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 Jul 2016
John F McCullagh
IT
It might have been beautiful, and certainly smart
Born with your academics and my poet’s heart.
It might have been witty, pithy and wise;
possessing your nose and my two emerald eyes.

It might have been evil; it may have proved kind;
the first of our brood was the last of our line.
Not that we ever will know, I suppose.
Just idle questions  geneticists might pose

It would have been born with ten fingers and toes
If left, unimpeded, for nine months to grow.
We were both too young, both too unprepared,
This life, unintended, was not to be spared.

Forty winters have passed since that fateful decision.
It was swept from our path with a clinic’s precision.
Now you, too, are gone, and that leaves only me
To mourn for our child not permitted to be.
 Jun 2016
ryn
"Yet you feed us lies from the tablecloth"
- B.Y.O.B. by System of a Down*

We sat across the table
as we feasted on misguided notions.
Our integrity tenderised,
thoughts manipulated,
traded with unconditional compassion.

Twisted ideals,
served upon the finest china.
Delectable treats,
laced with shards of
such distorted agenda.

Multi-faceted truths,
all lobbied for self-centred gains.
We're the ones who'd worry
and cower under tattered brollies...
To anticipate for when it would rain.

Between us still sat the table.
We'd still be served age-old (t)ale
while the room stank of rancid broth.
But I have lost my appetite
the moment we were fed lies...
Offered on the most extravagant tablecloth.
 Jun 2016
Fay Slimm
The Edge......

This morning I saw light lift the hue
of night-dim lavender
while rivulets fell as blue mist
down tall iris stalks.

In dawn's drizzle I noticed sun kiss
the shivering lawn
as honeybee-hunger nosed through
late blooming roses.

I watched wet dry on petals of shiny
chrysanthemums and
warming rays open the daisy-eyed
corners of coming day.

As light splashed more morning at
and round garden paths
a curious gladness took me to the
edge of poetic rapture.
 May 2016
v V v
tachyphylaxis - tach·y·phy·lax·is (tāk'ə-fĭ-lāk'sĭs)  n.
1.    A rapidly decreasing response to pleasure following initial administration.

I didn’t know this
demon had a name.
Ugly as it is it fits,
a random mish-mash
of unpleasant sounds
and equal unpleasantness
felt.

I’ve known the *******
forever, manifest in vitamin cures
and psychological processes,
SSRI’s and stabilizers.

He attends to the end of
affectionate loving and all
the designer vacations
you've ever taken.

He is the golden handcuffs of
square foot home ownership
and his business cards are
set in silver.

To put it bluntly
his continuous presence
is intent on destruction
of any contentment.

He is all things along the way
that appear so promising at first
but never last.

Synonymous with tolerance,
antonymous with precedence,


the antagonistic leaven of all living.
,
St. Catharines light in the afternoon: lead oxide, pink white, dry mud shadows.
They lay on her living room carpet and Anthony gloated over Milly
Her cotton nightgown, her long back, and round shoulders: proof at last.
"So this is gloating. It is better to gloat than to doubt. It took me a long time."

Her clean faded quilt brought from the balcony rail: it
Smells of clean laundry and cold air and the thrill of their power.
He’s proud to be the lover of a heroine,
And happy that he can see her this way.”

Picnic kisses tasting of smoked oysters and beer.
There were never friendly kisses of love before?
"Milly, I love hearing how you defied the adults."

He told Hansel and Gretel to her child, who had strep throat,
And told it again, knowing it would work,

Seeing the bookshelves, seeing her notebooks,
Knowing that he would have his life after all:

                      The mispronounced words of a solitary reader,
                       The red skirt on the chair, the gold necklace of coins.


                   Paul Anthony Hutchinson
www.paulanthonyhutchinson.com
Copyright Paul Anthony Hutchinson
 May 2016
Terry O'Leary
The flames of the furnace (well-travelled by wind
slowly glazing the rags of gray women chagrined
at the sight of a hair fleeing tresses now thinned)
sometimes billow like waves flooding naves through the night,
when the lightning peeks in where the tension hangs tight
while the lanterns, alarmed, appear fulgent with fright.

Having lost both his hands, and now dancing for dimes,
Captain Hook haunts the alleyway's rivers of rhymes,
sometimes singing or prancing to mimic the mimes
with white faces contorted to pillars of pain,
as the ringmaster murmurs “we're all the insane”
and the inmates dunk donuts in droplets of rain.

With their hammers in hand, in their plum pinafores,
Satan's soldiers of fortune wield powers of Thor's
leaving blood on bent bodies, the tombstones of wars
lining highways and byways  with manna and gold
for the mastermind movers, survivors consoled
with some pie in Valhalla (or so they've been told).

Above boulevards, battered with batches of bricks,
flys the Duchess of Dawdle on waxed candlesticks;
while she watches, debauches, her ****** tricks
as he talks (on their walks in the summer-day parks
where a parrot kneels praying, a parakeet barks)
’bout the buffed brazen beaks of the latter-day larks.

Hoary goblins glow gruesome, they leap from the loft
to the hard-hearted rues, shedding tears that they've quaffed
through the night of the dead as the clarinets coughed
and the keepers kept watch so that no one escaped
dingy dungeons where priests and their puppets hide caped
behind walls lined with tulips and justice hung draped.

In the Garden of Eaten, where apples once grew,
lie the bones, somewhat blanched, from the last barbecue
and the snakes strut like storks down a lost avenue
along tracks  like the cracks on the mask of the moon
all alight with the shadows that seep down a dune
as the firefly crawls from a crimson cocoon.

Phantom trains travel tunnels (dispatched in all haste),
voiding tickets to nowhere, it seems such a waste
to see roadblocks with red lights at dead ends misplaced
at the base of the bowels of the bottomless pit
where reflections of life seem so ****** counterfeit
from the back of the eyes of the blind hypocrite.

Lady cockroaches, camped in the Countesses' beds,
are commanding crusaders to fit arrowheads
to the ends of burnt bridges suspended by threads
from frayed thongs of diminutive bald balladeers
taunting Cerby, the three-headed dog, serving beers
to the pagan disciples of bold puppeteers.

The oceans lay barren, the garbage dumps filling
with fracking and cracking and lead water spilling,
for milling and drilling are thrilling but killing
the birds and the beasts and the tea leaves, soon falling,
yet gurus roast chestnuts but can't heed their calling
while mauling and crawling on knees while they're brawling.

Unshorn sheep in the meadow are led to the bay
to be brainwashed and fleeced, trusting donkeys that bray
of the virtues of demons that haunt yesterday,
while the vultures deflower the turtle dove lanes
where the blood trickles up and the cruel crimson stains
Easter eggshells and feathers – that’s all that remains.

One eyed bees pilot lines through electrical storms
and blind hornets hum hymns when they're swirling in swarms
while the rest are repressed as the blue marble warms
(regent Queens losing sight that the end has begun)
and for eyes of the ewes, veils of wool have been spun  
and the wasps fly their flags from the **** of a gun.

Seven trumpets (attempting to echo the horns
of the Siamese goats and the three Unicorns
giving birth to the mirth in the temple of thorns)
sound the bugles of sorrow inside of the sea
of crazed lies of the wormwood afloat like a pea
in a pod of dark dolphins that can't disagree.

Often bellowed by barkers, to crowds with no faces,
are words (in their aftermath, leaving no traces)
of picnics and parties in limbo-like places
on paths to perdition where pundits are preaching
and sirens belch bullets while pirates prowl, breaching
the shadow's barbed branches, with whistles blown, screeching.

They're dissecting dissenters that dare to annoy
and then trample with jackboots sent in to destroy,
until taming the toes of the last Gypsy boy
who gets caught in the craw of their cold catacomb
with no rescue by running nor staying at home,
and no freedom to breathe, only rough roads to roam.
 May 2016
Mike Essig
follow the yellow brick road...*

The terrible freedom unleashed by typewriters.
Condition of complexity judged without criteria.
Radical provocations. Urinals and prams. Contingent.
Anarchist aesthetic. Not truth nor beauty but freedom.
Materiality of language. Multi-hued wheel barrows.
A cuttlefish. A crate. A cassowary. A cigarette. A ******.
Paratactic order. Particular phrasing. Pulsing pastiche.
An infinite conversation without resolution
as with the stupid friend who won’t shut up. Ever.
A transcendent dialectic based solely on proximity.
Ineluctable modality of the near. Only that. Buck it.
An unquiet ghost endlessly self-questioning. No answers.
Moaning in the meaning. A simple stuttering. Sibilant.
Turbulent and unpredictable as waddling wolverines.
Words that only mean whatever is seen. Juxtaposition.
Dissolving into desired dissonance. The magic chord.
Absolute verity in the experience of the fraudulent
for the same reason as the ubiquity of toothpaste.
     The poem as its own universe, complete and whole,
     fodder for the mind, not balm for the soul.
 Apr 2016
Seán Mac Falls
And dreaming of Inisfáil, I was raised on Bolivar Pond.
Sheltered in my wake, I’d coo as the dewy’d morning dove
   And fern in my bed, I rose to greet
       The song-splayed sounds of light
   And work, I made it dropping slow
Bright in the summers swoon, I was adorned in forest eves
By rings that rang from tree to rook, and flung the wingèd down,
       Brambled in bay, garland in violet
   When blades could ***** and not make bleed,

And I was brindled by the moon’d many shades, that liken
To a brook, and mottled in my main, noted among moss
   In that glow, once knighted we must serve
       Wood, let me comb in peace!
Colored in the mantled cloth of leaves
And bonny and red, I was the brave and the boon, the deer-
Ants learned me, and herons stood muck, on stands spearing all mite
       And the vernal song sang lowly
   Swaddled in azure’s unfolding dream.

At each turn was a season, nascent life charming in marsh
Forays that brimmed the hollow rood, in clover yards, I saw
   The lilt of bees, sallied in clearings
       Brown as the yellowed beech
   Colored in sounds that beat the heart.
And forth into the field I sprang unto that shedded loam
And high was the sail that bellowed the raft that raked my pond,
       Bullied by the har-umph of frogs
   I rippled, rowing cat o’nine tailed tunes.

Windy and free in the hollowed bark round the ****** bay
I trailed the bear sniffing ****, heard the hoo of a swooping vowel
   And wild in hare, dug the fox-hole up!
       Damp fires hailed the rising
   Moon, as fire-flies dinted the troutling pools
And nothing I saw in my drowning sun could nettle or thorn
My piney ways, nothing could rot my wood-craving ears
       For the kestrel’s qweet-a-quee rang holy
   In the skunk-flowered fields of Bolivar Pond.
Inisfáil (Inish-fall) ] Gaelic word meaning: Isle of destiny, island of the fall, Ireland.
.
I know the door you're
Speaking of,

And you're right.
It is
Shut -

Firmly
Tight.


Love seeps through,
Overtaking my view,
Breathing promises
of
No looks back.

While

Red emotion
Slips through,
Obscuring my view,
With such ease,
Spilling
Right through the
Cracks.


I feel gusts of
You,
Whisping bits of me to

The spaces you wish
We'd go -

Though it's the
Heavier parts
That can't quite start

Flying -

Afraid
Of the
Multiplous

Ways to go.

--

It's Me

That gets
Left behind.
 Apr 2016
Sjr1000
Needing to go home, the time has come
All of these designs have come undone
The party favors have been put away

The room is cold, your body still with sleep
There are a thousand open windows looking in from the street

The night was filled with shooting stars

A one night stand is what our lives are

We loved each morning well
We played through out the night
When it was dawn we longed for the night

We held up infinity's mirror
We danced like angels riding the Santa Ana winds
We dreamed of sandcastles and moved right in

We constructed deconstructed
there were even moments of resurrection

But the time has come to head on home

Kissing your forehead fairtheewell

Leaving my belongings on the floor

I came with nothing but potential
I leave with nothing as promised

Opening the door
A turn to the dark and silent night
But first blessing those who remain unblessed
by such a life's gifts

The time has come
I need to go home
Time for peaceful rest.
 Jan 2016
Joel M Frye
sacred silence hangs on angel wings
blessing, watching over wakened night
fluttering on the screen, drawn to the light of
consciousness, the truth of darkened mornings.
strong, alone, remotely flipping through the
channels of the restless bar-room soul
charles bukowski, angry, drunk and droll;
pavement wisdom yanked inside, renewed and
resurrected.  rolling stone lays open,
having sprung the latent-night messiahs
preaching to insomniacal choir.
cryptic muse's recipe for coping:
be consumed, entombed, re-wombed by
worshiping and feeding written fire.
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