gurgle, gurgle,
groundcurrent unsettled,
moon unseen like stars
fever dreamed,
dissonance for the melody maker,
dissonance for the retired risk-taker,
dissonance for the hips of homewreckers.

civil, civil,
no minutes can afford the divide,
aside, to the crystal buildings and
the sky's sputtering cries,
compliments to your forehead's ****,
compliments to your forefather's rash,
compliments to your aforementioned crash.

the current, the current
rides hot and merciless along thigh,
dribbles down chins and nightgowns,
dries--a permanent badge of scattered life,
electroshock seeps from self-made holes,
electroshock seeps from smoldering bowls,
electroshock seeps from typecast roles.

volcano, volcano,
grumble and moan.

volcano, volcano,
clear cord and stroke.

volcano, volcano,
grieve me in ash.

volcano, volcano,
I've been awful bad. I've been awful bad. I've been awful bad.

City limit space expands,
it's threaded through with veins--
grey-black dendritic strands
                                     span
                        across this moldy brain
of a city.
Our rotting nights spray hits around
           the places players play.
The impulses will whitewash all complaints
'til the glaring day.

I wanna spit-shine every storm drain,
stain the cracked sidewalks in white,
take this town to Sunday morning Mass,
though she was born for Friday nights.

We're gonna trickle past addresses
                                                   now,
Electroshock through habit streets
these crosswalks sneer with snide expression.
Mildewed thoughts we'll hardly think.
A conversation you're repressing
I'm smoothing out my wrinkled brow
Another weekend's blurred out
blank confession
melts off the tips of tongues,
          I can taste it now.

Circulation space expands,
we're threaded through with veins--
this bio-asphalt plan
                           spans
              all through this molded frame
of a body.
But rotten thoughts, like ships aground,
                   teach sailors how to pray
when impulses have buried all complaints
'neath the foaming spray.

I wanna shade out every bruise now,
paint the dumpsters all in gold.
Missoula, listen: You're a lady.
I don't give a **** what you've been told.

A moldy brain dreams slattern makeup
for a prizefight town each night
so let's take up every artist's brush,
paint shadows on these barroom eyes.

We're gonna flow right through these boule-
                                                          ­          vards.
Electroshock through habit streets.
These dim lit yards and spoiled thoughts
are hyphens placed between each week.
A conversation you're repressing,
I'm smoothing out my wrinkled brow.
Our city's made-up face is running
off the tips of winter and I taste it now.

The funny farm is the place to be.
We have soft beds, prescription meds, and cable TV.
When we party, someone loses their job,
or they might lose a limb if we form a mob.
It's one of those places you want to find yourself.
Electroshock is fun if you bring pop and chips.
Careful being around us, we're bad for your health.
Best of all, we're about to set sail on our blanket ships.
To the unknown and out of room 213!
Quick, hand me the bleach, I want to feel clean!

Monsters all,
Are we not?
Some of which have lost the plot.

Confine them all,
Bolt and lock.
And pray that they will be forgot.

Corner them,
Bring in the S.W.A.T.
Hush the rest; disperse the shock.

Poke around,
Electroshock.
And hope that they will join the flock.

Social chains,
Block out a lot.
Our moral boats have been rocked.

FISHTHOUGHTBLOOD                                                                                                            JON BOLDUC

When I was a boy,
Father taught me to ice-fish.
Here’s a memory;

Father drills a hole,
the auger bounces, vibrates, roars,
shaving ice– soon
the  blade connects with winter water,
           –the engine fades off.
I fish  floating ice chunks from the hole with a skimmer
while
Father sets the trap, ties the sinker, and hooks the minnow
thru its side.
He lowers the line
gently into the fishhole; the bait plunges to the lakebed.
Father reels up the slack, pitches the three legged trap
above the exposed black water
and we wait for a trout, or a snarled toothed pickerel.

Father,
I have learned

to fish for thoughts
with an ice–trap. When the flag
springs up, I reel
slippery ideas up from deep darkness.
As they flop, I pull the hook out from their lips,
knock them in the head,
throw them in a pail; gut them, I spill fishthoughtblood on the white snow.

After the low sun sets,
My friends and I fry caught fishthoughts
in my dim cabin.

Hughes,  Plath, Ginsberg, and Eliot
talk around the fireplace
as the pan sizzles, as the oil jumps. Soon
we feast on flakey poemfillets;
we talk about the  dark english rain,
the crowded zoos, electroshock therapy, bald mediocrity.

After we have eaten
and finished the wine,
and all my friends have gone home
I look down at empty plates

and somehow,
“the page is printed.”

There was much in her madness to draw us in.
Poetry was payback, electroshock for readers,
collusion between self and the culture oppressing women.
Rebelling against the limitations of a woman's sphere,
seeking refuge in career, a feminist before it was chic,
writing poems as a poultice against death
lurking in the shadows of a conflicted mind.

Sylvia, what was the dialogue you had with Death?
He deceived you in the mirror,
made you tremble at the foot of the stairs,
hissed from the potatoes in the kitchen,
till you sought solace in the oven's jets.
You were an artist out of time.
It's safe to come in from the depression now.

I am experiencing the human condition
Or I would be, if I knew what such a thing was.

They say poetry is an art form designed to show emotion
emotion of course representing such a thing as a human condition
but my poem is broken

I must insert 25 ccs of suffering more,
50 ccs of subtlety more,
and 100 ccs of emotion more,
not to mention the 600 mg of lithium,
the 25 µg of Wellbutrin,
and the 100 mg of synthroid I put in myself.

But my poem is broken.
And if poetry is a form of the human condition
and I cannot form my poem
then I cannot form the human condition.

This is an inevitable factor in the world of man
most people tend to forget it, but it is so
the more I cut myself off from the world around me
the more I become what the world needs from me.

Then comes righteous silence.

Silence is golden but only in small amounts
Silence is only golden when the faux silver of duct tape must
simply not do.
Emotion is a human condition, but I must take the pills.

After all, if these pills are not effective,
they’ll simply electroshock my brain
in order to find my human condition

Who am I?
Why am I here?
Forget these questions--
hey, hand me another beer.

But surely--or Shirley--the animal crackers in my soup
are just as sick and tired as I of being a pawn--
afraid of the magic space wizard destroying us all--
they are just as afraid of the inevitable,
that indeed, everything all along has been true
and tis all forbidden
Afraid that perhaps the friendly raccoon’s intentions
are not so honest as they appear when we first move
to our new woodland home

Perhaps my animal crackers in my soup
are more afraid I will lose myself
as I stumble down the rabbit hole
looking for the man who burned down my home
only to discover he truly was the innocent
(In this crime, at least)

Or perhaps as I stare these pills down,
muting my human condition has come easier;
no longer am I attacked by strange men
for a golden woman carrying a blue staff

No long must I boldly proclaim
that I’ll go out through my kitchen
when indeed, for someone with my body
(human condition aside)
belongs there, if only to make a sandwich.

If only there was a dictionary definition in the back
of every high school textbook
and we are made to ‘put it in our own words.’
Defining what should be such a simple thing
should be rather easy then.

But nobody said it was easy.
We were all told that we were special
but I have come to the conclusion that
saying everybody is special is really saying
that nobody is.

And if nobody is special,
should not our own human condition be the same?
or is is simply that no,
humans are manufactured on a mass-produced scale
for the pleasure of those powers that be?

Yes, they have a tough game with tough rules,
and they’ll win (and I’ll always lose)
but am I a design flaw?  Something wrong in manufacturing?
I’ve traveled to these human distribution centers
and there were many babies wrapped
in blue or pink cloth dictating from birth
a key aspect where the human in question
has no choice.
And their human condition has been dictated to them
but I paid no mind

(I ignored the stains on)

I allowed human condition to be dictated,
knowing most of these children will grow to be
a design flaw like me.

Lost.
Confused.
And waiting on a mother swan to come
and tell me I am beautiful, and indeed
I have been in the wrong place the entire time.

And as I left this distribution center
of humans, and the human condition
I asked myself
“What god would make this world?”

“What god would make this world
with so much suffering and pain and make us
unable to identify for fear of what will happen to us?”

“Was it an angry teenaged god who played a game
only to find that his friends were murdered around his ears
and he must have to build this universe by himself?”

“Was it a god who lived in a world all alone
only to hate any form of life beyond himself?”

And as I asked myself these questions
I prayed that it wasn’t true.
That maybe, this is just exclusive to my
inability to find my human condition.

on this page i write pain, and the html censor revises it with flower... need for a positive vocabulary feedback of life in general?! what is this hippy ****, what's the point of writing the raw when you're revised as well done, missing the Tartar alt.?!

variations on E.C.T. as catalogued by
Sylvia Plath in the Bell Jar -
Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest -
mute Indian the winner in that one -
Hubert Selby Jr's Requiem for a Dream -
or perhaps from?
never mind - the mild electric chair
for therapeutic purposes, gamer crew and
the virtual reality mask - so many profess
to needing one - IQ enhancing stereotypes -
but there's me with a bottle of whiskey
and some spare time -
the professionals speak of an undoubted
pain threshold -
so instead of outright killing each other
we masked it behind outright necessity of
turning **** sapiens into guinea pigs -
clap... clap... clap... clap... and that clap
already resounds prior to this marking and forth
toward another century of the desert of
Darwinism - ever hear that joke?
a chemist, and physicist and a Darwinist
enter a bar - a chemist orders Hapsburg 98% proof
absinthe, a physicist order a shandy,
while the theoretical biologist (Darwinist)
orders a gene atlas and pseudo **** safety pins to mark
his route should he be drunk, and should be,
but isn't, he's on a rampage of walkie-talkie steroids
befitting only the tongue - raps and raps
without rhymes - 'buddy, drink something!'
'i'll drink a smoothie of aborted fetuses,
in that Christian calendar: the feast day of a would
be Mozart', oh hell, a would-be ****** too...
you have to much capacity and the claustrophobic
area of expression, believe me, they won't let
you fill your full potential -
take to rank, take to surgical instructions -
the man in charge at Oxford says:
please don't use frightening words electroshock therapeutics -
but i swear that's what it was?
treating momentary lapses in apathy - angry,
jealous, psychopathy - i.e. people uncomfortable
with the idea of Σ (totality, given neurology and
the brain myth, found elsewhere, or in / as total) / soul -
leave them be, we need psychopaths to give us
consumer gratification for the and in with the existence
of corporate sister nationhood -
well, unless you want a start-up in the sense of
a French Revolution - that one's booked:
only in America - elsewhere we're just Palestinians,
throwing rocks and paper-drones at metal -
testing out Newton and not the Einstein's parabola -
algebraic notation *x (time) hyphenation y (space) -
which means given algebra there's a third missing,
from Kantian standpoint of 0 - a z... god?
or, wait, refrain from Darwinism's anti-social collective
of a personal will - oh i don't know, improvise!
but what critique came to Communism (post-theoretical
socialism) came to the project of a multiculturalism -
this time round it wasn't the Pope that undermined it -
still, people confuse an attack on Communism
with an attack on Martial Law - the actual critique
came against Martial Law years December 13, 1981 to July 22, 1983,
we feared the Soviet invasion - why do you think
my communist party member grandfather lives
without complaint? of course the first to complain
are the farmers - before them the nobles drank,
got bored, cured boredom with borderline paedophilia -
the bemoaning - the king ****** me last at Versailles -
i lost my virginity and i subsequently lost my
ideal, i defined reality with a symptom.
so once we warred and killed each other -
but since we're a bit more pacified these days -
we decided to internalise warring with each other,
and instead of killing each other we decided to
experiment on each other - the reinterpretation of
E.S.T. into E.C.T.; prices start at £89.00 for the basic
kit to imitate death row simulation... you the funny
thing is... once you've experienced a brain haemorrhage
you became a slight sadist - you want the pain to come
to finish you off - some say the soul is bound to bones -
animation, pure and simple - that the non-existence of
soul is proved by the remain of bones - but that's
whiffed away with the Hindu practice of cremation -
and that's dark comedy given the Nazis -
it's almost like the Nazis wanted to end the debate,
the already Gothic practise of burial and bone-keeping -
as if invoking the geometry the soul would pick up first,
the abstracts of mechanisation, the canvas readied for
ether muscles and juice - ****** ended up
Hinduism on amphetamines; ****, i think i lost a bracket (
somewhere... oh well, i guess i must end with ).

Pits and pockmarks
flit and dart
across an infinite ceiling.
Random synchronicity
plays patter song
stupor and languidity
The orchestra conducting
purple and yellow
to a sparkling, a
crushing crescendo
falls like a wave on tastebuds, tempting.

She lingers like
fog on a pane of glass
A sharp signature
impaled on a pile
of dreaming dust.

Like a rushed column
updraft through a house
of leaves blank and staring.

A mark from the
back of your palms up.
Your fingers stuck signing
a language sang by the blind.

How did she stay so long
A force hidden in neuron canyons.
A Gypsy camp lodged
between cortexes
spinning silk into a
muffled gasp, a conspiratory shuffle.

She lingers like spines of glass
in nailbeds, planted sweetly,
with the best of care.

Laughter in an asylum
electroshock dreams soaked in sweat.

Grabbed my brain like a chemical symphony.
Painted pictures of pivotal seconds,
wrapped up and romanticized.
Dreamt about.

Your lilting language planted
little honeypots deep in my palms.
Sparked fire from entropy
lighting a city in my chest.

But now these buildings tower
like Goliath in David’s dreams.
I need to escape
I need to slide out of
this sleep you’ve monopolized.

******* dreams
like smokering fingerprints
left on the cleft of my conscience.

The old taqueria on Victory.
The Bourgeois Pig.
The bitter spice of winter
painted over the cracks
crumbling the walls.

These waking hallucinations
haunt my habits.
Still frequent the holeinthewall
dives in my heart.

I'm here. These texts these sacred carnivorous words
this verbal membrane
(read carefully I summon you read twice!) :
curtain meninx electroshock therapy
blanket straitjacket
bed-sheet ***** placenta

I praise this osmotic verbal membrane
I give you I get undressed I curse myself
Ah! my repressed whorish pathos:
I give you lucidly
Any poetic art is written in ink
(I calmly assure  in public)
in fact
in these mortal neurons

Darkness and dust

These texts these words I've picked from books and streets
Only this ultimate membrane
(precious like the *****
fragile like soap bubbles)
still separates me
from the psychic space where you've pushed me
                                             as towards the springs of the Nile
from the psychic place whence  I try - cautiously
painfully - to pull out:
my hands my paws my brain my heart
What is beyond? darkness and dust
What is left? a poetic art this darkness this dust
these cracking neurons

Marta Petreu
*translated by Liviu Bleoca

Leaving my phone on the
morning strewn bed, the
bus courses by and drags
me along for the ride. Old
high school friends pulse
through my head and I
contemplate their distance.
Every unrecognized human
who seeps into view or
distance causes me to bury
into my phone and feign
distraction. Feign importance,
like someone is paying attention
to me. Until I realize my phone
is my hand and my real phone
is still fast asleep in Asia.

I feel like a ghost today.

Not one word shared between
others as real as me, I figure
I'd feel as lonely at the bottom
of the ocean as I would on
-stage in Madison Square
Garden. 4 hours of work
slithers by like an injured
snake. After exactly an
hour and 17 minutes on a
bus home, addiction knits
the phone into the palm of
my hand like resentful lovers
wishing they didn't need each
other. Only 1 text message
and it's my significant other
slipping me recognition. Old
high school friends pulse through
my head and I contemplate their
distance. I return recognition
to my lover and hear nothing
from her for hours to come.
None of these old high school
friends seem to acknowledge
what I thought was love between
us. I pretend not to care as the
world ignores me and fall back
into the confused trance of
'keeping busy.'

I feel like a ghost today.

What happened to the school
-yard friends? The late nights
spent with nowhere to be?
The happy conundrum of life
as a game? What happened
to freedom? What happened
to freedom? What happened
to freedom?

I hold a sliver of hope that one
day life will electroshock my
existence back into existence.
It's been a beautiful fight, but
lets hope the war is over by Christmas

*** momma, I'm coming home.

I saw Ada,
In New York. I hit her up,
and she wanted to meet up for breakfast.

The next morning:

She had on slate shorts, a ruffling, loose white t,
And chucks falling apart at the seams
in scythes of fabric.

Her hair bobbles
as she bounces over.
It's so frizzy and curly
as if it’s been through electroshock.

She gives me a hug and as she pulls away
her lips hit my cheek.

A grey pigeon lands in my sight behind her
and pushes a white **** out onto a starbucks lid.

The best thing
Is seeing exes that you haven’t
talked to or seen in awhile; and hearing
them talk about the great things they’ve done
In your time apart.

It’s almost as if I was right there with Ada
when she was experiencing
her new love of Brooklyn.

I am
A  ghost in her life,
And in that piece of my heart
That misses her,
I like the feeling of being
as free as a spectre;
an unobtrusive observer.

My car has got it’s brain back through
A trick automotive lobotomy hack

It was acting a little manic, the whacked
Human Machine Interface Module part

The screen was seen as a scary
Kerouac consciousness stream

An obscenity screed; a
Muddled fuddled car scene

HMIM installed anew—
Electroshock therapy

Zzzzzzhhhxt-phsssszzxt!
Initiating … initiating … initiating …

“Welcome!
Destination?”

The first time he touched your fingertips, you felt electricity shoot through your veins and you wrote it off as static
But now, with him between your lips, staring up into his eyes which are staring down at your body, you realize that he is your electricity
With every ****** he surges you
With every command you feel your mind break
The first time you landed on your knees before him, you gazed dazily as your whole empire collapsed
Now the same fingertips that shocked yours slip inside of you, electrocuting you awake
He ***** as if he is a straight descendent from Zeuss sent to Earth to give you a taste of thunder
His lightning makes you tremble and you can't imagine what your body felt like before he made you scream
You live for his hands grazing over your hot skin as you squirm for his touch
His electrifying touch that makes you call for the gods
Even though you know that the only entity you could ever bow down to is the one who arches your back with every movement
You call to your God, he comes to you with every inch of his being
You feel him deep inside of you, breaking you free from your inhibitions
He holds you down by your throat as your body succumbs to him
His body engulfs yours
You burst from the deepest crevice of your soul
And as you lie there, weak
Feeling the after shocks of the best electroshock therapy of your life
Reminiscing on his fingertips
You realize the piece of you that was missing
Is whispering storms between your thighs as he shocks your heart to life

Live too long and friends will become ghosts.
Corpses will fill your address book.
The ghosts show up in the crushing morning silence
and depart into your dreams after the twilight.
They never seem to have much to say.
I often ask them questions. What's it like being dead?
Is it cold? Are there animals. Is there anything to read?
Should I join you or hang out on earth a while yet?
The answers, when there are any, are not satisfactory.
And so I stick to earth for another bruising day.
In the Shack nothing happens and that is more than enough.
It is hard to fall asleep and truly hell to wake up.
I often feel like a road killed skunk that just had electroshock
or a successful suicide who just ****** a shotgun to ******.
Between dawn and twilight exists a pointless purgatory.
Still, heaven remains a vague possibility.
But that is what is meant by life. I'm off to participate.

  ~mce

“Show us your scars”
When they should’ve said shame  

“Point on where it hurts”
Yet they couldn’t find a cure

“Have you been thinking about death?”
Like my thoughts wander to anything else

“Just take this pill in the morning”
But I‘m up every morning

“You’re safe here”
I felt their eyes under my skin

“Have you assaulted anyone in your life?”
Can’t they see that I‘m the victim here

“Can we send you home without worrying?”
As if I can guarantee them my life,
as if I have a home

“Bring your mother with you in the next session”
But I’m in therapy because of her  

“Have you considered electroshock therapy?”
And now they want to cause me more trauma

“How many times have you attempted suicide?”
“Enough times to believe that I have already died” I said finally

Strangers in the cold, maneuvering the night and its labyrinth of nostalgia traps,
The holy ground of memory,
I remember, I remember when everything was so,
Underwater,

I was somebody else’s ghost, crybaby angel of death, corner booth of the donut shop two minutes past the clock tick of the witching hour, I’m feeling the heat,
Electricity jumps from neon sign to stainless steel countertop to the back of my throat and I swallow premonition
after premonition,
until my hands tightrope walk over blacktop abyss of their own volition and the floor,
just drops out,

I’m spiraling again, getting ****** up on the collapse trip,
I’m afraid to desperation and I don’t have the drugs to sort it out,
I don’t know how to tell you what is wrong because I can’t even explain it to my dreams,

and sleep hangs heavy like the shadow of the gallows, my caged ****** blood sings to me of electroshock nooses and I’ve got this entire genealogy of disappearing and I know I have to run,
I have to run and keep running and only my body remembers why

So my grandmother has had
Electroshock therapy
And I'm on the similar route
They ask me
"Why can't you be happy?"
You are manic depression,
I get it.
You need to live a normal life
Just please leave me alone.

Love masters degrees
imaginary science
called psychology

          Kelly McManus

Bleeding with leeches,
electroshock therapy;
your yearly check up?

                          Kelly McManus