By Ryan P. Kinney
A Jigsaw poem adapted from quotes taken at the 50th Anniversary Hessler Street Fair Poetry Competition Judging; Cleveland, OH 5/11/19

A snake crawls about his bleached skull.
Frosted night pales the moon.
(lets dive into his dreams. Will this dead man tell us his tales of madness and delight?)
Mysterious, smoky eyes look back at me.
The very breath of time
A deep breathe for those unafraid to leave the sun behind
It’s just a matter of time. We all fall down.
Quarterly tides that lift my spirit
The truth changes with the promise that nothing can ever remain the same.

Rhymes out of time
Where I can see the truth in each brush stroke.
What would I do with such knowledge, but to ask for more
There ain’t ever going to be a perfect audience
His book will never be bargain basement; overstock.
I’ll never live that long
Poetry isn’t produce
Almost nobody is looking to buy local.

He is part of the people who chose to be lost
Parents often struggle to teach their children how to choose.
Millennials are the forgotten ones
A generation that has no tolerance for *******
He figured it out long ago
He was a captain without a ship.
Burned the ship to save the crew

His tactics had not matured.
He wailed, “I want to feed my mind beauty.”
“I could eat up the kisses you lay on me each day.”
“Chocolate love can correct a lot of mistakes…”
“I need to eat healthier.”

The music rocks me with desolation
Microphone to inform underground
In the morning, still angry with power
I stop and ponder at what I thought was the immaculate conception.
Unshattered crystal can be torn between love me and love me not.
Anywhere is better than the empty side of your bed.

What is the consensus on nonabusive drunks?
The woman with medicine in her voice, she wanted to heal him
However, He was a dog not easily brought to heel.
The salt of the Earth tastes different than the kind Morton makes.

When standing in your sand I feel glass shards cutting into my feet.
Punctured with track marks from an older compass, lifting rose buds through the empty pores.
A life made from the finest threads of silk; gossamer quickly torn asunder.
I don’t want to die at the hands of someone else’s creation. I create my own life
Will she bet hers or mine?

They call me a murderer, but all I’ve killed is a lie.
Undeterred by my hacking
Cutting never worked.
They cut her open, replaced broken parts
She lived, in fact she thrived
While I will remain my shape.

Burial lands are for the living.
The largest human hole ever dug.
Where she could rust in piece with friends and we could finally let go.
There is holiness there in those subtle, dark places

Be bold she whispered, scribbled on the pages of her soul
Follow your wandering heart.

Each aware of the wings blooming ****** and wet; from the other’s shoulders
Flower crowns are essential.
Bathing in sweet feral rain
Pine sap running through his veins
Dining on nature’s primal fruits
While we lie among the roots

The change that never came
At least as a zombie I don't feel my mind rotting
Imagine ******* out bits of dark matter into an open sewer through the center of the city
Our baptism by fire, need not be theirs.

Original quotes from Ryan P. Kinney, Lori Ann Kusterbeck, Barbara Marie Minney, anitakeys, Lorianne Arwood, Audamatik, Jeremy Jusek, Ralph Pittman, Valentine Ventura,Casey Krysztofik, Kevin F. Smith, Kelly Hambly, Diane Ferri, Michael Ceraolo, Maeve Kroeger, Ariel Alexander Fiore, Hannah Gates, Georgia Reash, Eli Hawkins, Shivla Shikwana, Frank Thomas Rosen, Rob Smith, Tam Polzer, Elizabeth Burnette, Julie Ursem Marchand, Nancy Brady, Christine Donofrio, Cat Russell, Keith Allison, Sara Minges, Joan Perkins, Aubrey Crosbey, Tim Richards, Jill Lange, Ashley Pacholewski, Krystal Evans, John Burroughs, Renee Sanders, Azriel Johnson

Assembled by Eli Williams and Ryan P. Kinney
From works by Lennart Lundh, Gabriella Ercolani, Vicki Acquah, Ayla Atash, Russ Vidrick, Chuck Joy
Additional original content by Eli Williams and Ryan P. Kinney

Some future digger after truth,
alien or human, kneeling with
trowel and brush at this grave,
will note in clear, careful script
the wonder that a people would
be so deliberate with the smallest
of their gods' creatures,
and so careless of themselves.

They walked upon the new Earth
Like they did on the Old
Tugging along their gravel hearts
On freshly laid asphalt
Their eyes slowly
Moving towards the new sky
The clouds, like curtains, unfolded
Their feet freshly cleansed of old
Traditions and assumptions that they
would never make it to this great moment
But no one knew what was past
That port of no return
The ship sailed away,
Faded out of view
The lights one by one dim
The music softens
The actors bow,

Bewildered is the conscience of a dancer
whose unified self wishes to remain true
to a lover,
to family,
a social circle.
Yet a facet of the face must make love
to the masses;
each hungry audience that idolizes the mask,
she slowly exposes.

Another layer chipped away like
Hardened clay
The people here aspire to be
Nothing more than alive
The lives of the New World
In the hands of strangers
Coexisting within each other
For fear of never existing again
This is their lifeline, their blood
They are all in this repopulation
Together

They are husband and wife, or lovers.
They are childhood sweethearts
become best friends against adversity.
Or supplicants, praying for tomorrow.

But when your empty heart is weighed
"what are you really worth?"

I am vapor
An ethereal mist that permeates through all people
Unknown that I have infected them
That my heaviness weighs on their soul

You stand here, asking me,
“What do I want?”

I want to be light
Free,
Not a particle that jams up people’s souls
But something that invigorates them

She presses her hand to the bulletproof safety glass
And meekly whispers,
“Well, what do they say?”

They say I shouldn’t be so tired
They say I should get a job
They say I should get off this couch
They say I shouldn’t be a blob

They say I should feel,
Live
Create
His hands move wildly in the air
Miming a paint brush; a hammer
A tool of destruction; creation
He weaves his hands as though he is dancing to his own genesis


Simple and intense
As the splattered paint on a Jackson ******* canvas

we see others as they are
we see ourselves at every age
and all at once

Assembled by Ryan P. Kinney
From works by Russ Vidrick, Dan Rourke, Joe Roarty, Tanya Pilumeli, Terry Provost, Brian Matheny, Joe Roarty, Bob Wilson
Additional content from Saga of the Swamp Thing vol. 1
Additional original content by Ryan P. Kinney

The devil checked in at noon
And asked us
What is the sleep of reason?
The devil is a wicked man and wears a suit and tie.

In the eyes of your maker
You should be ashamed
To look your Maker in the eyes

Yes, you must stand naked. We all must

I see the perverts.
I see them on the corner.
I see them in the dark.
There's nothing a pervert won't do for pleasure.
They want to be weird.
That's how they do it.

Taste the salt on your tongue.
Salt of the earth
The ****** that made you and touches everything you made
Give us our daily lust. In **** we trust

...And God teaches the cricket how to play his music.
In a world gone wrong, won't you hear my song...
Live in vain or live in shame.
A dead man's hand, a mad man's brain...living off the lighting in his veins
What a wealthy country, but no one’s coming to pay my bail.

Assembled by Ryan P. Kinney
From works by Lennart Lundh, Elise Panehal, Tanya Pilumeli, Jason Blakely, Bronte Billings, Matt Young, Megan Hively
Additional content from Saga of the Swamp Thing vol. 1, “People who Died” by The Jim Carroll band, Linkin Park “Powerless”
Additional original content by Ryan P. Kinney

Dig the small grave
and place the smaller body so,
just so. The chill May rain
and the warm human tears
falling on her head
will serve for the ritual
washing of this pup,
barely two days old.

The fly says, “I can see that I have alarmed you. Please… Feel free to scream. There is no one to hear, and I shall still be here the you are finished.”
“I kissed it. It’s clean.”
“(Most) the people who died were all my friends”
We kinda stopped talking before we started talking.
says aloud, what he has been speaking in silence.
How fake they wish this could be
live inside, where everything that is small and screaming
There's blood on my hands... and I can't wait for this to be fixed so I can wash my hands of all this.
You woke the devil I thought you left behind.
So I cozy myself to a liar and a thief, because I want absolutely nothing to do with me.

Your telling me if I’m dead or not.
Atleast act like it matters

Assembled by Ryan P. Kinney
From works by Russ Vidrick, Connie Kopko Kramer, MaxWell Shell, Lennart Lundh
Additional content from Saga of the Swamp Thing vol. 1

At dawn
It is more interesting
The sparrows sing

That cloud looks like the starship Enterprise: a vessel of hope and discovery; a vapor. This sweet potato destined for the curry’s a carp: Japanese-lucky, walleye-man’s curse. And the cross-cut carrot? It ain’t an iris, a hint about eye-health. Friends, it’s just fun: not science, not God. Also, it’s dinner.

A fountain of youthful talent chemically imbalanced.
...with a grey skull full of He-man.

The road behind them curls
like a river taking the easy way,
not really caring where it goes
as long as it's someplace else.

The sky’s aflame. He skulks back to his mud, his ferns and stones. It is unease he feels, without a name, or merely autumn gnawing at his bones. The things of shadows vanish with the night. Worse horrors still are (may be) heralded by light.

Assembled by Ryan P. Kinney
From works by Gabriella Ercolani, Dr. Benjamin Anthony, Heather Munn, Vicki Acquah, Tanya Pilumeli
Additional original content by Ryan P. Kinney

Bewildered is the conscience of a dancer
whose unified self wishes to remain true
to a lover,
to family,
a social circle.
Yet a facet of the face must make love
to the masses;
each hungry audience that idolizes the mask,
she slowly exposes.

Then he saw the little movements where her belly was and now were taut muscles barely holding back guts and little faces with eyes shut snakes tiny tongues clicking, tails wrapping around

Atlantic waves
Soothing
Tsunami crashes; my mental health strews memory about like road sand.

A child asks for two dollars
To help me from his heart-
My maintenance software
Opens to error messages-
"Man pushes glasses up
On his nose-incidentally";

Resistance subdued
Take her then
Junk in the corner
She's worthless to me

This is no kindness in this man.
He is gluttony incarnate.
Consumption just to flaunt his aristocracy to the peasant.

You enter the world empty-handed and you will leave it empty-handed.

Assembled by Eli Williams
From quotes taken from works at poetry readings by Vladimir Swirynsky, Bob Olsen, Ray McNiece, Kathleen Gallagher, Joe Roarty, Eva Barrett, Russ Vidrick, Tam Polzer, Rosemarie Iwasa, Dianne Boresnik
Additional original content by Ryan P Kinney

I watched you undress like a stranger lost in a great city of hope
The problem of loving the same woman in different ways
And still love once more
This is my word in any language
So I cozy myself up to a murderer
So I can taste the infernal darkness
Too much white space, unpunctuated
No place for the demon to go, but further in
I'm a monster, I admit it
God not only loves a sinner, he prefers them
How long will I be playing to get by
Is it worse to be the one taken or the one left behind
Nothing is ever born again here

Assembled by Eli Williams
From works by Eli Williams, Josh Romig, Lennart Lundh
Additional content from “There is a Light That Never Goes Out” by The Smiths

Want to see life
Take me out tonight
For a moment
Take me anywhere, I don’t care
I can’t seem to make
My heartbeat slow down
If time is liquid, like the oceans
Take me out tonight
Not much traffic on this path anymore
In my rearview mirror
And in the darkened underpass
I watch the boy
No longer even special
If I could go where they’re going
Where there’s music and there’s people
I don’t care, I don’t care
Take me out tonight
Take me anywhere, I don’t care

Assembled by Ryan P. Kinney
From quotes taken from works at poetry readings by Bronte Billings, Josh Romig, Micheal Billings, Jack McGuane, Elise Panehal, Rosemarie Iwasa, Adam Brodsky
Additional original content by Ryan P. Kinney

Being broken makes the girl do something good
She loves the challenge of impossible tasks
Detachment comes easier to a drunk
The lostness of the found, the blindness of the seeing, the spirituality of the atheist, the silence of the spoken
She doesn't matter
Nothing she creates matters
Nothing matters
The nothing is electric…
You are caterpillar now
One day you will be a beautiful butterfly
Her stark lines are completely naked now
Humans are also stardust
Which means we are golden

by Dawn Richardson and Tiffany Ann Boyd

Assembled from works by J.M. Romig, Sheena Zilla, and Ryan P. Kinney

My first memory is of dying.
I felt like I’d lived a full life
And now I was gladly fading away.
My first last words were
“Tell Elizabeth I love her”
I don’t remember knowing Elizabeth.
I love her though, or at least I did in that moment.

“These aren’t sad tears I’m crying, I’m just cutting onions my dear.”
It makes me want to rip off my flesh and run down the street as bare muscle and bone screaming ****** ******.
It will get better once I leave this purgatory waiting room of stress and self-loathing, but until then my outlook is a bit glum.

I am terrified
Before me is a discolored, screaming, clawing, misshapen alien creature
My son takes his first breathes of real air
We are all exhausted
His mother looks at me with a look that practically screams,
“We did it.”
I plead, “But we’re not done doing it yet…
Are we?”
His gurgles turn into cries
And I know…

For some reason, couldn’t tell you why, I thought about Frankenstein’s Monster.

Some parts are really fuzzy,
I hold it close to me- the fuzzy parts against my skin.
It’s a quilt blanket, stitched together of pieces and parts of found cloth.
My father made it for me.
My very last birthday gift.
I cocoon myself in it like a womb.

I hated him for what he’d done, but I hated myself more for missing him.
I have to fight everyday to be a better person in spite of what I was exposed to.

Created at the Winter Writing Workshop (Dec. 27, 2015),
HEYMAN! Productions

by Ryan P. Kinney and Aaron Shinkle
With additional content assembled from Eli Williams and Lennart Lundh

The fall of man

It was the end of monsters
The end of mothers
The end of haters
Of lovers
Of pain and suffering
Of bliss and ecstasy

Nothing to hide under the bed
No terror floating in your head
Just the buzzing and swarming of insects

There was just the animalistic need to survive
And Gaia had decided
It was best for her survival
If we did not

Truth be told
We did it to ourselves

Some future digger after truth,
alien or human, kneeling with
trowel and brush at this grave,
will note in clear, careful script
the wonder that a people would
be so deliberate with the smallest
of their gods' creatures,
and so careless of themselves.

One never sees the monster
Hiding in the open
No one ever suspects that we are hiding something
When they are staring it in the face

We walked upon the new Earth
Like we did on the Old
Tugging along our gravel hearts
On broken asphalt
Our eyes slowly
Moving towards the new sky
The clouds, like curtains, unfolded
Our feet freshly cleansed of old
Traditions and assumptions that we
would never make it to this moment
But no one knew what was past
That port of no return
The ship sailed away,
Faded out of view

Another layer chipped away like
Hardened clay
The people here aspire to be
Nothing more than alive
The lives of the New World
In the hands of strangers
Coexisting within each other
For fear of never existing again
This is their lifeline, their blood
They are all in this repopulation
Together

we see others as they are
we see ourselves at every age
and all at once
supplicants, praying for tomorrow.
Everything from nothing.
And to nothing we return.
To the whole of the way,
We hastened our downfall through an illusion of control.
Only through letting this run its course
And stepping to the center could we hope for survival

The lights one by one dim
The music softens
The actors bow,
We close the curtain on this world

by Ryan P. Kinney and J.M. Romig

The coy house thinks, “Should I let this man enter me?”
Although she pretends to resist at first
She soon relents,
The pressure giving way and her door granting passage

He pledges to give her hardwood floors
To put a swingset in her backyard
The finest dressings on her windows
Painting her face,
Decking her out
To show the world how much he loves her
Softly wooing, he promises her a family

She hopes this one will make good
As he begins his work,
She watches the swell in his young wife’s womb
And for a while, believes in life again

For the first time in years,
She breathes fresh air as they move in their boxes
The melding of their past and her future
An image so bright,
That she is almost blinded by the light
When one night,
The soon-to-be mother misses her first step

At the bottom of the stairs,
He finds his world in pieces
As the paramedics pack the body and cart it away
The door closes behind them
And the air grows stagnant

The only boxes he ever unpacks,
Contain spirits
To numb him from the haunting emptiness inside
The past becomes nothing, but a foot stool
Slowly crushed and deformed under his weight
Her rooms,
Built to house new memories, home cooked meals, and laughter
Now nothing, but
Stale beer, chips, and wasted life


Created from prompts at the Winter Writing Workshop (Dec. 27, 2015),
HEYMAN! Productions

Assembled from works by Ryan P. Kinney
By Elandra Fritzsche with original content

There is a game I play
It is one I play all by myself
With a million other players
It is called Adulting
The game is simple
All you need to do is follow the rules
All you need to do is listen
All you need to do is
Grow up

Grow up
It is something people tell you to do all your life
Grow up and act your age
Even when you are supposed to still be a child
Grow up

At 14 I started playing the game
Partially convinced that growing up meant
Getting the hell away from my parents
And being absolutely certain that if I did not
One of us would be dead

For years I played the game
Earned my keep
Took a wife
Bought a house
A mortgage
An expanding weight line

I followed the rules
I played the game
I fixed my house
I worked hard
I did the things that married men should routinely do with their wives
I had grown up

But I wanted to be lost
The game was not as fun as I thought it would be
I wanted to remember what it was like to be found
But found within myself

They say that all rules are meant to be broken
And so breaking them is just what I did
Slowly
Quietly
Secretly
On weekends I smashed TV's
Torched Barbie dolls
I kept my toys in my closet
My comic books in heaps
I swept the remains of broken rules away
As to keep them hidden
For awhile

Then suddenly
I was gone
To find myself
Among the ashes
Of the rules I had broken
And burned to keep hidden
To find that the world covered in ashes
Was the world full of color that I knew before the game was played

I looked for a way out of the game
And so back to school I went
The toys came out of the closet
My comic books worn like bandanas
Hanging from my back pocket

But once again after the time had passed
They wanted me to play the game
To grow up
I had tried
It didn't work out very well

Give me my childhood
The freedom I had had before the game was played
Give me all the things that come with it
But please don't make me play

I do not follow the rules
I do not like them much
This is not a game I want to play
I lost the first round already
Do I have to play again?