXISTENCE, we must further consider the happenings…

In the space of a single moment
Three moons past (in the arms)
Of this lover of abandon, that
All men’s dreams are made of;

True recognition
Of the improvisational scheme
No curtain calls
Only beginnings
In this hustle, of

Worldplay…

And the sister’s come
As brothers go, to the beauty
Of butterflies
In wanton streams
Becoming the beacons
For our passage
Into the next phase!

And now the soldier, weary of to and fro, begins to recite his
somewhat tattered war-torn tale of woe…

Momentary version (inversion, reversion) of self returning from
or coming to reality; the ‘garden’ remaining only an allusion in
this chaotic semblance of ORDER that uniformity demands…
‘natural’ only the many-colored robe donned as the decades turn;
and imagery only a fallen fantasy in the face of the
technological tirade these demons so proudly professed to be
the answer…

“What war did daddy do in you?”
“What did the war do in you, daddy?”
“What daddy did war do in, you?”

Waiting for the wonder of the weave, weary become the way of
life… creativity cumbles as the pillars turn to the ancient
powders… apolitically rise, mourningly, to meet what the
mortals (having been led to) believe to be challenge… there
are more to dreams than Freud would have us understand, but
that’s not my business! Where are the KEYS?

Patience is no virtue
It is, rather
An ancient art;

Ask the hunter
(OR the hunted)!

Spiritual communition creeps abaout in such unlikely places;
sinners and saints alike seek comfort in the coming of the
cloud; subliminal death-wish imposed on millions of
unsuspecting discophiles… how serious this condition? Only
philosophers know for sure… or palmists… maybe psalmists..
purchase peace elsewhere – existence is MINE!

“How can it end like that?”, you ask; YOU are the answer!!!