Simplest of names,
So plain, But how I love to say it
A promise for warmth in igloo block prison eyes
And tone of Daria,
just whelmed enough to respond
A chance of sarcasm is air
Venom in plain daylight.

Plain tone.
Plain mood.
Plain old abuse.
And most would take it from her.
As she would and certainly has taken it from us.

Petit feminine fighter with no haymakers or KO records.
****** face, that rested war and peace between chin and brow.
Baroness of motherhood or is it the queen of hearts and depression?

Stars and music always forever
Anchor tattoos with a key to a heart, now a predator.
Forever enchanted by the la-de-dah and bleeding heart affairs
A savior in no motion or fashion but I dare not call you hypothetical

But a standard broad, beauty and-
So shameless I celebrate seeing you, awkward and so ****
Cleopatra, to be a bit dramatic-
Yes Cleo-mantra, I collectively disintegrate all charm and physical form
And you,  unfazed or unimpressed with either detail of romance

My friend, compromised by style and NO amusement.
There is much more to you than ****** faces and belittling arguments.
There is more to you then practicing soapbox rants in your kitchen.
There is more to you than a shallow mothers intoxications and material.
There is more to you than the new hair dye or the wigs you collect.

The things you store in the boxes cluttering your room with everything not in those boxes
The clothes on your floor, decorations from your teenaged 3rd or 4th personality.
The smell of perfume and coffee and more perfume all over,
stuck to papers, next to wine bottles, borrowed and never returned books, unfinished snacks,
used paper towels, lipstick stained mugs and glasses, your sons toy I stepped on 4 times,
pictures of gone lovers and notes, your license; now found again after the second time ordering a new one.
And…it's expired,
Then finally under the aftermath of years, doubt, clutter, your cell phone vibrating in the fray of sheets.

"found it."

Least we forget that, as we forgot we are both in this room together.
You are so much more than this mess I picked up for you countless times
And though I complain I will pick it up for you and not ask your permission
I won't scold you, I can only exhale failure and help.

Staring blankly into your screen discussing all genres of worldly horror and ways to divert.
Such plans and opinions but no federal funding!
We would pay homage to girl power and the early 90's and call her G.I. Jayne-
(Or not cause she doesn’t have that kind of sense of humor.)
But imagine a solider, a true solider of the meek.
That is theoretically, G.I. Jayne.
Has all of our best interest at hearts, our hero.
Songs of children are said to give her strength-
(She really doesn't like this kind of humor, I must move on.)

My friend truly distressed by the world she can't control from her tiny screen.
I place all comfort I can to her and understandably rejected like a stranger making rounds.
No trust comes from her nowadays, None for me at least. I can't speak for all.
I try to climb over the steep absurdity, alluding to her self-mutilation and task this is
but not going as far as just telling her this is ******* killing me.

I have no lesser or sophisticated words.
I'm dying every time we reach these altitudes.
Fingers and my tone raising at every disagreement .
How you can break me down to my atomic core and decimate miles of friendship.
My closest star in the sky, use to bring me morning tea, flowers and maternity
We now stand in quasar as our space and stardust find mass in thousands of millions of years in development
For me to be sent to the loony bin and you to prison like our heroes from Clinton to Lazaretto.

In the red corner - me
in the blue corner - life

this isn't a fair fight
there was no sparring or training
I had to come out swinging right from the bell
absorbing every jab that life throws

just waiting for the knockout punch

still dancing and going toe to toe
throwing haymakers left and right
I try to keep my guard up
hoping somehow to win by decision

side-stepping punches
ducking and weaving
uppercut uppercut uppercut
I dropped my guard, and there goes my mouthpiece

ding!

saved by the bell

I still have a few rounds to go...

If I could fix the world,
Setting straight the crooked man’s twisted words with my iron crow,
I’d wrap my brain around what’s wrong, run him out of town on a rail,
Make it safe for women and children first again,
While he hangs together with his corkscrewed cronies or separately,
A lone gunman, fulfilling his own prophecy, his days numbered,
And I belly up to the bar to hoist a few and toast his good riddance.
Why would I tell you my anger and grief, love, knowing it will only raise red flags?
Worrying for my sound mind and body stooped to his level,
Your chemistry simultaneously repelled and attracted to our strange elixir,
The cure worse than the disease, my fists clenched, bruised haymakers
Flailing to defend the ghost in you, a wispy cloud of smoke my arms can’t wrap around.
You should see the other guy, never walking away from a fight, never talking out of school
About the last man standing, railing at raindrops, my reach outstretched beyond grasp,
Out of insight, out of my element, out of my head, out of words,
Left with only futile grunts, moans, and sighs, drained of charm,
My primal gut gnawing at this empty longing, disarmed by your absent embrace,
My zombie arms search the streets howling for their runaway bride.

This day has been rough
I'm spent and my reserves are burned
After all of the hard work
The pain
The grind
The time
Keep pushing ahead to get there
Figurative haymakers thrown
Untouchable to get the job done
But burnt
Spent
Overlent
Taken to the limit
Finding out what you're made of
Being surprised but impressed
No matter the task at hand
Or tribulation overcome
At the end of the day
Knowing when a someone thinks of you
They think of love
To feel appreciated  
For being you
Will make breaking through any obstacle
Wonderful

The day fades away
Black and grey
And black and grey
Until all that is left
Is cerebral thoughts
Bouncing against the shattered window pane
Which shows the way
To everything we are too scared to know
The sacred truths of our flaws
Too beautifully ugly to be recognized
Too perfectly imperfect to fit the leftover jigsaw pieces
Jesus pieces ring with fibs of green backs
And crack was distributed to poor neighborhoods
So a lot of the time a welfare check or food stamp
Ends up more like "my bad"
And no news crews roll through
Unless the person who died
Shares my skin color
White guilt making me feel less stable
In my bitchings and moanings
Like my bad feelings couldn't possibly land heavy
Like haymakers
Growing up we used to jump from hay bails
Landing in loose straw
Running away from farmers and their
Combine harvesters
Now I run from life
Too afraid to jump from the ground floor
Into the clouds
Life is hard
Living it the way you want is harder

Ringing in our ears,
wild haymakers throw us off balance.
We are The Smoke.
Eyes jump and jive,
dancing,
to the music of earthquakes.
we stick and move
through terrain so tough,
The Devil himself gets tangled.
Feet pounding on yesterdays dreams.
Thundercats roar towards the sky.
Forgiveness is not given to the weak.
Hammering on,
always look twice before the fall.
Remember what it is like to fall and
forget the taste of strength.
The birds are hungry for their pound of flesh.
Move!
We run.
Left, left, right,
two forward,
three back and
once to the side.
The birds are closing in, watching with red eyes.
Swollen,
we run and
cross
this path,
leading us to the spit soaked floor and
broken chair.
Another round
and round we will go.
Hands cracked with every minute the clock beats down.
Forgetting the taste of victory.
Our lungs are filled with smoke.
We fall.
The wild ones smash through the Heavens,
warriors through and through.
We must forgive ourselves.
For glory,
we will shake The Smoke.

Referees mismanage oversight
incorrect calls lower credibility
faith in justice dissolves into the ice
agency is taken into padded hands
vigilantes slash and spear.

Hip check leads to cross check leads to fist check
malignant hostility boils over
leather armor is removed
interphalangeal joints meet mandible
type O negative paints a jersey
haymakers take bizarre trajectories
to avoid helmets and visors
the face is homebase to ingrain pain.

Violence subverts gamesmanship
players must be taken off ice
to be put on ice
otherwise brawls become overabundant
and destroy the integrity of the sport
yet each transfer of agony is euphorically satisfying
—considering the context—
so fist fairs continue for the foreseeable future
we organize an impenetrable perimeter
once we've acclimated to penalty kills.

I dropped out of school after my first semester of freshmen year. My parents had just gotten a divorce. I was in a state of perpetual, adolescent, hopeless confusion.
I've always loved stories. Fiction or nonfiction didn't matter. Just as long as it blew my mind. I, like so many before me, was going to be a writer. Not just any writer either. No, I was going to be part, Hemingway, part Kerouac, part bukowski, and part Thompson.
The decision was made. I only had one problem: I couldn't tell anybody my plans. I am a privately educated kid from England. My path was laid out before me. Hard work to college to minimal success to family life to riches I never knew existed. So I wrote up a fake class schedule. For some reason it contained multiple French classes... I don't know either.
So every week day I would "go to class". Which meant I was walking to the Bowe street starbucks with a pen, a journal, and a laptop. I wrote so much terrible poetry that year you could replace me with any teenage girl suffering from rejection and self-conscious body issues. But you know what? I put the ******* hours in. After a while I found something which I could pretend was my style. I started getting emails from strangers telling me how good my poetry was. I got a lot if reads - 100,000 before I knew it. My head was so big I had a hard time fitting through doors.
Have you ever got so high you forgot your own name? I have. The *** helped me ignore the constant whirring of anxious thinking. The drink helped me shed my politically correct layers of defense. The validation from my poetry ensured my needy feet would never touch the ground. My pride told me everything was fine. Better than fine.
So I started writing less and less. Started staying in more and more. *** fueled day dream benders became a regular thing. Icarus had never came so close to a fake sun.
People started to notice. Aggravating talks about my potential and intelligence. Horrendous awkward dinners with my family. My mum used to tell everybody that I was writing a novel. I didn't have the heart to say I was lucky to get one poem on paper everyday.
Friends stayed distant. Girls came briefly and left as quick as their legs could take them. I became a ghost, haunting the streets of Richmond with bohemian declarations of... "True freedom." Life had lost it's luster. My control was slipping.
The story I would like to tell is that I won. Conquered cultural wilds to paint myself a noble individual. But none of that happened. This isn't a story of my success as a voice of a generation. This is not a story of redemption. This is a story about a confused kid who gave into the temptations of spontaneous decisions. A kid who needed help and advice but was too proud to know how to ask. This is the story of coming to the brink, and not caring if you fall.
So where am I now? I'm back in school, dealing with feeling like I have severely underachieved. I am waiting tables for people I could care less about. I am catching up with my Friends and peers who have already surpassed me. But I am alive. I am still writing. I am here to tell you that life punches in no pattern. Haymakers come with jabs, and the bell always seems to far away. You don't beat life, not even on a technicality. You just give everything you can to try and go the distance.

to a baby’s swing
or to a fine horse
with one
good
ear
or to the weary
haymakers
that are now
my mother’s
unkissable
arms

my father
his head full
of hot soup
but not a minnow
burned
recites
the toy
gospel

as I begin
to take
my intelligence
personally
here among

the floored laundry, the raised unawareness

of the powerless mad

By: Cedric McClester

Well, I’ll be ******!
Trump and Putin are a sham
Perpetrating a flim-flam
They just shot Uncle Sam!
In Helsinki with a battering ram
Is it necessary to draw a diagram?
In order for you to understand
That all of it must have been preplanned

They met in private
With no notetakers
Under the guise of  peacemakers
Just like your average lawbreakers
Doing their best to throw haymakers
See neither one of them are Quakers
But they’re con men outright fakers
Playing ball like the new Lakers

I blame the one,
But not the both
Cuz Putin didn’t swear an oath
He wants to stymie our growth
And Trump’s playing with half a loaf
For his base which he betroth
But which of them hates us the most
It’s hard to say, yet he’ll still boast

He doesn’t care about us
So he’s betrayed his sacred trust
In order to do what he must
To protect himself and to adjust
Even if we all go bust
Making America how he discussed
Despite the economy being robust
He’s unworthy of our trust







Cedric McClester, Copyright © 2018.  All rights reserved.

Most people lead with the jab
But his 1-2 punch was dactylic
The majority of his poems are haymakers
Homogenous mixtures of slurred speech
That rarely connexts

His footwork is nothing special
He still finds the canvas too springy
He's distracted by blinking

Graceless graphite paws
Taking granite swings
Skipping chips of deadweight loss
Embedded in the stream of ink
Now dripping from his brow
The fighters looking up
And the ref is counting down

The finesse of Grace knows
Real Princes do not come a dime a dozen
neither do they swagger unnoticed in the pen of yokels
or sit in taverns in abandon ribaldry with the carpetbaggers  
or with haymakers and the naysayers brigade of lame affiliations

For t'is highly and lowly known
these duds merely mouth off in vacuous tirades
filling the air with the stench of uncouth notions
reeling the politics of the gutter parliaments in absentia
in the rabbles House of commons of the uncommon senses

For strewth they have to display
starved attention makes for attention seekers
the alchemy of the reprobates and fishmongers
brews elixir of stunted minds in vivid hallucinations
ungainly choristers yodeling the hangman's blase anthem

As solid as the pillars of Athens
privilege is courage bravery knowledge and truth
freedom comes in cerebral leverage not hedonistic sermons
the scale of mother Justice holds balance in equity not disrepute
we uphold the dignity not the shallow vowels of repugnant liars
in guided light we pour scorn on the johnny come lately cultural bandits