“Rain for my words,”
Cried the poet.
But the rain would not acquiesce;
For she dreaded a languagekiss.

© LazharBouazzi, Carthage - Tunisia, May 14, 2016

Simplicity
Is the
Act of giving shape
To chaos -
An affair of alchemy,
Like turning sweat
Into drops of
Silver.

(c) LazharBouazzi

put us down
where our dreams go to die
in the dusty old attic
where our throats become dry

in ten or so years
you will strumble across
what could have been
and what you thought you had lost

The Industrial Evolution

I want the rain to wash away the grime
From this filthy living corpse.
Its dross filled pores
And a life cloaked in rust ridden slime.

Dumped grot covers me.
Exhaled from the mephitic breath
Of a thousand septic chimneys refusing to fast.
Spewing out ****
Drowning all us luckless souls in muck.

The inevitable residue of greed
Deposited by those with no belief in the End of time.

A planet of zombies
Wading through a mire of death.
Only waiting for the time
They reach the END.

(Gerry Aldridge)

Words can be silenced
Only for a lifetime
But my words will live on,
And my ghost won't be gone
Until night til the dawn,
My poetry will spill
Like ripened wine.
I'm everlasting
To everlasting.
My body may be passing
But my eternity is forever,
Like a perennial rosebud
My locution hangs with the
Good that's to come,
And hushed I shall not be.

And suddenly
I was captivated by how he held his steering wheel
I was blown away by how the shadows of the passing streets lights
made themselves home on his skin
I wanted to be home on his skin
I wondered what it felt like to be embedded into the cracks in his hands
Actually I wanted to be a small molecule that belonged on his fingertips
Even for just 2 heartbeats
I just wanted to place myself over his chest
And for a few seconds my life would be completely in my hands

One says
"I'll race you to the gutter."
The other one says
"Yeah, but I'll beat you to hell."
Followed by lots of liquid laughter
And they think they're joking

                                     By Phil Roberts

I dreamed of my father
crossing the fields
on his one-eyed tractor
mowing acres of sadness
heading east of a moon
that'll be gone tomorrow
and I waded the creek
beneath a ridge
where my mother is shearing
dead roses and the smell
of those flowers floating
to the foot of the mountains
reminds me of her hair
and my father's laughter
disappearing across the hill.