I. Neptune’s Theater


A rock spins through the universal tumbler

and its warm blue pools calcify

as turquoise Neptune in his cloudy blue bath bath

builds a lace castle with his fingertips


Sculpts a submerged eden of crimson and emerald

where painted parrots chat up cardinals

butterfly and angel fry sway with wave pulse

and foliated coral fingers beckon from arched windows.


Neptune’s children are flat and bright, spined and notched

free yet entangled in lace mesh ecosystem

beneath an array of bioluminescent stars

as a gangly pretender watches and blows bubbles.




II. Sapien Siege


The hot acidic hand of death grasps

the mesh rends and tangles

the ecosystem shattered

reef’s loosed children scream beneath planet’s stars.


Butterflies impaled

cyanide-swooning damsels

mesh-tangled angels hauled heavenward

coral to potash, corpses to coal.


The pretender to the throne blinks

rubs blurry lenses,

kicks plastic fins

and moves on to the next show


Unseeing and unaware

of the luminous filament in his wake.

Self-appointed divinity,

deus ex machina.

*****************­************

Ann says: All of the animal and human characters in this poem (except Neptune and The Pretender) are named after coral reef fish. Coral reefs, one of the most diverse ecosystems, are expected to be largely extinct within one human generation. Deus ex machina is Latin for “God from the machine.”

Copyright 2013 by Ann Marcaida.

sleepy eyes open glimpse high ceiling red wood beams house built in 1920s glance out window tree tops blue skies mountains in distance flock of birds flying east chirping sounds passing car engine accelerates inhale deep breath through nose stretch legs plantar dorsal flex feet raise arms over head stiffness in shoulder feel strange sensitivity in right pectoral above ****** cautiously examine with hands feel coarse lump growing more like nub smell moss glare down at growth protruding from chest panicky by soreness rise from bed to mirror on closet door tree stem jutting out from chest inspect dark bark like calloused growth little leafs budding this cannot be race in nervous tantrum run to bathroom suffer painful weight pulling me down clutching carrying foliated limb with arms see myself in mirror horrified stagger back to bed lie on right side branch resting on mattress breathe anxious breaths reexamine pectoral area feel sinewy roots spreading under skin across chest up neck down over stomach waist legs forget how to get home disorientated nauseous exhausted what is this flora invading me ******* kafka metamorphosis post-modern hyper-real narration without accountability jorge luis borges metaphor without mindfulness fairytale run wild jean baudrillard simulacrum psychosis room now filling with plant undergrowth stinking of earth dirt gooey slugs worms shells bugs festering climbing towards windows voracious for light warmth moisture blocking out morning sun entire body trapped in tangled twisted leafy twigs excruciating pain fright lungs gasping suffocating encroaching darkness fatigue loss surrender wake up 4 AM from nightmare scared to fall back to sleep

Without you here,

I've been able to name stars after myself

And ***** my fingers on roses that I've planted in my own garden

I've read and written poetry because I have identified myself with confidence and happiness

And the throbbing constant ache is at a dull hum

I'm foliated sketches and the dog-earing of my favorite pages.

I am the prayer I say at night before bed and the gratitude I feel in the morning

And without you here,

I am still all of those and so much more

Without you here

I am so much more

The bedrock underlying much of Manhattan is a mica schist known as Manhattan schist.  Schist is foliated or layered in appearance. Quartz sparkles, micas, and amphiboles are primary minerals in schist. A melted rock, just like the city resting above, it too, a famous melting *** of humanity.

This one poem too, composed from pieces of other poems,
folded in layers of many others that melted together,
in harmonious discordancy

<~>

this glorious grime,
this delicious dirt,
stuff of my blood,
genes of my children's children inheritance,
of thee I sing,
in thee I revel,
of thee, I am composed

the city I love,
where I was born,
schooled and fooled in,
by many a woman

the city where I named
and raised my children

will probably die in
this city, and when
I am long forgot,
my name never uttered,
    who, will think of me?
Perhaps,
whenever someone says,
"he was such a rascal"

these tales I took,
some or all,
from beneath my skin,
where city streets grit,
was injected beneath my skin
and came with the title,
City Boy

so today, on a reborn street,
near tall towers no more,
I rest upon reconstituted speckled curbstone,
the city's lowered down ledges,
the city's lowered down-town boundaries,
constantly redrawn,  
but nonetheless, always rebuilt from their own
regenerated stony compost,
and the typical NY passersby doesn't even notice
a man, head in hands,
unsilently weeping, thinking that:

We lose or throw away so much we should have kept,
We keep so much we should have thrown away

street prowler, heart growler,
Art Deco lampposts,
the mountain range of east seventy second street,
begs the bagger's question,
each post
begging each other,
"from whence will come my inspiration?"

licked the stubbled sidewalks,
fell down into their living caverned cracks,
light needed, needy softly heated,
orange and green pizza neon signs,
saying here,
if you see upon what be,
these are your city's homeland colors of veracity

perhaps
NYC was model precursor
for our internet presumed-to-be-alive-but-who-can-say-for-sure
model for the world today,
where I know not my apartment's neighbors name,
yet carry his second child
in my arms,
when the fire alarm
summons us all to flee
to street safety...
and still only
"know" his child's first name,
and his father,
as Apt. #16D

all this exponential signage
of this NYC boy grousing,
are his defrocked muses him annoying,
with a serenading blizzard
of one trick pony repetitions,
their coronets trumpeting his unmasking,
*making this essay, his revelations,
a product of their harmonious discordancy

I saw a foliated Beatle, playing guitar
he looked like a reject for bleeding Ringo Star
a slug had wiped it's trail in it's sleepy state
yet he was so desperate it was all far too late

Then he was stuck, ... stuck in the mire
and his warts were growing and on fire
he cursed the day that he was born
he would not be father of any spawn

Then she ripped him up
then she ate him up
to there was nothing left
nothing left of him


By Christos Andreas Kourtis aka NeonSolaris

Parable of Torvisco: “branched among the thickets of ignorance, their foliated stems speak of the white blood that has fallen from the souls that resiliently endured the solitude of their limbs and who enjoyed their ruddy bark and the pubescence of the Daphnes that gawked at over them turned into Laurel, she being a spatulate flower of Vernarth, like Apollo elliptically adoring her with the underside, and something fuzzy hiccuping over the teachings of someone who is not loved. Being the Daphniform Torvisco, of appressed retractable sepals that are pronounced on the laurels in Dafnomancia of the pubescent Torvisco on the first ******* of Daphne, leaving the ovoid crusts near the foliate stolon of the grayish spurs on the fins of the Pelecaniformes Petrobusjos, leaving the Malloga the lice. of their plumage that they are eaten by laurels, as a carminative antispasmodic digestive degassing, in the flora of the intestinal Torvisco engulfed by their pride and eagerness of nobility.

Parable of Sacred Bud: “first the animals and the buds that emanated from the inflorescences were venerated, as gods of the occult sprouting from the long-lived saps being miscellaneous family taxonomies that were consecrated to gods trapped by the mists of their foliage, over the colonies of other species with outbreaks of bud expiration in the distant buds of the leaves, towards non-renewable woody plants, for critical tempering to germinate on the dogma of woody herbaceous plants, as sacred shoots of ferns without their cell walls. Here is the tree of evil and good, sprouting one of each but as hyper-sprouting, which deceived the eyes of those who wanted to cut it because of the human snooping in bloom, on the shores of Medea's hands, growing on the shore of a headless river deity, who was not yet poisoned by an Olympian gesture, agreeing to have long fragrant and rosy hair on the pubescent teenagers who dared to call themselves Medea "

(Prócoro redoubling his sinister imagination of the Rosé of the Witches and grotesques, he was still ecstatic at the expectation of the extensions of the Rosary of the Evangelista San Juan simulated in the crowned Torvisco, for purposes of the genetics of the world in the hands of pubescent bodies that were embodied in the bodies and their stolons, like retrograde shoots going towards the spheres of the pelecaniform Petrobus and its little lice that resided in it as vital alarms. Structuring thus, the grazing that ran from its wings with vigorous fine pediculosis, which was abstracted from the scalps Medea decked out in megalomania in the sprouts of the Enchanted Torvisco)

Somethings are forever.
Like a last goodbye, swelling into a deep lullaby.
Or like new beginnings under a reign of tiny kisses.

Eyes illuminated,
Heart incinerated,
Mind foliated,
Soul encapsulated.

My emotions  are a crutch,
My will, feels like it doesn't weigh much.
Death bed.
Flat line
Passion reborn.

General Cluster


Joe Bye Then, is going

to plough Josep Borrell's

pristine garden without

help from John Deere.

   Seedlings from the

    jungle are already

on the waves coming

to propagate this fertile

prosperous cohesive

    horticultural zone.

    Trees will sprout,

   foliated branches

   will shade sunlight

  impede growth dark

ages will return apes

  from Africa will inter

breed, eventually they

will ruin the purity of

  our unipolar estate.