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Keith J Collard Dec 2012
I still have flashbacks, horrifying and spectral: of conference meetings, projectors and efficiency meetings...corporate metrics, acronymic value cards that read like a Masonic Temple's pledge.. ...honesty, commitment, sacrifice, the dutiful worship of mercury and saltpeter; also customer satisfaction.
           Those flashbacks frequent my mind alot--especially when I am ramming my co-workers into the trash compactor with the blades of the fork truck. They say " ooooh" and " ahhhhh" as if they are getting a massage. They dull my blades with their dull heads.
          I have to ram them with the blades of the fork-trucks, or they will scramble out. They still say things like, " make sure that has a tag,".....and " wear your safety goggles," making chills run down my spine. I haven't put all the workers from the " Do-Wee depot" in the compactor only corporate cadavers and not zombies.
          But I have to forewarn, the zombies are not a threat, it is a few cadavers and the "consumers" that pose a threat to me and what I have built. The zombies are producers, even only if it is moans and putrefaction, but they are good sports, and my only friends.
         Some co-workers, who I was friends with before, I have spared from the compactor--owing mostly to that the part of their brain that was corporate, either fell out on the floor, or was gnawed on by a fellow zombie rendering them good sports and not cadavers.
        I use the building material section to chain them to their previous aisles. Jose, was my best friend, he was shaped like a slug, with a huge lower lip, and slicked back greasy hair, he always cheered me up, how busy it was and how slow he remained. Him and I worked together in the ' outside-lawn-and-garden' section. Even his zombie self has kept his lisp.
          I chain him to the outside lawn and garden section, where he likes to water the flowers. He lunges at me sometimes, but the chain is thick, and Jose is still a cool zombie.
Angry Joe is out there too. He is chained to the 'reach' truck. He is always mumbling about overtime.....or " Im not staying late."
         I have disabled the riding engine, so he just stands on it and runs the fork blades all the way up then all the way down, beeping the horn the whole while. He is the only one I kept, that has some vestige of corporacy in his brain, for the reason that he watches the back gate. The consumers are constantly probing this outside metal fence gate, and Joe has eaten all of them. Don't get me wrong, Joe can be a good sport, when he is not drooling about 'overtime' or ' I havn't took a lunch yet.' He can be quite funny.
          He banters with Ryan from inside 'lawn-and-garden' all the time. Ryan is alot younger, alittle younger than me. He has a mullet(what I call a mullet and he say's a hockey cut) and verily is--before he become a zombie-- the laziest person ever, and now that he is a zombie, well let's just say, I don't have to chain him anywhere, I know where to find him.....at the back gate smoking a ciqerette backwards with his mullet on fire or in the break room. He had the most squeeky voice when he was a human, but now odd fully enough, he sounds like Tom Jones.
         " You ate my cosumer Ryan," drools Angry Joe, " No I didn't Joe, you ate your own consumer," Ryan rejoins in his acapella voice ( I like hearing Ryan's deep zombie voice).
There are others, in the various departments of the Do-Wee Store, but this journal is to relate the first most pressing concern, two cadavers have escaped the compactor.
             The store manager Joyce and her minion(the assistant manager Damien) have escaped. They were ******* humans, and remained so in corporate cadaver form. They hide from me, as I plow through the aisles with the inside forklift. I have used wire from the fencing aisle to reinforce my forklifts. Sometimes a cadaver co-worker will jump out with a price gun, drooling " where is your spootterrrr...."( a safety regulation in the store).....I run them over with great gladness, but then wishing I heeded their advice of safety glasses."Splat."
            I have my theories, on how everyone turned to zombies. It started with over-ocurring routine, which my a.d.d could have been impervious to. But I couldn't have been the only one in the store with a.d.d? But that seems the case. The first day when I showed up to ' outside-lawn-and-garden' it took me six hours before I noticed everyone was zombies. I didn't notice they were zombies until I noticed them in good spirits.
               But the first day of the zombies, was concurrent with the rise of the consumers--ever more dangerous, greedy, and audacious are the consumers. They consume everything in their path, they consume good conversation, good manners, and replace with their mark, which is this....your life with the current moment is to be sacrificed to get them what they need to continue resuming their lives. They do not enjoy shopping, but enjoy holding you in place, consuming you and your values into their value, which has no value at all, since their mind has consigned the present moment that has you and not them, to a number that always has too much value, and they will bring you and it down while you are subject to time and they are not.  
             They turned my friends into prisoners of arbitrary time; and like putting a rabbit in a dank dark basement, with plenty of food and treats and space, it will slowly get diarrhea and die.  Everyday I marked the sunrise, and I would always pay thanks to it, no matter if I was on break or not.  The nine hour day could not ruin me, but my friends being ruined, that started to ruin me.
                       And that is what I believed started all this, nature has no room for two kingdoms of Consumers. So the producers(zombies) were created from the routine of being divested of life, and from nothing they came to produce: producing gases, vile ****** smiles, human  cannibalism, hearty conversation, practical jokes, moaning questions to the infinite sky.... they were created human again, given value, and most of all, I have my friends back, and they are happy again. But, the corporate cadavers that escaped the compactor , put my creation in risk, they look to let in the consumers again, they are up to something...
             But presently with the corporate cadavers gone, and the consumers held at bay, I have my Depot of Eden, I can grow anything, make anything, and soon will be able to ferment everything, especially fuel.   Now monday morning conferences that threaten you to pick it up because there are alot of people out there that want your job( iterated by the frizzy headed gangly Joyce) are replaced with 'zombie dance parties'.  
            " Zombies, what is the first rule of zombie dance party," they reply to me, " dohmp talk bout damp party," then we make a music video.  I let loose a couple of cat's in the break room, and presto, an agile cat make's flesh eating zombies look like Micheal Jackson.  Even I get busy with them, I feel so comfortable with them; dancing to Juvenile "back that *** up,".the best dancer gets to eat the cat...sure beat's listening Joyce's depressing morning pep talks about quotas while I am watching a bird outside the front glass trying to eat a dragonfly, " Keith you paying attention."  I just want to say, " No I am not you frizzy headed gangly walking skeleton key(she is skinnier than the gang of keys jingling on her belt)."    I will find her and put a roofing nail in her temple and her plans.
                The sound of zombies walking in here is music to my ears, like gypsys walking barefoot on a strawberry patch.  I don't know what that has to do with anything, but I like it, and don't care who knows.

            I fortified the outside of the store with everything within the store. I grew a garden, with all the fertilizers, and acids and alkilines of outside garden. I also use the garden chemicals to sprinkle on the brains of my co-worker zombies to change their acidity(almost like a hyrdrangea shrub). The purpose to get them somewhat coherent to play poker and darts in the breakroom. I figured out how to make explosives, with the nitrogen fertilizer and pool cleaning acid, well actually HeyZues did, he always eats both, and one day he moaned really loud  " BLOOOONDEEE " ( his nickname for me from The Good The Bad And The Ugly) and  gestured his expanding stomach, he blew up and gave me my first wound, he destroyed my dart board.   I took his head and posted it on the back loading dock, I know there are consumers trying to infiltrate when he sounds off with " BLOOONDEEEE..."  resounding through the whole store (almost like when he was a human).   I created another dartboard, I can create anything here, sometimes I think, that feeling is what........
                But the point of this journal is the two who escaped the trash compactor, Joyce and Damien. They haunted me before and haunt me still. When I leave to venture outside for gasoline for the generators(the only thing I need, not for long hopefully) they run amok. I will see new ' sale signs' in zombie penmanship, and I can see that they have hidden co-workers to have cadaver meetings, where they talk about ' customer satisfaction.'  I can sometimes hear keys jangle, it has to be Joyce, for the sound is to the cadence of her John Wayne walk, like she has been on horseback her whole life.
            Outside is very dangerous. There are many consumers out there.
                 I was outisde in the parking lot, where consumers still wallow around when a consumer asked "which product is better." I had to drop a cinder block pallet on him with the forklift; they are more adacious then my zombie co-workers. Even after a pallet of concrete is forklifted on them, they wave fliers with sale advertisments from underneath.
            Well, this particular trip, I returned inside and was startled by the loudspeaker, it was Damien's voice, the same as before, paging the hardware department. I jumped on the fast slim forklift to hunt for him. There are phone terminals everywhere, and he could be in the upper level offices. I saw Joyce's shape through the window once.
          They are up to something.
Everytime I ventured outside, the store became altered. I even saw a consumer waiting in line with the cashier machine now on. I sent the consumer to Angry Joe, who was due for a lunch break.
          There is a gap in my wire somewhere, I know it.
            I was at the gas station, getting propane and gas, when a consumer was scowling " where is the gas attendant, is everyone stupid or what?" while he was trying to figure out how to pump gas. I disabled the safety pumps, they do not shut off, and do not coincide with numbers, you hold the handle it pumps out as much as you need.
              He was pacing around like a little kid denied recess and suffering from sounds of frolic and kickball--dragging his feet due to the fact he had to pump his own gas, I heard a scraping metallic clicking noise. My eyes were caught by a bright glare on his shoe tread, I gripped my nail gun..... then he dropped the hose and walked back to his car with gasoline gushing as his wake. I saw what it was on his tread, I had no time to flee....it was a push button grill ignitor with the orange tint of a " Do-Wee" label on it......" ****."
              The last thing I registered was the consumer saying " ahhh don't touch me," apparently talking to flames. I woke up in a ditch, the big fork truck and my gas station destroyed.
I limped back to the " Do-Wee" store, and utter horror greeted my singed and surprised eyebrows.
              " Grand Re-Opening, 50% off everything." I squeezed the trigger of the nail gun, the nail harmlessly echoed off the parking pavement at which it was aimed. "They set me up at the gas station. "
               They had to do better than that to separate me from my zombies.

             I entered through the store in a nun-plussed state. I woke out of my unbelieving stupor with the sound of Jose's voice. " Welcome to Doooooo-Weeee....can I eat your...."
            "Jose it's me, who chained you to the entrance?"
         " Dammian, Keeeeeth, they are waiiiting....here's a newsletter...." --he smacked me across the face with the newsletter.
        " I don't want that ****.....' as I clutched the newspaper the loudspeaker went off in Dammians annoyingly over-polite and late-night-voice.
       " Attention shoooppers. all prices are feeeefty percent off, ask our associate Keeeeeth for a 80% discount, he is the skinny deleeecious looking kid with spicy skin, and a boston red sox hat on."
Hundreds of consumers pivoted their heads to my direction. " Hey, that kid has a Boston Yankees hat on."
         " Run Keeeth," zombie-lisped Jose.
           Fifty million imbecilic questions assailed me at once......" can I return this sprinkler for a jacuzzi.....can I get 120% off.....can you come to my house and fix my television for free"-- it was unabashed audacity, survial of the most annoying and repetitious; and the corporate cadavers have let this consuming flood in on me and my poor zombies.
           I needed to find my steed, my inside forklift. It was not where I left it near the entrance.            
        Surely they have sabotaged it. " the riding mowers," the thought uplifted my fading resolve. I darted past wallowing consumers before they could get my scent. I heard a consumer, " you obviously don't know what Im talking about," talking to zombie George, who was munching roofing nails.
         The consumer grabbed me, and said "here he is, this is Keith, he is wearing a Phoenix red sox cap"--panic bit into my brain, this consumers grip was implaccable. The grip that holds the steering wheel tightly driving nowhere fast, with anything in that interstice of commuting, not worthy of manners and the least of which being a friendly wave to 'go ahead.'
           They formed a wall of uttering stupidity, escape was cut off. They scratched at me, hissed, tore at my flesh and screamed demonistically in my ears. I caved and and called the hoard m'am and sir, they choked me, and loosened their grip only so I could tell them " Im sorry, sorry for your inconvenience, take my life and personality as tribute, take my imagination rendered prostrate by these sceptic corporate words that this mouth emits, betraying my personal form, the human element to this lifeless purposeless machine....destroy me, for finding the infinity between letters of corporate law and none between nature's laws......"
        I was almost unconscious, giving a speech to imagined hooded phantoms......" destroy me, for valuing friendship and imagination, and seeing infinity, in the shadow of a letter, eternity in the numeral of a number, and for defying the order to see things as others do....."...." destroy me, for seeing that people are unhappy and trying to uplift people for the sake of seeing them smile....destroy me, destroy my smirk, and add a lifeless smile to my corpse."
              I heard a horn, the riding floor mopper/buffer, it was Ryan, he commandeered the machine with precision-like drunkenness. He knocked down the consumers like twenty pin bowling. " What's up ***** cat," he possibly said, and I climbed to my feet.
         I walked to the riding mowers, and turned the key on the floor model. I sped the main aisle, with caresses of consumers that would be deep clawings at a slower speed. I dodged stupid question, and swerved from unabashed frugality. I turned up the tool aisle, grabbed a battery nail gun.
              " It says batteries are included, but are they included?" I answered with a 12 gauge nail, and resumed my course to the upper offices, that for too long looked down on me and my friends. I climbed the stairs and entered. The office was abuzz in corporate banalities. " Hello, this is Damian how may I help you.....oh helloooooo keeeeeth, one minute.......sir hold one second thaaaanx."
                I aimed the nail gun muzzle at his ugly overly polite mug." I finally found you, I will get the store back in shape Damian...."
          He cut me off, " no yoou woonn't, they are pouring in, we will meet our quota for the year...."
        " Me and my friends
Zeeb Jul 2015
Hotrod
Verse I

Wrenches clanging, knuckles banging
A drop of blood the young man spilt
A new part here, and old part… there
A hotrod had been built!
A patchwork, mechanical, quilt

Feeling good.  Head under a raised hood, hands occupied, the job nearing completion.  Sometimes the good feelings would dissipate though, as quickly as they came, as he cursed himself for stripping a bolt, or cursed someone else for selling him the wrong part, or the engineer whose design goals obviously did not consider “remove and replace”.
He cursed the “gorilla” that never heard of a torque-wrench, the glowing particle of **** that popped on to the top of his head as he welded, the metal chip he flushed from his eye, and even himself for the burn he received by impatiently touching something too soon after grinding. 
 He, and his type, cursed a lot, but mostly to their selves as they battled-on with things oily, hot, bolted, welded, and rusty – in cramped spaces. One day it was choice words for an “easy-out” that broke off next to a broken drill bit that had broken off in a broken bolt, that was being drilled for an easy-out. 
  Despite the swearing, the good and special feelings would always return, generally of a magnitude that exceeded the physical pain and mental frustration of the day, by a large margin.  
Certifiably obsessive, the young man continued to toil dutifully, soulfully, occasionally gleefully, sometimes even expertly, in his most loved and familiar place, his sanctuary, laboratory… the family garage.

And tomorrow would be the day.
With hard learned, hard earned expertise and confidence - in this special small place, a supremely happy and excited young man commanded his creation to life.

Threw a toggle, pressed a switch
Woke up the neighbors with that *******

The heart of his machine was a stroked Chevy engine that everyone had just grown sick hearing about.  Even the local machine shop to which the boy nervously entrusted his most prized possession had had enough.  “Sir, I don’t want to seem disrespectful, but from what I’ve read in Hot Rod Magazine, you might be suggesting a clearance too tight for forged pistons…” then it would be something else the next day.  
One must always speak politely to the machinist, and even though he always had, the usual allotment of contradictions and arguments afforded to each customer had long run out – and although the shop owner took a special liking to the boy because, as he liked to say, “he reminds me of me”, well, that man was done too.  But in the end, the mill was dead-on.  Of course from the start, the shop knew it would be; that’s almost always the case; it’s how they stay in business - simply doing good work.  Bad shops fall out quickly, but this place had the look of times gone by.  Good times. 
 Old porcelain signs, here and there were to be found, all original to the shop and revered by the older workers in honored nostalgia.  The younger workers get it too; they can tell from the co-workers they respect and learn from, there is something special about this past.  One sign advertises Carter Carburetors and the artwork depicts “three deuces”, model 97’s, sitting proudly atop a flathead engine, all speeding along in a red, open roadster.  Its occupants, a blond haired boy with slight freckles (driver), and a brunette girl passenger, bright white blouse, full and buttoned low. They are in the wind-blown cool, their excited expressions proclaim… "we have escaped and are free!" (and all you need is a Carter, or three).  How uniquely American.

The seasoned old engine block the boy entrusted to the shop cost him $120-even from the boneyard.  Not a bad deal for a good high-nickel content block that had never had its first 0.030”overbore.  In the shop, it was cleaned, checked for cracks by "magnafluxing", measured and re-measured, inspected and re-inspected.  It was shaped and cut in a special way that would allow the stroker crankshaft, that was to be the special part of this build, to have all the clearance it would need.  The engine block was fitted with temporary stress plates that mimic the presence of cylinder heads,  then the cylinders were bored to “first oversize”,  providing fresh metal for new piston rings to work against.  New bearings were installed everywhere bearings are required.  Parts were smoothed here and there.  Some surfaces were roughened just so, to allow new parts to “work-into each other” when things are finally brought together.  All of this was done with a level of precision and attention far, far greater than the old “4- bolt” had ever received at the factory on its way to a life of labor in the ¾ ton work van from which it came, and for which it had served so dutifully.  They called this painstaking dedication to precision measurement and fit, to hitting all specifications on the mark, “blueprinting”, and it would continue throughout the entire build of this engine.  The boy remained worried, but the shop had done it a million times.

After machining, the block was filled with new and strong parts that cost the young man everything he had.   Parts selected with the greatest of effort, decision, and debate.   You can compromise on paint and live with some rust,  he would say, wait for good tires, but never scrimp on the engine.  Right on.  Someone taught the boy right, regardless of whether or not he fully understood the importance of the words he parroted.  His accurate proclamation  also provided ample excuse for the rough, unfinished, underfunded look of the rest of his machine.  But it was just a look, his car was, in fact, “right”.   And its power plant?  Well the machine shop had talked their customer into letting them do the final engine assembly - even cut their price to do it.  To make that go down easy, they asked to have two of their shop decals affixed to the rod on race-days.  The young man thought that was a fair deal, but the shop was really just looking out for the boy, with their herring of sorts.  
The mill in its final form was the proper balance of performance and durability; and with its camshaft so carefully selected, the engine's “personality” was perfectly matched to the work at hand.   It would produce adequate torque in the low RPM range to get whole rig moving quickly, yet deliver enough horsepower near and at red-line to pile on the MPH, fast.  No longer a polite-natured workhorse, this engine, this engine is impatient now.  High compression, a rapid, choppy idle - it seems to be biting at the bit to be released.  On command, it gulps its mixture and screams angrily, and often those standing around have a reflexive jump - the louder, the better - the more angry, the better.  If it hurts your ears, that’s a good feeling.  If its bark startles, that’s a good startle.  A cacophony?  No, the “music” of controlled explosions, capable of thrusting everything and everyone attached, forward, impolitely, on a rapid run to the freedom so well depicted in the ad.  

This is the addictive sound and feel that has appealed to a certain type of person since engines replaced horses, and why?  A surrogate voice for those who are otherwise quiet?  A visceral celebration of accomplishment?    Who cares.  Shift once, then again - speed quickly makes its appearance.  It appears as a loud, rushing wind and a visually striking, unnatural view of the surrounding scenery.  At some point, in the sane, it triggers a natural response - better slow down.    

He uncorked the headers, bought gasoline, dropped her in gear, tore off to the scene
Camaros and Mustangs, an old ‘55
Obediently lined-up, to get skinned alive!

Verse II (1st person)

I drove past the banner that said “Welcome race fans” took a new route, behind the grandstands
And through my chipped window, I thought I could see
Some of the racers were laughing at me

I guess rust and primer are not to their taste
But I put my bucks mister in the right place

I chugged/popped past cars that dealers had sold
Swung into a spot, next to something old

Emerging with interest from under his hood
My neighbor said two words, he said, “sounds good”

The Nova I parked next to was “classic rodding” in its outward appearance.  The much overused “primer paint job”.  The hood and front fenders a fiberglass clamshell, pinned affair.  Dice hanging from the mirror paid homage to days its driver never knew, but wished he had.  He removed them before he drove, always.

If you know how to peel the onion, secrets are revealed.  Wilwood brake calipers can be a dead giveaway. Someone needs serious stopping power - maybe.  Generally, owners who have sprung the bucks for this type gear let the calipers show off in bright red, to make a statement, and sometimes, these days, it’s just a fashion statement.  Expensive calipers, as eye candy, seem to be all the rage.  What is true, however, is very few guys spend big money on brakes only to render them inglorious and seemingly common with a shot of silver paint from a rattle can - and the owner of this half fiberglass racer that poses as a street car had done just that.  I'll glean two things from this observation. One, he needs those heavy brakes because he’s fast, and two, hiding them fits his style.  
Really, the message to be found in the silver paint, so cleverly applied to make your eyes simply slide across on their way to more interesting things, was “sleeper”.   And sleeper really means, he’s one of those guys with a score to settle - with everyone perhaps.   The list of “real parts” grew, if you knew where to look.  Looking was something I had unofficial permission to do since my rod was undergoing a similar scrutiny.  
“Stroked?”, I asked.  That’s something you can’t see from the outside. “ No”, my racer friend replied.  
“Hundred shot?”  (If engines have their language, so do the people who love them).   Despite the owner’s great efforts to conceal braided fuel and nitrous lines, electrical solenoids and switches, I spied his system.  The chunks of aluminum posing as ordinary spacers under his two Holly's were anything but.   “No”, was his one-word reply to my 100- shot question.  I tried again; “Your nitrous system is cleanly installed, how much are you spraying?”  “Two hundred fifty” in two stages, he said.  That’s more like it, I thought, and I then figured, he too had budgeted well for the machine shop – if not, he was gambling in a game that if lost, would soon fly parts in all directions.   Based on the overall neat work on display, I believed his build was up to the punishment planned. 
  I knew exactly what this tight-lipped guy was about, seeing someone very familiar in him as it were, and that made the “sounds good” complement I received upon my arrival all the more valuable.  I liked my neighbor.  And I liked the fact of our scratch-built rods having found each other - and I looked forward to us both dusting off the factory jobs.  It was going to be a good day.

The voice on the loudspeaker tells us we’re up.

Pre-staged, staged, then given the green
The line becomes blurred between man and machine

Bones become linkage
Muscle, spring
Fear, excitement

Time distorts ….
Color disappears …
Vision narrows…
Noise ---  becomes music
Speed, satisfaction

End
Cyril Blythe Nov 2012
Janie pushes the metal book cart back into its parking space in the Document Delivery Department of the St. Louis Public Library and hangs the last sticky note for October 30, 2012 on the wall by the head of the department’s closed door. She retightens her brown scarf under her chin, tucking the wispy hairs above her ears back into hiding. Having your hair begin to prematurely gray as a teenager has dramatic effects on a person. Her mother wore scarves around her wrists when Janie was growing up and when Janie begin to wear scarves to conceal her salt-and-pepper hair, her mother just smiled. The clock hanging on the wall above the children’s section reads 11:28pm.
Two more minutes.
She reorganized the pens and books on her desk and set the box reading NOTES onto the right corner or her desk with three blue pens and a stack of note cards. Her coworkers learned fast that Janie does not like to talk. She does not like eye contact. She loves the silence, and never ever to ask her about her hair. Her manager gave her the NOTES box after about a month of horrible miscommunication and everyday it fills with requests for books or tasks that Janie has to complete. She completes the tasks one by one, alone, in her back office in the Reference Department and hangs the completed sticky notes on the wall by her manager’s door. She works the night shift and locks the library up every night. When she’s alone she can talk out loud to herself and those are the only voices she cares to hear.
“Goodnight, books. Good night, rooms.” Janie shut the heavy wooden door to the library, placed the color-coded keys in the front right pocket of her jacket, and began her walk to the bus stop one corner away. She avoids the main road, taking her first right onto a side street that she knows would spit her out right beside the bus stop.
“Goodnight Taco Bell Sign. Goodnight Rite-Aide. Goodnight Westside Apartments. Goodnight Jack-o-Lantern smile.” She stopped in the middle of the alley and peered up at the Jack-o-Lantern grinning down at her from the third story window above. “Mother wouldn’t’ve liked your smirk, Jack. She would’ve slapped that **** right off your face.” Janie, satisfied the pumpkin was put in its rightful place, smiled as she trotted on.
“Mother carved smiles into her arms and that’s why Daddy left, it is, it is.” She kicked at a crushed Mountain Dew can as she remembered that night from years ago.

“Mommy?” Janie pushed opened the door to her mother’s bedroom and saw the moving-boxes torn open and all their contents scattered across the floor. She tiptoed through piles of scarves and silverware and corkscrews until she reached the bathroom in her mom’s room.
“Come to us like rain, oh lord, come and stay and sting a while more, oh lord…” her mother’s voice was slipping off the tiled bathroom walls. Janie pushed open the door and saw the blood for the first time pouring from her mother’s wrist. Her mother was naked and perched on the bathroom sink, singing to a red razor blade.
“Mommy?”
“GET OUT!” Her mother jumped from the counter and perched on all fours on the floor. She began to growl and speak in a voice too deep to be coming from her own throat.
“Mommy! It’s Janie!” She began to cry as her mother, still naked and bleeding, twisted and writhed onto her back and began to crawl towards the door that Janie hid behind.


“Thirty-Three percent, dear. Just a thirty-three percent chance.” She shivered trying to clear the last memory of her mother with the words that all the shrinks had echoed to her over the years. “Schizophrenia is directly related to genetics, little is known about the type of Schizophrenia mother was diagnosed with except that it is definitely passed on genetically. But, there is only a thirty-three percent chance you could have it, dear. Thirty-three percent.” The sound of the bus stop ahead reminds her it is time to be silent again.
“Disorganized Schizophrenia.” She mouthed to herself as she stepped back out onto the busy street from her alleyway. She tightened her scarf and saw the bus pull into the pickup spot. She walked forward to the bus, again immersed in her self-imposed silence.
Stepping out of the February cold, Janie removes her wool scarf as the bus doors close behind her.
“Where to baby?” The driver smiles a sticky smile. Her nametag reads, “Shannon” and has a decaying Hello-Kitty sticker in the bottom left corner.
“The Clinton Street drop.” She hands the driver her $2.50 fare and avoids the woman’s questioning eyes. The night drivers are always more talkative, curious.
“Your ticket hon.” She tears Janie a ticket stub. “Everything is pretty dead this late, I’ll have you there in ten minutes top.”
Janie begins to shuffle towards the seats, ignoring the woman.
“You mind if I crank up the music?” The bus driver asks, purple fingernails scratching in her thick blonde hair. “I need to keep my eyes open and blood flowing and music is my fire of choice you know?”
“Sure.” Janie shrugs her bag onto her shoulder and walks on before the woman can say anything else.
“Route E-2, homebound.” Shannon’s voice crackles over the loudspeaker.
She shuffles down the bus towards her usual seat; second from the back right side.  Shannon starts the bus rolling before she reaches her seat and Janie can hear her singing along to “Summertime” by Janis Joplin. The bus floor, today, is sticky because of the morning rain. Two years of riding public transportation has taught Janie that staring at the floor as she walks to her seat is better than the risk of making eye contact. The bus is usually empty this late but if there ever happens to be anyone else on, it’s better not to converse. Safer that way.
She plops into her seat filling the indention that ghosts of past passengers left. The seat is still warm and Janie squirms around until the stranger heat is forgotten. She tightens her scarf and sighs. The brown pleather seatback in front of her is peeling towards the top. Janie leans forward and idly picks at the scab-like dangles of brown as she watches the sodden city canvas roll past her out the foggy window. As she picks, the hole grows. She twists and digs her unpainted nails into the seat until her hands feel wet, warm. Looking down, they are covered in blood and mud.
“What. The. Actual. ****.” she whispers, wiping her hands on her pants leg. She cautiously picks off another piece of pleather and a trickle of deep red begins to run from the seat back, clumps of mud now falling onto her knees. A puddle of blood and mire splatter down her legs and pool around her feet as she picks at the seat. Her white tights are definitely beyond saving now, so she digs faster until her thumbnail catches on something, bends back, and cracks. She gasps and withdraws her shaking hand, watching her own blood mix with the clotting muck in the seat, half of her thumbnail completely stripped off.
Looking around, all else seems normal. The driver is now muttering along to some banter by Kanye West, completely unaware of Janie’s predicament. She closes her eyes.
This is a dream, this is a dream, wake the **** up.
She opens her eyes to see the pool of filth around her feet trickling towards the front of the bus. Panic sets in with a whisper, They’re going to think it was you, your fault, you’ll be thrown in jail.
“But I didn’t do this.” She lashes out to herself. “I didn’t hurt anyone.”
Next stop, E-2. Shannon blares on the intercom.
“It’s just a dream, get your **** together, Janie.” She laughs at herself, manic.
Prove it! Her subconscious screams.
Convinced to end this moment she has to continue; Janie plunges her hand into the pleather grave one more time. Frantic and confused she laughs as she digs, spittle of muck splashing on her bus window.
Faster, faster, faster.
Deeper, deeper, deeper.
Realer, realer, real.
Wake up, now!
Then, as the bus slows, one last chuck of mud splatters to the floor and Janie sees a pink piece of her thumbnail stabbed into the white of a bone in the bottom of the seatback pit. Her white Ked’s were becoming so red they were almost black. She pulls her knees up to her chest and begins to rock back and forth. Clenching shut her eyes she begins to hum. Janie’s sweet soprano harmonizes with the buses deep droning purr, their wet melody interweaving with the driver’s alto and Lil Wayne’s screech made her feel dizzy as the bus turned right.
She take my money when I'm in need
Yeah she's a trifling friend indeed
Oh she's a gold digger way over town
That dig's on me
The bus slows to a stop and the bass is shaking. Janie is cold. She slowly peeks out of her right eye, expecting to be instantly immersed into the same dismal scene. The seatback is whole again. Releasing her knees, her feet fall back to the floor and her shaking fingers stroke the solid pleather.

“Ma’am? We’re at the Clinton Drop.”
Janie hurriedly picks up her bag and flees down the aisle to the bus doors.
“Everything alright, dear?” The bus driver asks, smiling.
“Fine, just fine.”
“You be safe out there tonight. The night is dark and only ghouls stroll the streets this late.”  Shannon laughed as Janie’s jaw dropped. “Happy Halloween, dear. It’s midnight, today is October 31st.”
The bus doors opened and a cold wind ****** the warm bot-air surrounding Janie into the streets. She begrudgingly followed, her mind spinning as she stepped onto the pavement. The doors slammed behind her and she turned to see Shannon pull out a tube of lipstick and smear it, red, across her cracked lips. Shannon made a duck-face in the mirror and reached down to crank up the music as loud as it would go. The bus exhaled and rolled forward, leaving Janie behind as it splashed through the potholes.
She surveys the surrounding midnight gloom and the street is quiet and dark. Even the stars are hidden behind swirling clouds. She begins to hum, hands in her pocket, and shuffle towards her apartment.
“Goodnight, stars. Goodnight, street.”
As she approaches her single-bedroom apartment, digging through her coat pocket for her keys, her thumb pulsates. She grasps the keys and pulls them out as she steps up to the apartment. Sticking the cold, silver key in the lock she looks down at her thumb and in the shadows of the porch sees half of the nail completely missing. She laughs as she pushes the door open to her bare apartment, light flooding out. Without any hesitation she closes the door behind her, sheds her clothes, and slips onto the mattress in the corner of the room gripping her thumb tight. She reaches out for the glass of milk on the floor beside her bed from the morning and it’s still cold. Nursing the milk, surrounded by blankets and solitude, she reminds herself,  “Only a thirty-three percent chance. A nice, small, round number. Small.”  
She sets down the empty glass and curls into the fetal position under the heavy blankets, pointer finger tracing circles on her thumb. Only when she has heated her blanket cocoon enough to feel safe does she remove her scarf and allow her thick white hair to fall around her face.
“Goodnight, room. Goodnight, mother,”
Connor Jul 2016
And it's difficult to remember something as the very name of Eisenhower
Or flowerbaskets
And tired movies made of silicone and
Aftersex
Or sixteen candles echoing out of an imaginary suite with cigarettes at every table
And green lawns
Barbershop conversation
The reflection of the sun in special trees
Or my best friend Jesus Christ
Or the smell of the theater that one day with the cynics who just got back from a tennis match and barbwire still laced delicately around their thoughts and
Nihilism
And automotives
And priestess Jane or Henry's gloomy doppelganger who reads alternative magazines and loves the aesthetics behind broken glass
And fine tuned musical instruments

It's difficult to remember
Lonesome Fridays smoking on a park bench trying to finish the puzzle
Or synagogues you've never been in
Or insurance
Or newspaper articles detailing the misadventures of Mr. City
(Of course of course! Take your shoes off at the door and make yourself at home)
We're tossing all our sewage into the ocean
that's far from clean as it
LOOKS anymore these days
That's anything
And everything except for the glowing mountains seen faded and wintry behind Apartments and the
"Glorious Mexican House of Spices"
Never been in there either

It's difficult to remember
Times of Mr Twin Sister
Or Joan Jett in the hallway
In a highschool who's psychology classrooms have become a time capsule in the ground/
Or the gentle skinny ******
Wearing Broadway makeup and
Kafka tattooed on his shoulder
I like his hat
He looks at me suspiciously
Or the guy who is yelling his order at the counter when it's quiet here anyways
Or the mariner who has a hobby of the saxophone
Or 1970s *******
Or the sheepskin bikeseat fad that's yet to come but I'm predicting it now!
Or two dollars and twentyseven cents at the beginning of Allen Ginsberg's America
"I've given you all and now I'm nothing"

It's difficult to remember
The Oriental
Sacramento flies
Midnight Moon
Quarter to four
"The Immortalization Commission"
Remodelled hotels downtown
Where mandalas on the floor became a
Tiger lily luminous
And the kimono is yesterday's painting/
Dearest Darling
When I was feeling down!
A staircase in reverse (??)
The sound a kiss makes
It's difficult to remember
Colleen's earrings
Or Washington State
Or air conditioners in Bali
The Indian ocean's daybreak hymn
To Seminyak
Or whatever happened to Steve from the Airplane out of Taiwan
On 3 days awake
Hello Kitty nursing stations
****** (Kubrick's version)
Cardboard taking up half my bedroom
It's difficult to remember until I jot it down and then its a sudden forever
Sunshine Superman in a cafe spontaneous
drawings with someone I just met who has some ******* attitude/
Who hops fences and has feral ideas
People! En Masse! Te Amo!
You're all in wolven liberty
And vague postulators
And holy prostitutes for the dollar
Sad eyed intellectuals
With undergarments made of breakfast cereal/
Seaferry poetry is different from
Trestle in August poetry
Or henna handshakes
Or the Napoleonic era
Sweet Cherry Pie
The tulip's tongue
Garabajal
Cloudy first day of July
Was hotter yesterday
But not too hot

It's difficult to remember
Antiquity
The pale horse Studebaker outside the clinic
With a glossy red trim and **** I wish that was my ride
Andy Warhol's exploding plastic inevitable
Nearsightedness
Angels and their ability to shower with a a snap of their fingers
Distant harp music
Better him than me
Bananas almost ripe
Green aquatic
Reclusive junkies
Palomo's appliances
Questions for the next time
How much I like what you like and how I like that you like what I like
Ahh that's not my bus
I'm trying to get to the city!
That one quote Socrates is known for about knowing nothing as true wisdom
Supermarkets being built on top of liquor stores burned down a while back
Monopolies
Tragedies
"No Love Lost"
THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL
Your guess is as good as mine
Never tried to eat Asian food in Asia
It was all pasta and good cider that tasted like pineapple
Rain hitting the window and I'm
Drowsy again
God Save The Trees!
Curly hair looks good on boys
Torn up blinds
Queer as a three dollar bill
If Bill costs 3 dollars I'm sure he's caught something better safe than sorry
Sage advice
I'm the very model of a modern major general
Golden yen and international currency
Incense in the bedroom and how good it smells
There's my bus! Applying for a better job than the one I got now
But that's how it always is right?
Chasing satisfaction
1007 apt
Porch ornaments
Unique names
Unique style le style
The extra charge on foreign ATMs
Cordoroy polo shirts
Flooding in New York!
When someone's face screams *******
"Slippery when wet"
Dine N Dash
Grass gone yellow
Confidence in dyed hair and capes as long as wedding gowns
But less expensive
Doors that always seem to be locked and I'm wondering 20 year later what's behind them?
Albino animals
White thoughts as clouds or
Abstractions
Weathers nicer in Florida but who cares
Festivities this early in the day
Automatopeia
Do sad orphanages still exist?
Just like the movies
Midnight in mirrors
That sick puppet at the shoe shop used
To know how to really hammer it down
And now he's weak and forgotten
Never heard the words of a true prophet only Oceania
Or the private temple near Apollo Bay
Like Japanese gardens behind that gate
Will I ever see it
Make a proud example outta ya misbehavior
Form without function
Exhausted spiritualism
*** Kettle Black
negative photographs of dark rooms
And there's laughing coming from SOMEWHERE
Essays on kleptomania
Had a bad dream I became a cliche
Surrounded by other freaks and there was a lovely ***** I fell in love with her
We married in Oregon by the sea her name was rosy
***** rosy
Check your mailbox for nails
And what you don't wanna hear/
If you were a vegetable you'd be organic!
Empire
Satirical bubble gum
Satori
Linda Lovelace and her special party trick
That's someone's fantasy
Diamond in the rough
Mister guy with two black eyes frequents the adult playhouse
Hes fully stocked on fishnet leggings
He's too proud to put them on himself but
Has nobody else around
Boo hoo
Swigs back the whiskey and trips down the stairs getting a third black eye in the process
Marion came by with her dog the other day
Wanted her box of clothes back but he loved to sniff them to remember her
But she wouldn't have it

"Honey I'm going to call the police!"

"Ah they don't give a **** they have bigger things to worry about"

"Yeah you got that right shrimp **** enjoy my unwashed *******"

And she never came back again
He started losing the vertebrae in his spine 1 by 1 and you know where this is going
I won't say he was a poor man because he had it all coming to him the *******
But he coulda had a better start if you ask me.

It's difficult to remember
And even more difficult to forget
After the fact

Seagull opera
Giganticism
Portrait of the artist as a young man
Losing one's pencil when the best idea of your life drops down from heaven and into your sorry head
Signs graffitied to have funnier meanings
Cruelty
Impassive
The Loyal Lioness
And Bangladesh has too many kitchens
And not enough dishes
When I was young I used to say Island as "is-land"  
Which is true it is land
But the Europeans probably stole it from somebody else anyways/
I left my future behind
And objects in the mirror are closer than they appear
Im no illusionist
I'm terrified of the cracken
Father feels the same way about
Hotels
Why bother/
This has been going on and on for a while are you tired yet
Is your patience being tested
Mine isn't because this wasn't an all-at-once kind of rambling
It's extremely important to laugh at least
Once a day
Otherwise you'll find yourself a politician
In no time at all
Rockefeller
(         ) Quaint home to die in
I think
Trains create great music
Float on
Sink into yourself
Roses in a crooked alley
That's people
Busy busy busy busy
Let's describe a situationist
I'm not a fan of bright colors on clothes
Your best shade is blue
Bricklayers transcription of Don Quixote to a skyscraper
Rocket thyme
& Garden
Erratic children's
Insomnia
The doorbell repeatedly
Vancouver riots/ I saw that live on the news!
Pictionary with the surrealists
N Dada TV set MC Escher
Antenna
You're in the Twilight Zone now
Dear Ramona
I'm trying to make it up to you
With a brightness only seen when you're ready to see it so please for the love of God don't blame me when it's not appearing
The tapestry hidden
Keep your blankets clean
And avoid hospitals unless you're fine with fishbowls & the halogen
The water gestapo
Storage lockers full of unacted plays and
Antique microwaves
Emitting the nostalgia of the cold war era
And what a waste of time that was /
Walter Wanderleys presence in Autumn universities
The opening of Vivre sa Vie
Salvador Dali's pluvial taxi
Lightbulb epiphanies
Aquariums and their protestors
Zebras in the shade
Two wrongs dont make a right
Elizabethan theater
Saloon shootouts in a fever dream
I lost and bled out all over the rustic wooden floor
A maiden reached out for me and El Paso did play I woke up and pretended nothing happened/
Funerals for bad People who did bad things
My first memory of a cat beneath the mattress
Hello Dolly!
Auditory learning
Psychotherapy
Lillian the landlady lost her ladle and labeled little Lyle as a lair
The Black panther movement
Reading symposium some years ago and
Making note that Phaedo was still my favorite dialogue/
Zen Buddhism
Xoxo xoxo
The day Gypsies were replaced with
Surface ****** appetite
And not the real thing
Newspaper clippings
Hypnotism when all other options are out
Mystical visions of sidewalks
And the love of your life stepping through a door you've never seen
Maybe Yes No I Don't Know
Creature comforts
Che Guevara's problem is that his beard made him too easy to recognize
(Also that little hat!)
Chinese cough medicine didn't work
For long I still wheeze sometimes
Domestic violence thru the wall
Ceiling fan probably doesn't even work!
Dimpled laughter
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
In skytrains to Commercial
Bermuda in her mind
And courtesy in her voice
I'm no Arthur Rimbaud
But you already knew that
Alcazar of Seville
Filling up the shipbottle
Here's your paradise
Now relinquish it as it is
False!
Hare Krishna
Nowhere Fast
El Diablo and the
Portofino loaf left rotting on the countertop
Latin children speak of the sacred viper
You'll hear of it after this but we'll never see what the ******* meant
Heads alternating round the social current
Of my lively city
There's a dog soaking up the rain
And songs are made in honor of
Recent catastrophes
Trials are dealt
Cards cast to the gutter
New York quiets down for the news of another war
You scratch my back I'll scratch yours
Skeleton key
Ballad of the last wailing zoo
THE ATRIUM
Complexity in simplicity
That's how Brainard got me!
Elderly overcoats
Hiding purest LSD
Is a fan of Hawaiian T shirts
And a communist
What if I was a Freemason
Or owned a tanning salon
Faint crimson
What did Marv look like again?
"You're surrounded by people who love you"
Coffee when one needs it
GOODBYE BLUE MONDAY
Tattoos on the wandering man
Oriental chimes and the people who own them
Bus stop regulars
Vines overtaking power lines
The hypnogogic state
Strawberry light softening
The mind
Sister Ray LOUDLY PROCLAIMING
doitdoitdoitdoit
Passing the graffiti n Pluto neon
Halal wide awake another Saturday
Where's the Karaoke
Flashing by here
Those who find comfort in a bridal scavenger hunt
Or expensive beer
And here comes the hooded clown
Clamoring about his favorite
Loudspeaker
Telling me my time is soon and the noise
Drowns out the drowsy bliss
After hour spirits the perfect time for
Writing and trying to read distant Chinese
Indecision on the tip of the tongue
"NOW WHO IS THAT KNOCKING
ON THE CHAMBER DOOR?
COULD IT BE THE POLICE?"

I'm completely off the topic
And into Apartment lobby photosets
Low battery phone calls
Confessions
Nauseated reverb
Trying to see the attachment people got with bingo halls
And moving companies
Ah no luck again
Eve is at it with her showtunes
Halfway methodology
Triage
Paisley headbands left
Distraught on the quivering
Heater
Dwindling sunsets
We're truly disciples of the moon spirit which grants us more energy
(This is according to a drunk I met one night)
Or ***** old men
When the horizon is engulfed with
A winking cinder
Suitcase at the door
Last time
First time
Magician never reveals his fetishes
(They all have to do with bags under your eyes)
Employment office dramas of my friend the one who blinded a social worker
And the one who blamed Islam
And the one whos philosophy entirely consisted of Spooky Action at a
                                            DISTANCE
Parisian riots
Queer youth
Didn't make the team! Jester
'cross the hall who's beard suggests
Ishmeal n car battery n expired vegetables n rain which crosses the line n
***** cranberry n
Poorly fitted suits n
Harsh pigment n incense shops n
Bocca     secret towns
With churches more beautiful than any you'd find in your own city
n the cultural market
Xylophone ear to ear
Soul cleansing starting at only
$89 (with a 6 month guarantee)
Sophie's birthday and her picnic at Victory Park
The nearby bums trying to sell tea mugs and
Loose wires beside gated convenience stores
I'm an Island away attempting a poem
And never bought a scratch n win
Or heard the same song more than seven times in a row or been in a column
Or escaped the washhouse
Invested in a birdcage for next year
Been to a palm reading
Visited Oasis
Smoked salmon
Told anyone else about Montana
Screamed the things I'd like to scream
** Word of the day
Or kissed a lunatic or swallowed the corpse of yesterday
I keep her on my neck until
I'm too anxious to let go
Counting streetlights
Jeans worn in and faded to be sent off to
A lonely caffeine addict
Christmas Eve I'll be reading a postcard from San Francisco
Asking the same questions
My imagination is made of a different material than last week
Now it's the same color as your hair
HEY that's a good pickup line to use in the heart of the Canadian Embassy
Drinking discarded music resembling a sweater you may have said YES to if it wasn't so unsure of itself
And now Mr. Acker Bilk ascends thru the window of an August home
Like a lazy hornet
I'm still lost without identification
Or a nice belt
As happens when one uses a quality item too casually
How did uphill suddenly seem so downhill?
I'll claim a waterfall
For SALE that inevitable Indonesia
Greyhound O another greyhound O another greyhound
I'm fretting too much about not enough
Delayed the Airport and the yellow question

????

II

What if I knew how to read the curb?
Or translate drunken droll
What if I was never tired again and could
REALLY do anything I set my mind to?
What if I was the first cigarette that cured cancer instead of caused it?
What if I could end superstition
And walk underneath any ladder I wanted?
What if I could make it with a young Audrey Hepburn!?
What if I stopped pretending to be a microphone and got on with "it"
What if the grocery store closed later
And I opened earlier?
What if parking lots werent so sad
All the time?
What if gravity simply had enough of exotic birds and specifics?
What if we stopped trying to recreate what is truly lost?
What if foreign children embraced
Wasting time instead of
Midnight starry bicycles
And the antics of a monk
Disguised as a romantic?

There are those that worship God
And those who worship the Sun
And those who worship nothing at all
But I suppose on the last bus
We're all the same exhausted
Voice who can't wait for next pay day
What is an empty bank?
Or authenticity
What is there to prove anymore?
I hope I don't die tonight and regret
Being impulsive for once
You're a smart shadow
And a dull character
Pushing the last of the daisies
Get the lamp to turn on again
Give the pavement something to look forward to with your walk
Be consistent in being inconsistent
If there's a word there's a ***** and a poem for it!
We all oughta worship
Nothing at all except
Clarity
Compassion with ones neighbor who either forgot the pay the electricity bill or couldn't afford to
We're a swimmin
Written between late June to July 13th.
palladia Jun 2013
awkward is a promiscuous word. it flirts unintentionally. it seduces mentally. but most of all it's so disruptionally absurd even the first-come-first-serve basis comes 15 feet behind the typical quota. but it really isn't that serious. it would be awkward plus if i wasn't active right now. does that sound appealing to anyone? well it better. i'm no vanguard when it comes to distribution of emotions. they'll be distributed equally, thank you, and don't worry about getting more 'cause they'll be pieced out safe and fair. lord jesus, we need some sorrow-getter-overs in here! i'm always telling those who ask me for advice to relinquish the suffering and let the good times roll. not that it'll save their hides, i snicker mimically and divert the attention to something inappropriately interesting, like a ***** bumper sticker or a animal corpse on the side of the road. and you are gonna turn into one if you don't stop that crying! man i need some fresh air and i'm not talking about the innocent kind. it's more of the obvious, over-cynical cyanide-soaked air that formaldehyde would blush over. there are two r's in sorrow because the s and the o and w need to be capsized into one rowboat. i never thought i would compromise intimacy with loudspeaker attention-grabbers and then the sailboat does a belly-flop and lands head first in the witches' cauldron. which is like Hamlet's, but a lot less systematic and bunches more pagan. it's synthetically miserable but enigmatically moral. dance of the morals is another program i like. it has to do with the regard of selfish hope and loose pragmatism. pagan! ****** i know it's pagan but it's pigheaded trash like that which gets stuck in the garbage disposal ever so often and we don't have no time to clean it out. i use a fish net that once occupied a corner near the stove which had the net chewed through by ***** rats that inhabit the lower quarters of the bathhaus. it's nothing significant really but more or less a principle in not making leftovers from the unknown trashpile near the barn. attention: entrance alert. "too bad for" who cares. i'm sick of this. "too bad for". that's all said? "let's chat a lot" what? i thought maureen was coming over at 7? who left the cat out again--the dog's gonna have a field day playing cops and robbers, and there are always reallive guns. and i'm stuck back at square/ground one/zero figuring out how i'm gonna get the next day's meal without having to cut off my head or make the microsoft paper clip icon appear with those embarrassing clips telling you how you should appear to your boss on your first interview. and find out that he's a man after all. and ultimately regret what you said every two minutes. wish i had contributed crescents more to the goodness, and not brush over like a stuckist's paintbrush. he's actually using blood instead of acrylics- that's when i get running. wish i hadn't have done that. wish i hadn't. we "hadn't" too much, you know? i wish we had to have "hadn't" before it hadn't have been created. still my emotions are sold and i've cast a mold far too ugly to be a stupid cupid. can we get on with the show, please? no thank i've had enough cranberry pie for right now, maybe buttercup the parrot can have the rest? the cat hates water. then why is he swimming in the dog dish? i'm not complaining, just hesitating to say how i feel when i want it. yeah, i know you're looking at me make a sucker outta myself on your camera. all those poses weren't hard to accomplish but you aggrandize the bad and disregard that i actually have good talent after all. crazy 8s. thought i'd never compromise. thought i'd never make a sport out of tantalizing the shopkeeper's parakeet. yeah, they're playing that game everyone calls a bore cuz it is one. why not roast a marshmallow then find a salamander caught between the chocolate and the *******. and we can't have them crackers anyways cuz there's got gluten in them. can we take a walk, i have something to tell you? i have to tell you about my personal life. i don't care if you're bored. darwin was never bored, fyi. i don't want to hear your juvenile complaints anymore. you're always telling me your problems but you never let me talk. but why would you care? and no way am i gonna share? not there. still. you're still not coming around cuz you're crying and i can't take it anymore. stop the tears, i already told you just take another pill and you'll relax. your life can stop in a heartbeat because some freak told you to stop ******* with the power outlet and make an attempt on making it right. how am i gonna make it right? seems good to me to get up and go and never return. seems right to let it all hang lose and think of excuses as a way to win some money. i'm not the principle breadwinner around here, but i'd bake enough bread to feed an army if i had to. a whole cohort of emotional bigots who don't care anything about their stupid, money-******* societies. it's leveled to the drain again, yeah i know you don't understand. i'm done asking. please? do it for me? don't you know i'm hurting myself because... i'm not listening. don't you want to know i'm cutting my flesh because... i have to water the garden. oh dear what was that? whew! almost another collision with a bee. whew--another close one. what about the spiders in the cabbage bed? what why didn't you tell me? yeah, the cabbage patch has produced more memories than heads, and no not those types of heads. a mashup of what i hate most and what i hate least scourged outta me in a whirl. she's going to take a walk. the radio's on and it's hot in here. those maudy days of summer, but i love every shred of them like i do a coat in the winter. the radio's playing my song: doomsday magnificat! i like leather and metal combinations that are sold in a 60s oz town. you can tie and whip me if you conscience can, but not now. it's another adage gone to the birds. oh no the shopkeeper's parrot is out again and i didn't do it! how come i'm blamed for things i don't do? get over it. another fact of life. another testimonial head my way. dodge! that was a flying saucer that almost razed your head. you wouldn't care though because enough has happened today to make your head spin even faster than it already is. and they're real-live which makes me keeping fumbling my too-short curls disintegrated by sheer chauvinism and belated princeness. that's alright. i know how you feel. i know how the world feels because i am the world. and the world is my canvas. and i may dictate what you are allowed and i may waver onto what laws of principalities are shooting up everywhere, but it's okay 'cause there's a lot more to shoot than good time. and those wacked people can form an alliance and take down the stronghold because in reality, you know that you are wacked yourself to say that. i'm sorry you did. the world will keep spinning, snipers will keep killing, conservatives will keep protesting, parents will keep levitating, children will keep withholding, the days will keep heating, the pool will be more refreshing, and yeah mrs. renttib is still coming over. the world is new. and i am young. but we will all stay safe and good in this empyrean. because and i created it. and i established the surveillance cameras, which are everywhere, but don't feel pressed. yes, i'll forever watch your every move, and even though you've done good, i'll still send you to hell. because you belong there. you may begin now. make your tread strong yet gentle. it's not my expense, the water is cooler out here,
                                                                ­                             anyways.
i've had a rotten day, but i wasn't involved, rather- others force it upon me, for condolence's sake.

ah, you've got plenty to be thankful about so why bother complaining? i often try to analyze this, because my life isn't perfect and i'm often ****** into an uncomfortable state, even when i had nothing to do with it. this was written during (+ after) a family argument about help and those who shouldn't help us, and telling others first, and letting everyone know. i think it's better to keep it to yourself or see a psychologist than starting a whole mess like this again. i know people hate that i don't like opening up and sharing but i'm doing it for the good of everyone. i'm the breadwinner of myself; others will only make me file more tax returns, it seems! so i'm upset and nervous and kind of scared. i want to explore it in a different angle and if i have to be crass and confrontational to do it, i say "full speed ahead!"
Zeeb May 2017
Wrenches clanging, knuckles banging
A drop of blood
A  new part here, and old part… there
A hotrod had been built!
A patchwork, mechanical, quilt

I drove past the banner that said “Welcome Race Fans”
Took a new route, behind the grandstands
And through my chipped window, I thought I could see
Some of the racers were laughing at me

I guess chalky grey primer is not to their taste
But I put my bucks mister in the right place

I chugged-popped past cars that dealers had sold
Swung into a spot, next to something old

Emerging with interest from under his hood
My neighbor said two words, he said “sounds good”

The voice on the loudspeaker tells us we’re up

Pre-staged, staged, then given the green
The line becomes blurred between man and machine

Bones become linkage
Muscle, spring
Fear, excitement

Time distorts ….
Color disappears …
Vision narrows…
Noise ---  becomes music
Speed --- satisfaction
Pennsylvania, 1948-1949

The garden of Nature opens.
The grass at the threshold is green.
And an almond tree begins to bloom.

Sunt mihi Dei Acherontis propitii!
Valeat numen triplex Jehovae!
Ignis, aeris, aquae, terrae spiritus,
Salvete!—says the entering guest.

Ariel lives in the palace of an apple tree,
But will not appear, vibrating like a wasp’s wing,
And Mephistopheles, disguised as an abbot
Of the Dominicans or the Franciscans,
Will not descend from a mulberry bush
Onto a pentagram drawn in the black loam of the path.


But a rhododendron walks among the rocks
Shod in leathery leaves and ringing a pink bell.
A hummingbird, a child’s top in the air,
Hovers in one spot, the beating heart of motion.
Impaled on the nail of a black thorn, a grasshopper
Leaks brown fluid from its twitching snout.
And what can he do, the phantom-in-chief,
As he’s been called, more than a magician,
The Socrates of snails, as he’s been called,
Musician of pears, arbiter of orioles, man?
In sculptures and canvases our individuality
Manages to survive. In Nature it perishes.
Let him accompany the coffin of the woodsman
Pushed from a cliff by a mountain demon,
The he-goat with its jutting curl of horn.
Let him visit the graveyard of the whalers
Who drove spears into the flesh of leviathan
And looked for the secret in guts and blubber.
The thrashing subsided, quieted to waves.
Let him unroll the textbooks of alchemists
Who almost found the cipher, thus the scepter.
Then passed away without hands, eyes, or elixir.


Here there is sun. And whoever, as a child,
Believed he could break the repeatable pattern
Of things, if only he understood the pattern,
Is cast down, rots in the skin of others,
Looks with wonder at the colors of the butterfly,
Inexpressible wonder, formless, hostile to art.


To keep the oars from squeaking in their locks,
He binds them with a handkerchief. The dark
Had rushed east from the Rocky Mountains
And settled in the forests of the continent:
Sky full of embers reflected in a cloud,
Flight of herons, trees above a marsh,
The dry stalks in water, livid, black. My boat
Divides the aerial utopias of the mosquitoes
Which rebuild their glowing castles instantly.
A water lily sinks, fizzing, under the boat’s bow.


Now it is night only. The water is ash-gray.
Play, music, but inaudibly! I wait an hour
In the silence, senses tuned to a ******’s lodge.
Then suddenly, a crease in the water, a beast’s
black moon, rounded, ploughing up quickly
from the pond-dark, from the bubbling methanes.
I am not immaterial and never will be.
My scent in the air, my animal smell,
Spreads, rainbow-like, scares the ******:
A sudden splat.
I remained where I was
In the high, soft coffer of the night’s velvet,
Mastering what had come to my senses:
How the four-toed paws worked, how the hair
Shook off water in the muddy tunnel.
It does not know time, hasn’t heard of death,
Is submitted to me because I know I’ll die.


I remember everything. That wedding in Basel,
A touch to the strings of a viola and fruit
In silver bowls. As was the custom in Savoy,
An overturned cup for three pairs of lips,
And the wine spilled. The flames of the candles
Wavery and frail in a breeze from the Rhine.
Her fingers, bones shining through the skin,
Felt out the hooks and clasps of the silk
And the dress opened like a nutshell,
Fell from the turned graininess of the belly.
A chain for the neck rustled without epoch,
In pits where the arms of various creeds
Mingle with bird cries and the red hair of caesars.


Perhaps this is only my own love speaking
Beyond the seventh river. Grit of subjectivity,
Obsession, bar the way to it.
Until a window shutter, dogs in the cold garden,
The whistle of a train, an owl in the firs
Are spared the distortions of memory.
And the grass says: how it was I don’t know.


Splash of a ****** in the American night.
The memory grows larger than my life.
A tin plate, dropped on the irregular red bricks
Of a floor, rattles tinnily forever.
Belinda of the big foot, Julia, Thaïs,
The tufts of their *** shadowed by ribbon.


Peace to the princesses under the tamarisks.
Desert winds beat against their painted eyelids.
Before the body was wrapped in bandelettes,
Before wheat fell asleep in the tomb,
Before stone fell silent, and there was only pity.


Yesterday a snake crossed the road at dusk.
Crushed by a tire, it writhed on the asphalt.
We are both the snake and the wheel.
There are two dimensions. Here is the unattainable
Truth of being, here, at the edge of lasting
and not lasting. Where the parallel lines intersect,
Time lifted above time by time.


Before the butterfly and its color, he, numb,
Formless, feels his fear, he, unattainable.
For what is a butterfly without Julia and Thaïs?
And what is Julia without a butterfly’s down
In her eyes, her hair, the smooth grain of her belly?
The kingdom, you say. We do not belong to it,
And still, in the same instant, we belong.
For how long will a nonsensical Poland
Where poets write of their emotions as if
They had a contract of limited liability
Suffice? I want not poetry, but a new diction,
Because only it might allow us to express
A new tenderness and save us from a law
That is not our law, from necessity
Which is not ours, even if we take its name.


From broken armor, from eyes stricken
By the command of time and taken back
Into the jurisdiction of mold and fermentation,
We draw our hope. Yes, to gather in an image
The furriness of the ******, the smell of rushes,
And the wrinkles of a hand holding a pitcher
From which wine trickles. Why cry out
That a sense of history destroys our substance
If it, precisely, is offered to our powers,
A muse of our gray-haired father, Herodotus,
As our arm and our instrument, though
It is not easy to use it, to strengthen it
So that, like a plumb with a pure gold center,
It will serve again to rescue human beings.


With such reflections I pushed a rowboat,
In the middle of the continent, through tangled stalks,
In my mind an image of the waves of two oceans
And the slow rocking of a guard-ship’s lantern.
Aware that at this moment I—and not only I—
Keep, as in a seed, the unnamed future.
And then a rhythmic appeal composed itself,
Alien to the moth with its whirring of silk:


O City, O Society, O Capital,
We have seen your steaming entrails.
You will no longer be what you have been.
Your songs no longer gratify our hearts.


Steel, cement, lime, law, ordinance,
We have worshipped you too long,
You were for us a goal and a defense,
Ours was your glory and your shame.


And where was the covenant broken?
Was it in the fires of war, the incandescent sky?
Or at twilight, as the towers fly past, when one looked
From the train across a desert of tracks

To a window out past the maneuvering locomotives
Where a girl examines her narrow, moody face
In a mirror and ties a ribbon to her hair
Pierced by the sparks of curling papers?


Those walls of yours are shadows of walls,
And your light disappeared forever.
Not the world's monument anymore, an oeuvre of your own
Stands beneath the sun in an altered space.


From stucco and mirrors, glass and paintings,
Tearing aside curtains of silver and cotton,
Comes man, naked and mortal,
Ready for truth, for speech, for wings.


Lament, Republic! Fall to your knees!
The loudspeaker’s spell is discontinued.
Listen! You can hear the clocks ticking.
Your death approaches by his hand.


An oar over my shoulder, I walked from the woods.
A porcupine scolded from the fork of a tree,
A horned owl, not changed by the century,
Not changed by place or time, looked down.
Bubo maximus, from the work of Linnaeus.


America for me has the pelt of a raccoon,
Its eyes are a raccoon’s black binoculars.
A chipmunk flickers in a litter of dry bark
Where ivy and vines tangle in the red soil
At the roots of an arcade of tulip trees.
America’s wings are the color of a cardinal,
Its beak is half-open and a mockingbird trills
From a leafy bush in the sweat-bath of the air.
Its line is the wavy body of a water moccasin
Crossing a river with a grass-like motion,
A rattlesnake, a rubble of dots and speckles,
Coiling under the bloom of a yucca plant.


America is for me the illustrated version
Of childhood tales about the heart of tanglewood,
Told in the evening to the spinning wheel’s hum.
And a violin, shivvying up a square dance,
Plays the fiddles of Lithuania or Flanders.
My dancing partner’s name is Birute Swenson.
She married a Swede, but was born in Kaunas.
Then from the night window a moth flies in
As big as the joined palms of the hands,
With a hue like the transparency of emeralds.


Why not establish a home in the neon heat
Of Nature? Is it not enough, the labor of autumn,
Of winter and spring and withering summer?
You will hear not one word spoken of the court
of Sigismund Augustus on the banks of the Delaware River.
The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys is not needed.
Herodotus will repose on his shelf, uncut.
And the rose only, a ****** symbol,
Symbol of love and superterrestrial beauty,
Will open a chasm deeper than your knowledge.
About it we find a song in a dream:


Inside the rose
Are houses of gold,
black isobars, streams of cold.
Dawn touches her finger to the edge of the Alps
And evening streams down to the bays of the sea.


If anyone dies inside the rose,
They carry him down the purple-red road
In a procession of clocks all wrapped in folds.
They light up the petals of grottoes with torches.
They bury him there where color begins,
At the source of the sighing,
Inside the rose.


Let names of months mean only what they mean.
Let the Aurora’s cannons be heard in none
Of them, or the tread of young rebels marching.
We might, at best, keep some kind of souvenir,
Preserved like a fan in a garret. Why not
Sit down at a rough country table and compose
An ode in the old manner, as in the old times
Chasing a beetle with the nib of our pen?
Matt Revans Oct 2015
My autism's a part of me,

But it is apart, you see.

...

Who are you?

With your ‘normal’ view.

Are you just one thing, or are you a person

With thoughts & feelings, that are your own unique version.

Preferences, ideas, talents, and dreams?

That are bound by senses that meet at their seams.

Are you fat, short sighted or visually impaired?

Are you ever wondering why I just stood and stared.

Those may be the things that I saw the first time I meet you,

But you’re more than just your ‘normal’ diagnosis…. True?

As an adult, you have control over how you’re defined.

Your normality means your perceptions are refined.

So why would you single out one characteristic of mine that you can make known.

As a child, I am still unfolding, I’m not fully grown.

Neither you nor I yet know of what I am capable.

If you think of me as just one thing, then one thing’s inescapable.

You run the danger of assuming I have no chance of achieving.

And my heightened senses know this, it’s only you you’re deceiving

For I am not endowed with any ordinary sense.

You need to know this before I commence.

You take for granted sight, sound, taste, touch and smell.

Never once realising that these things can be as painful as hell

For me.

You see.

My world often feels hostile, and makes me so fearful.

I may appear withdrawn or belligerent, whilst others are cheerful.

Or mean to you, or antagonistic,

Defending myself, then going ballistic.

You tell me we’re going on a trip to the shops

And out of the world my safety net instantly drops.

My hearing, you see, is hyper acute.

But I’m put in the car, though I loudly refute.

At the shops, walls of people jabber and whoop.

The loudspeaker booms and adds to the soup.

Music blares and lashes and whooshes.

Tills beep and cough, a coffee grinder swooshes.

The meat cutter screeches, a baby starts wailing,

I’m starting to malfunction and am rapidly flailing

As trolleys pass creaking, and fluorescent lights hum.

I’m starting to panic, but also turn numb.

My brain can’t filter the input, the voltage is massive

I’m in overload with no chance of staying passive.

My sense of smell is stratospheric.

That fish on the counter is NOT atmospheric.

The man in front hasn’t showered today,

That Stilton cheese – someone take it away!

A baby goes past, it’s ***** needs changing.

Things are going faster and turning deranging

They’re mopping up pickles on aisle two with some bleach and a rag.

My stomach is churning, and I’m starting to gag..

And there’s so much hitting my eyes!

This trip has turned into the world's worst surprise.

The fluorescent light

Is not only too bright,

it’s that flicker.

The space seems to be moving, getting quicker and quicker.

The pulsating light bounces off everything and distorts what I am seeing.

I don’t know what I’m doing, or saying, or being.

There are too many items for me to be able to focus.

The world starts to drain me of my internal locus.

My eyes try to compensate by tunnelling my vision

Fans on the ceiling, twist my senses into nuclear fission.

All this affects how I feel just standing there,

and I can’t even tell where my body is in space, do I care?

You’re yelling at me now, and shaking my shoulder

But the fiery fog is down and is starting to smoulder

It isn’t that I don’t want to hear your instruction.

I just can’t understand, due to mass self-destruction.

You're shouting now, but what does "£$%^&&% NOW! !£$%^&*" mean?

My senses will **** me in a collusion so obscene.

Once we’re back at the kids home, it all feels less absurd.

And now when you speak, I can hear every word.

Simple instructions, that I know off by heart.

And I cling onto these so I won’t fall apart.

You tell me what you want me to do next and I’m able to reply.

Now I’m happy and it’s easy for me to comply.

Now I’m OK and I’m running about

And performing my ritualised songs, which I shout.

Then a visitor grabs me saying, “Hold your horses, cowboy!” – This means danger!

I can’t stop the horses, I’m me, not the Lone Ranger!

And I’m thrown into panic when what you mean is, “Stop running.”

But I don’t know that! Those stampeding horses are coming!!

That’s my life, you see, it’s not “a piece of cake”

When there’s no dessert in sight and you’ve made a mistake.

When you say, “its pouring cats and dogs,” I see pets flooding from the sky.

Tell me, “It’s raining hard,” so I won’t fear the animals will die.

Puns, sarcasm and allusion

Simply generate confusion.

Tell me facts and keep things clear

So I can live, yet not in fear.

It’s hard for me to tell you what I need when my senses are reeling

When I don’t have a way to describe what I’m feeling.

I may be hungry, frustrated, frightened, or perplexed.

But I can’t find the words, and lash out, angry and vexed.

Be alert for my body language, or my gestures and obsessions

Then you’ll handle my feelings like your own treasured possessions.

Watch out for me compensating for not knowing the right word

By mimicking my favourite film star, or something just as absurd.

Rattling off words or whole scripts, which will leave you confounded

That I’ve memorised from Disney, because they make me feel grounded.

They may come from the TV, or speeches, or a book

And though they make people give a funny look

I just know that saying them gets me off the hook.

Show me, show me! I’m visual, you see.

And I’ll understand rather than you just telling me.

And be prepared to show countless times.

I’m listening, despite my ritualised rhymes.

Visual supports help me move through my day.

They relieve me of the stress and I feel OK.

I don’t have to remember what’s happening next

For I operate on a visual text.

This makes for smooth transitions in my life

And we’ll finally progress without anger or strife.

I need to see something to learn it, because spoken words are like steam to me;

They evaporate before my mind's eye, and are gone instantly,

Before I even have a chance to make sense of them,

They've died in the ether, leaving me in mayhem.

I don’t have instant-processing skills.

Instructions and information are my life giving pills

Images can stay in front of me for as long as I need,

and will be just the same in years, for they'll never recede.

Without visual help, I live the constant frustration

of knowing that I’m missing big blocks of information,

Not to mention falling short, by being a misfit

And I'm helpless to do anything about it.

Unlike other people, I'm unable to learn

If it's normal interaction for which you do yearn.

I’m constantly made to feel that I’m not good enough

And people are stern and people are tough.

They think I need taking in hand and need fixing.

Never knowing the world and my brain are tranfixing

I avoid trying any new things, for I'm sure I'll get 'dissed'

And another grown up will be angry and get 'real ******'.

But no matter how “constructive” you think you’re being.

Look for my strengths, though they're hard for the seeing.

There is more than one right way to do most things.

It may look like I don’t want to play with the other kids on the swings

But it may be that I simply do not know how to start

They just think I'm weird, and set me apart.

Teach me how to play with others.

Remove my autistic shrouded covers.

Encourage other children to invite me along.

They might learn something of value from my life's different song.

And rather than spend my day as separate, secluded.

I might show an ethereal delight at being included.

I do best in games that have a clear beginning and end.

Random play is something my fears won't transcend.

And just one other thing, a sort of confession

I cannot interpret a ****** expression

Or body language, or other peoples' emotion

So in group situations I'm resigned to demotion.

I want to learn, I want you to teach me.

Reach into my mind and help me to see.

If I laugh when Tommy falls off the climbing frame,

It’s that I don’t know what to say, nastiness isn't to blame

Talk to me about Tommy’s feelings and teach me to say,

“Are you hurt, Tommy, I'll get teacher, then you'll be okay?”

If you don't I'll meltdown or blow-up, and get in a stew

And this is a thousand times worse for me than for you.

For my mind will go into overload

My sense of equilibrium will start to off-road.

For I'm well past the limit of my social ability.

As those off road lights glare at my own disability.

If you can figure out why my meltdowns occur, they can be prevented

And my behaviours will abate, less frequently lamented.

Keep notes about me and a pattern may emerge.

As your understanding of me will gradually converge.

Remember that everything I do is a form of communication.

It tells you, when my words cannot, how I’m reacting to each situation.

My behavior may have a physical cause.

Think for a moment, just have a pause.

Food allergies and sleep problems can affect my behaviour.

Just look for signs, for you might be my Saviour.

Because I may not be able to tell you about these things.

That blunt my affect and cause my mood swings.

Throw away thoughts like, “If you would just—” and “Why can’t you—?”

You didn’t fulfill every expectation your parents had either, that's true.

And would you like to witness a constant rewind.

Of the traumatic deficits by which you're defined?

I didn’t choose to have autism.

Or to live with this division

Remember that it’s happening to me, not to you.

But without understanding, my chances remain few.

With love and support, my horizons are broader

But I can't live my life by other peoples order.

Patience. Patience. Patience, are the three words we need to live by

For my dreams to be reached, and my confidence fly.

View my autism as a different ability

Rather than as a freak show disability.

Look past what you may see as limitations and feel for my strength

I may not be good at eye contact or conversations of length

But have you noticed that I don’t lie, or cheat at a game

Or pass judgment on people, and make them to blame?

I rely on you, if you can make me your personal vocation

All that I might become won’t happen without you as my foundation.

Be my advocate, be my guide

Be my strength, stand at my side.

Love me for who I am, and not what you know

And we’ll see just how far I can go.

Matt Revans 2014
©Copyright
Connor Oct 2015
DYNAMO

consciousness tossed
around in the heavenly night,
illuminations and poems in us all
as an asphalt drum bounds
oak to flat
dispersing lamentations to
the brain and barbwire ribcage
clawing at our lungs

PHANTASM

pain,
the behemoth cause for all inspiration
the pressing crucifixion
the shrill cry of harmonica overcast in
this bizarre moonlight
sinking an oceanic shadow
for my memory is high off melancholy
but i keep at it because the morning is beautiful

A PRAYER FOR WARMTH

(in my opinion)
nothing feels stranger than
an empty bedroom
we are each others loneliness

SOLIPSISM
Vamika Sinha Jul 2015
Time: 1
Us: 0

Will it always be like this?

Swinging our racquets at Einstein's illusion.
Singing, singing, singing 'Stop
the World I Wanna Get Off
With You'
when nobody hears
over the relentless tick-tocks.
As
     as
the clock's hands
push
         push
pull us together,
apart.

Hey, you.
Are we lovers or are we opponents?
Let's look at the scoreboard.

Time: 1
Us: 0

In school, they taught us perseverance.
So we keep
dancing, dancing, dancing
                                              around
the hands of the clock.
I'm on number 3 and
you face me.
What's it like on number 9?
What's it like to be on the edge of
the next hour,
the next day,
the next big thing?
You're on number 9, I'm on number 3.
I face you, you face me.
Are we lovers or are we opponents?
I face you,
                   you face me.

So easy for us to...
So easy for us to love, but
so easy for us to leave.
So easy to fight, to
wrap our hands
                            around
each other's throats
simultaneously.
So easy to embrace, so
easy to walk away
when you are the west and I am the east.

I'll ask you again:
Are we lovers or are we opponents?
Eyes flit up to the scoreboard,
even though
                      we don't want to look
away from each other.

Time: 1
Us: 0

The ball is in no one's court anymore.
No more back and forth,
stichomythia, repartee.
Nor round and
                           round
when it's all an illusion,
isn't it?

Don't look.
Don't bring it up.

Time: 1        
Us: 0

The figures are getting bolder, louder
than the ticking.
Tell me, tell me, before
you move to 10
and our angles get skew,
tripping over the clock's hands,
because we forgot the steps of
our dance.
Tell me, tell me, what it's like
when you see me
all the way from number 9
while I'm on number 3.

The scoreboard's screeching
like a train ready to leave.

Time: 1
Us: 0

The audience is already beginning to clap.
They have loved us
and so have we.
We put on quite the show,
enough to rival Djokovic or Murray.
But neither of us will walk out with gold.
Not when we've lost to an abstraction
that can swallow us into
memories.
We get silver medals.
Around our necks, choking
but we clasp them tightly
so they can sparkle on our chests.
My silver beams to you,
                                           your silver beams to me.
On and off,
a Morse code speech.
When we can't speak,
                                       can't breathe,
that seems to suffice.

Here is a case of beautiful irony:
How did we meet?
Your eyes
                 saw in
my eyes
               that silver gleam.
My eyes
               saw in
your eyes
                 the very same thing.
Remember:
I face you, you face me.
Are we lovers or are we opponents?

The scoreboard screams:

Time: 1
Us: 0

I bought a watch today, why
did I do that?
I'm so smart but
I'm so stupid.
I face you, you face me.
It's not an illusion, is it?
Look at me.
Is it?

Time: 1
Us: 0

We're finished.
But then how could we have ever won
when neither of us knew how to play tennis?

We look at each other
so the scoreboard can dissolve
instead of us.
Like your eyes
                          in my eyes
a tethering glance,
could hold us in an eternal position.
Like a single look
could sustain us
stationary.
I face you, you
                          start to leave.

It doesn't matter now.
Everything's spilling out
on the loudspeaker.
(And for once, you don't wish to seek this one truth.)

Time: 1
Us: 0

It will always be like this.

Time: one.
Us: love.
I'm seeing too many loves becoming victims to Time and Distance.
Ma Cherie Jul 2016
"I'm NOT going to tell you
this is NOT
JUST a test
like I tell ALL the rest

that it's ONLY
a test?
C'mon
you should know better"

I'm noticing this guy has a lot of ink
all over
and the darkest kind

"So it's NOT
Not an ordinary exam?
this ain't basketball tryouts?"
I ask...
"I just took a walk in the park
had a...
white
****** knuckle sandwich
I played pinochle
with the Old Man
rode in bear backed
like Lady Godiva...."

I heard
words &
Maniacal laughter
played by symphony  of demons
& smirking
violinists in the background

"I'll tell you it
is
in
FACT
a
TEST
****
a super difficult one..."
then

".....continue reading my contract...."

reading and absorbing
unfathomable amounts of learning
and yearning
with
excellent Earning Potential
requires a decent,
above average
genius IQ
i don't need anything
other than...
to
leave my heart behind
and any other angels
my set of wings
saved aside
this is just a ride
I tell myself
they cast him out you know
fallen Angel
and....no other Gods, Mommy, Daddy, deities....xcetera.

"logically it's been there all along
everyone hears me
not like you can IGNORE my voice
you've seen my ad...."

(a bony finger with a long sharp nail
points upward)...

"up there
you know where...
on the billboard in Times Square
i am 100% certain it was you"

and it is
here I am.
Okay, I'm in control...breathe
take a sip of moonshine first
shhhhh...
listen
a little chuckle

Lucifer continues....

"You can bring Conscience along
she has been cleared.. "
Loudspeaker coming on
"We repeat
this is NOT a Strong Storm warning
there won't be any arms waving
no lights like at the airport
telling you where to land
no hands outside the vehicle
or for holding"

A pause,
finally...in closing
he looks my way...saying

"You'll stop at the Crossroads
lose the shirt
see a
blinking Amber Alert
don't stop at the bar
no flirting....

look back
actually there's a poetic flood
it's coming
that 'deluge' of your
bloodstained Indigo ink"
filled paper
boats are
floating &
he is gloating
"you might refer to the Ark section
of your Manual
before it's time to go...."

I gather important
necessary documents
for example making sure my will is signed
on the dotted line
***** donor checked off
blood type
leaving all others behind
no certainty of any kind
may not return
from an
Unknown Destination
things tend to get worse
  before they get better
  grab a sweater
a bumpy ride
my friend
dragging those
    sharpened ink filled
       fingertips
       down a chalkboard...
       I  buckle up
   transportation provided
nausea subsided
here I go
down below
  "I thought
     I would
     always have to
      take you
       kicking......
        & screaming
        still saying the
        Lord's Prayer
        signed, sealed
          & delivered."
         I smile...
         nod ...
          I say
         "Yut...
           guess so"
            time to go
           getting up
            from a chair...
             & I swear
              I am
              walking
               out
                no
                room
                for
 ­                any
                 doubt.

Cherie Nolan © 2016
Recently had a seizure in my sleep, had before during bad insomnia and anxiety....mixed with prescribed new medications in the study of Medicine
unknown reasons, it felt like I was pinned to the bed and I remembered something my Maternal Grandmother told me to recite the Lord's Prayer, she said there would be times when I would need it
and I have
  somehow I could do it even if I wasn't saying it sounded like I was trying to apparently.
I'm not overly religious
baptized Catholic, born again Christian
Native American dreamer...
but  I am very spiritual and it got me through that horrible thing whether it was a dream, a seizure or something else, prayer works.
"Our Father
who art in heaven
hallowed be thy name
thy kingdom come
thy will be done on Earth
as it is in heaven
Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but Deliver Us from Evil
And I believe there's an Amen
Some possible alternative endings ...
anyway thanks all :)
dj Sep 2012
I'm in la-la land where
My dreams are
'ON FIRE!'
NEW and DIFFERENT!
ON Sale, 2 4 1!

I wouldn't buy myself
But I'd work a month
Just for that NEW iPhone 10!
Mattel bought my soul
For 50 seconds of ad-space
I feel hollow
But know this,
It's plastic through-and-through.

You've got it bad.
The billboard people stare 
The radio DJ secretly knows me
The loudspeaker at Dillard's 
Just told me it can make me thin
And can cure my brain cancer.

Everyone wants to be the Joneses
I'm not ashamed.

But in spite of it all
In spite of the unbelievable hopelessness,
I still have
The Cosmo-girl Secret to staying happy!
Our NEW Extra-Large Jumbo Everything Pizza!

The NEW Strawberry Kiwi Chewing Gum!
It's the Stuff your dreams are made of!
your dreams are made of
your dreams are made of
$_$ NEW POEM by DEV! Reading it will make your dreams come true! You'll lose 15lbs.! (today's my bday so happy birthday to me)
Elizabeth Kelly Feb 2015
It's been getting worse.

6am was open for sinners but 10 was closed for repairs. Imagine the disappointed frowns drinking coffee reading regretful emails.

The afternoon sun hurt my head, I miss your cave.
In my bed, pillows over your ears and eyes.

12 pm was better but 2 was embarrassing.

I hate to leave like that. I never want us to be mad at each other.
Crying at the kitchen table, no it's not you.

Calling myself an idiot in the car for routinely missing turns.

The mall wasn't crowded but it felt like it was. No dresses fit for the wedding tomorrow. Staring at a red scarf listening to Burning Down the House over the loudspeaker at Dillards and feeling my eyes in my head and wondering if David Byrne ever dreamed he would have songs playing over the loudspeaker at Dillards.

You shouldn't have done that to yourself.  I'm sorry I suggested it.
It's ok, it's not you.

It must have been 50 or more dresses. Four hours.

This has been the worst day.
We've been talking about this for a long time. Sitting at the kitchen table, ugh, boys.

Smoking through the window.

My great grandmother made my *** my pants when I was eleven because she was cursing the door she couldn't unlock.
I once saw someone lose a prosthetic leg while riding a roller coaster.
TJ had a cat named Rodney.

We found burn holes in her mattress when we moved in. All her stuff was still there.

Reconfirming value, standing in front of the mirror in wedding clothes. Red heels. A white scarf to a wedding that doesn't belong to me.
It's ok, it's not you.

Nick started talking about what he's going to say for our wedding.
I told him not to worry about it, I don't have any idea what I'm going to say at his.

Cigarettes in the cold. Adderall and ZzzQuil and Dr. Who prints on Etsy printed on old dictionary pages. The world is falling away.

Write a poem.

3:17am is open for sinners.

It's been getting worse.
searching Jan 2013
I'm an armchair warrior
trying to sell my soul
to the undesirable myriads
soaked in stains and oil.

Curl up with your coffee cups
(now children)
Curl up with your cigarettes
Take your vice and leave this place
No less weary less.

I'm a sellout to this
yes I'd sell out to a fish
If he'd give me a dime bag
and a paper.

I will sellout to you
I will sell my soul tonight
For a loudspeaker
And a deaf audience.

My life is a mess
I shouldn't cry less
I should really embrace the tears.
But with each coming year

I have come to fear
That I will drown in these tears.
And this beautiful mess
And all this crazyness

Is really beginning to drag.
I'm tired of pieces
Ignorant of puzzles
Give me a ******* cigarette.
The devil is in the diner,
Asking if I want more coffee,
Telling me it's free,
I answer that I think I have had enough,
an angel sitting courtside says,
havnt we all?
the ball is gone and a car crash begins,
because in the end who really wins,
she pours me another,
and she hands me another beer,
what am I to make?
with an everyday that everything is at stake?
the music is playing on the jukebox,
the music is playing on the loudspeaker,
but the demon in the car,
and my Savior sitting close,
do I do what I purpose?
she smiles while I place down my tip,
and cheers when the team has won,
I guess in the end,
I can always take more.
What the **** did i just write?
ARR Feb 2011
I won't tell you I love you when I don’t.
I won't tell you I miss you when I don’t.
I will tell you I take the long way to class
in  a Chicago January
in the snow
on foot
just to finish dissecting Teenage Dream because you said that song reminds you of me
I will tell you I devote time out of my day solely to thinking about you  heart heavily.
Because I am always thinking about you, fair warning.
And if I let myself indulge a week's worth of thinking of you in one minute,
maybe I can study some for my midterm in the morning.

I won't tell you I love you when I don’t.
I won't tell you I miss you when I don’t.
In those blindsiding instances of stark realization,
when I get a knee **** reaction putting on my scarf that still smells like fruit passion
because I made you wear it on the El platform to fend off a wind that round every corner could bend,
I will take out my blackberry, tear off my gloves, and tempt frost bite on the tips of my fingers
to send you a text that reads “I miss you.”

I won't tell you I love you when I don't.
I won't tell you I miss you when I don't.
Baby, I need not be insincere, I am not in love. Yet.
And it’s not you, and it’s not me. It is everyone else here.
Everyone else beating my brain in with cosmic signs
of Matt and Kim playing on the radio when they never play Matt and Kim on the radio.
Every poet pleading with me personally will flip their pages and I will be deemed defenseless against all odds.
I will tell you I love you, and I will mean it so fiercely
my chest will cave in upon itself thumping like a cartoon and creating a gooey mess of pink hearts.
Because you heart pink hearts.

I won't tell you I love you when I don’t.
I won't tell you I miss you when I don’t.
I will tell you embedded in the endless, elusive scenes of whimsy that make up my insides,
that song by The Darkness will play over every loudspeaker in the Student Center
because you paused,
you looked at me,
and you said “I love you. I really love you.”
Vernarth says: “Nocturnal mutism, nocturnal stuttering, goes from the fragile phrasing, peripheral phrase, hovering last word, where my loudspeaker hits, dissonant Sagittarius, I must prepare my denarius, not but, beforehand, cheers of hope to Zion, who among the bush of the millionaire wind that travels from Pluto to Mercury, each day that we map ourselves, trying to be more earth than in its own flowering. Paradiso Omega, nap of the oldest dream, adobe path. My  to fly Anne genuflects her heart towards Mariah from Heaven, in the title of hundreds of throats and gargles of the pyogenic sediment rambling. Oh so long night!, so clear firmament born of the fallen ether of the great Heaven so clear and enlightening Compass 37 on the quilt of God, three by three towards one, linking above the easy pit and dreams, dying Paradiso, Agonizing Horcondising, a fragile mass disoriented, discouraged, with numeral letters and quadruple letters, stone after stone of forage falling on the cinnabar sky "

Joshua de Piedra from the high pinnacle exclaimed…: “Stone after stone in its correction is born of a new silence eternal bond. It eats it during the day, it eats at night, just like the galaxies licking the frivolous awakening from a starless night, but being the substance of stars liquefied with a whip. Pilgrimage or Path of the Cross, on the stony ground of Uncle Hugh's house, in the other similar, my Anne's house, further on in the hidden and clayey chaos, the last Indigenous in Western clothing, working and stuffing the wells with green size, distributing alms for his apprentices, I keep looking from the high hill earlier. Kaitelka the whale and a Dwarf Leviathan; steward of the unnameable, perhaps of an unknown Cyprian squirrel censoring Noah in his animals empowered to tell him about a magnificent episode.  Each species balancing its essence to make the most grandiloquent dossier in the world, to join them and value them towards the unknown peasant world. The big apple to go, with its tailcoat worms, well dressed and united by the march of the rock sentinel Evangelus. Kaitelca alpha and omega cetacean, fluffy with bast for all the most lost seas of the watery world. She so down cetacean, she throws herself into the sea in fears in this gloomy space, exhausted warehouse, lifesaver between lives of lives, like wishes without delay, to beat the divergent period, falling on the flat ceiling. Enter to sail through the mud of Iodine, of this great Parnassus of all iodine, the Messiah was squeezing his robe of love all over the upper margin of the face, Jesus light, loving great pilgrims who helped me to urbanize the skeleton of this great demolition, of a great geyser on its oceanic back, distributing gifts through the tangled brow of the Horcón and Cantillana massif.  Freshwater meringue, fluffy flowers, incense, fuchsias, and Calypso smoke migrating from house to house in Sudpichi.  Adelimpia, holding the cord of the axis of the fatigued planet, Queen Anne restored the acute respiratory meridians, which moved her heart from the sinister side encompassed, cursed globe moving to another galaxy towards its 9600 years of expansion. The stumbling of the sun's rays, crowded on the back of the Jacinta, which multiplied on her bank of meek ideas, to reside above all the assemblages of millions of benefits, since the world is an improper world. The world has no end, God is a beautiful mute world, where we make mistakes every day believing that we are ..., being less true. Rather, we are the waste of the almost noise that tried to leave us as a legacy of the first noise of creation that was felt wandering, perhaps it was its breathing, of its lipped wise crater, in the most irresistible protoforms, devoutly preparing turgid liquids for driving through every dinner, without stars tasting their multi-polygonal sandwiches. Memory is a raging waste, every time we try to get to lick his honey-like him, we run out of a famished minute of life not lived”

Says the spirit Leiak:

“Without a doubt, without drooling, without Buddha… the tendrils of the universe flamed, like rolling pickets within his hearing sea ear.  Striped with wounded marks in zigzag, by the middle row between the unarmed infidels.  Filled with the greatest amazement, massacred with laughter riddled with the non-shining meteor. From temple to temple, without Buddha close to him, he continues lost on the path of valleys among several, by the waves of chimneys like the snout of a mastiff with typhus, infected badly that detonates a thousand times, circular or macrocosmic chemistry in submissive grounds, to drink, where no one is wrong. Pendency of the lymphatic jellyfish, among the meek otolith of Kaitelka, almost deaf, of so many prayers of impious savages to hunt her ..., she continues begging for mercy as a species, she shakes and shakes as if eliminating the supposed flea jellyfish in whirlwinds of babies in her ears of children's stories. Anne came out of her basket as if she had been picked up from the Nile, but in reality, she was close to Chocalan, Popeta, or Polulo, lit up like coal from a steppe oven. I continued walking shirtless on an insomniac night, waiting in the decimals of the full moon, some indebted Solaris of the evangelist, in a space that slowly locked the crooked tongue of sleep, locked by the treacherous luck of doubt. Plague and doubt, plague and nail, which opens the vast sea, unsanitary radio, from the messianic ****** of the muses to Botticelli blaspheming. Anne, a diva of the division of past lives, does not die in misapplication against all odds like a thousand sperms of an ensign, making her stipends simple, to buy sensitive chaste little flowers in suitcases of her super-saucy folds ..., there is no probing look similar to the ocean Cousteau's journey, through which the lost retina drains, lies the selective gaze, covered by the Guardian, who looks before the denigrated sap unfolds, which wears away scarlet fever, the gaze of substance, in front of thousands of sayings, plagiarizing Tramontane rumors "

Queen Anne rolls up her sleeves, collects ashes from the ill-fated victims sifted, by the tobacco, a very good service from the fumes of venerable lost in disbelief, this painting becomes vague and with a sordid diametric image and silent cataclysm. The confine of evil godson in a duo and verse of the Universe, of the concrete displaced with pieces of the tobacco, has been spoiled. Joshua de Piedra with filings in his stomach was with hundreds of particles tickling the metaverse on the beards of extraterrestrial comets. Heaven and Hell, interrupted sleep, fatal nap, draconian wind, Ultrasensitive Glory of austere forces, as long as you are alive, you are prey to it. Ignorance continues to spend the night in the empty vapors of the valley of chaos, duels of masses of sleeping consciences underlying the erosive *****, Queen Anne, is gathered at a gallop by Joshua de Piedra, blindfolds him so that he does not numb more body incense and set on a spring flower. By the knees, they are incinerated, but sometimes they are half-burned, burning like incense with Joshua in reversible adulation, of the rawest exquisiteness of essence of escapes of blossoming in chains, with the drama of carcinoma petals in anti-carcinoma times and of eternal life external. At the Post Office, the postman envelopes the new vignettes, new gardens of relevant highlights. The friend Joshua links the trough of flames escaping from his domain, at a faster pace for other readings, varying in shreds of first-time, delineating, and walking breaths that are lost in the misty vividness.

Says Leiak: “After making a round, Adelimpia with Hugh and Bernardolipo, restart their adventure, almost at the top of the Horcondising massif, collecting riches from between stranded galleys, and vaults dragged by the cataclysm towards this consistent mountainous ..., The amounts of coins from different origins were countless, from all those wealthy who stole from all their belongings, the tainted and intrepid wisdom, getting rid of everything before confronting the thunderous flashes of the Guardian, to subtract intelligent action from the oppressive limit in maintaining the Gnostic parallel. Adelimpia saw how the thousands of nausea cleaned themselves, before liquids and gastric ills, of which they are the bad residences, deciding to die acidly or spiritually towards an alkaline light.  Karmic oppression, anhydrous bubbles, carbonating every breathing capsule of compassionate life. Every day there is more foul-smelling hunger in men of acid rust, for the good spirits of the dipsomaniac in the diet of the most lost undefeated blind, a universal record of walking impoverished at the end of his objectivity. Adelimpia…., And Carmina; maiden of the extravagant silence is linked to the ox Xenon, master of his pumpkin ox, collects bubbling fragments from their stomachs of acid and fragmented, with unfortunate applicants to obtain him, all of them exalted before his prayers, as well as that fleece that the other possessed ox; Cricket that was grazing in the radiant spaces of the grasslands, ruminating lost ties for the good of all and being able to observe in the distance going beyond all sensitive imagination, being me Leiak, the spirit of Vernarth who looks over where he does not it does, sometimes incomprehensibly because of its purging. "

Joshua de Piedra says: “Horcondising, land of Spa, of beautification to correct your beautiful osteological inhabitant, your beautiful pro-lieutenant inhabitant, I believed that wealth would flow from my hands to finance my own poverty. Horcondising, is my nurse Luz, tracing with her blood the route of the Talami reign, everything continues without direction, the lustrín lost his paste of ruby cream and powders, of the conductor who governs their destinies in my hands ..., and it is required. Horcondising, badly and fearfully I say genuflected, here are my riches, but I swear by the most sacred, that I never thought I was so poor at the same time, in the presence of the almighty. Karmic planet, you come like bread and honey from a dazzled bee, you come to fill us with light through the horns of the cat, mounted on the back of the rooster, mounted on the roan bovine. Horcondising ... What a memory! When I was running fast through good waters and Sudpichi, I saw in line some swindlers in uncertain Faith, loudly dismantling the stunning consciousness of possessing without letting those who do not have know, and what it is to lack, what is the love of the slightest doubled second, until it brings honey and milk to the mouth of the beggar and with new clothes, around the circular saffron, the light of isolation and God's judgment on Hommo Sapiens. Baba, Vrja Ananda, I know that to ascend you have to put clean, white clothes on the wind, lavender with druid purple and stuffed on the petioles that fell on the stumpy back of the little elephant. I never got tired, I always laughed and the manly wind stretched my cheeks of purple roses, to laugh at the feminine world like a new man being born from the darkness of loneliness, in a new man, with a new life, in a deranged valley of Solitude, gaseous, ulcerative and asphaltic soil, of Horcondising, in the blaze of a fierce virtuous lantern ..., lying with its lost light on the rich and poor, entangled in resin from a hopper and a villain with feet tired from walking. As immeasurable to act I continue, although there is too much, among which nothing was ever forbidden from an ominous advance. But more awaits me, whoever wants numb oppressive anti-libertarian oppression, I will continue to ruin myself after this world, in the jaws of the rogue armchair of emptiness, with strong and pious prayer, strong and pious karmic augury to ruin the ruffian, that he holds and looks at you like a kitchen log in his dispensary. Karma comes to without and are, with are without are, with dream sounds, hallucinated sounds to realize the truth of accuracy. I have no vocabulary when I am hungry or thirsty for Faith or equanimity, but rather, more than all the power of the high massif to fall on the despotic ripper and cutthroat, accursed beings of the night darkness! I decree worse evil than all the bad curses to which it provokes by a glance, and stuns you like an ant in the fragrant countryside. Karma, baba nam kevalam, anti-karmic, to anyone who doubles your life, to **** you more than three times, without falling into the arms of Forgione or a Buddhist Monk tired of getting tired, self-love and improper Karma from now on everyone and all who with their deeds and gaze invade them with disloyal flatteries and evils, the true triumph of Truth and Equality so that it is equal to all resigned, looking less like the worldly offering of goodness, but rather bad at last of counts. Francesco, are you coming right...? Here I wait for you, low-cut I will also get in line to be supplanted. My story will be vital and oppressive, full of capital, anti-charitable because I have never been able to understand it. I know that powerful affiliations will come, and I will be in your lap, and all those who process your consummation and death will fall, a bad omen of their whim like any piece. Force the spirit that outside is evil, always yours, Master...! I am going, I am going, each one who looks at me as his prey will have to govern and feed him, for better or for worse, and otherwise, I will be eternally burned along with all his progeny in the Horcondising. "


So Joshua spoke when making a wooden whistle. He cut his index finger with transparent grease, and saw a viscous bleeding liquid fall into the constant complaint, from each head of frustrated saboteurs, and mercilessly squandered by those who aim at you every day to finish you and beg your entire eternal psychic substance, without Numbers or paternal letters, Vernarth and the Hexagonal Birthright, attended with great enthusiasm this regression, knowing that he was in their nation and domains where their mythological beings accompanied them beyond all vision. They all remain normal; doing everyday things, but Vernarth's voice accompanied them from an altar in a vivid voice and with great clarity in the voice that expressed their pilgrimage.

Vernath says with an infernal tone: “The Horcondising rack runs out of people benches, to attend to their requests the sky has become convex and unattended, to walk down the fragile plateau crouching down, weightless trees rub their bruised roots on the scrubbed Living spirits over each parlor, each present master along with his present consort seemed like perfect strangers, each separated by name in their new and uncertain divided destiny. All by putting the hand where the ulcer makes intermittent unhealthy purulence, on whether we are and correspond what we are or those who manage to have in this twisted life without a surplus, and what would it be if we had surplus ...? Rows of speakers and auditors are compressed, trying to want to be understood, but the words are keys and conclaves of high architecture sifted, of the wild despair in which we are beasts escaping from an eternal safari of thunder and cannon, vaping fumaroles of ancestry and drinking Bourbon to the thunder of the steely ***** on the orphanage of looming. Here Fray Andresito unfolds his body, you know it here is…! Right here he aimed at the weakest, the strongest, perhaps being a slave. What a difficult word to define... This cell without adjoining limits, called Atman, or female soul engendering another female soul, in the arms of the sorcerer, whose packaging and the serial knot would be made by a novice, who did not know if it was tightly closed, so as not to know if it would be fine in the future and reopen it with light in Gandhi's eyes, or by a child in care appointments without his arms to approach his mother cradle, perhaps being ivy or algae that sway his breaths vain…, from the flickering of the dotted throbbing of the Sun in flight through the lost night of the altarpiece, putting silicone because it comes out of the picture. Today a being was born in the arms of the almighty, a being anointed in the placenta of golden liquid and augrum, filling everyone and everyone leaving them speechless… ”.

Its ancestry of eternal way comes from mutual funds, equivalent prices in promoting values, on falls and rises, in franc growth, and various financial statements to beat dividends. The lines of people obediently migrated to the Horcondising, they never thought that they would be a great family, all in chains of multicolored and endless shapes, all in the high mountain at more than three thousand meters, and no higher, because in this Age again life, I cannot count more than thousands, in which the hundreds stay up late every day on this streetcar called the alliance. Branches of salty puree and ammonite soups with coriander, in the transversal valleys, to the southeast, with verve envelopes and their large moral excess on their backs and their hope of leaving all their treasures on the sidelines, before entering the muddy showers. when swarming with turbulent regrets and losing all ego money, highlighting a new epidermis, with an unprotected but opulent soul. Each being devoid of the word and thought, was trans walking through the heavenly ranks, with buzzing in their hearing aids attenuated and a smelly shanghai screeching, nothing would be left to pour into the channels near the almighty, the one who picked them up from the ground satin in some small sulfur coins and bleeding hollow, nothing will charge to their accounts or in their excess pride, only white skin in dark skin, and dark turning to dawn gray dermis, for exclusiveness, only lost in the jungle of ignorance shipwrecked tundra. Grandmother Adelimpia cleaned with sweepers and pine feather dusters, wormwood trunk and molle, and with the ceiling. My Anne, swept the flat floor with her wedding dress, years ago seasoned ..., Hugh and Bernardolipo laced some wines pigeonholed in the devil's segment, so as not to lose track of the high hill, which could be seen falling on the witnesses of the fallen Calvary Before the world ends for many, but not for the Huasos. The auction continued; Anne still had an end-of-the-world fever, with so many degrees…. Don't worry Anne, a Mapu aboriginal boy; the one with the sinister ..., brings a good herb to improve you, it is said that he comes from less to more, with his face like a beautiful farm landscape, stream water that quiets fevers and ills of charm. Have faith, says the elder Sylph Angelita Huenuman, reborn to Anne…: “The bark of that oak will be demolished and crumbled to cover you from evil and worse evil charm. Tomorrow on the high snow-covered peak, sweet cakes will fall steamed with berries and flavored almonds in your Word, which always deserves to smile to the limit, you are the omega star stele that will know how to smile, you will see it just like your Joshua de Piedra; which is an eternal incense of ruse, you will be dressed as a coco channel between aromas of eternity like spring light and first communion, between your snowy new garland of sap and in which you are always like a web-footed dreamy bird, moving away from the Aculeo lagoon, away from the giant hermit emerging from a nucleus of water and its pool, sobbing on each step of lake light of ascending sketch and of a lagoon avoiding new despised damage "
Alpha Day, Alpha Night, Omega Day Omega Night
Connor Jan 2016
I

Flowers already,
sputtering bicycles and the mad drums of foreshadowed
Springtime,
Massage therapist of the universe!
The extracted final note in a bird's outcry and my ears are full of sound
and sleep.
A cities undeterred heartbeat welcomes me to the continuous span of events only separated by the lambent verve,
windowless eyes watching each other
a signal-light blue ocean winding around a wicked mattress
seductively spinning a cowl into the night for her lover
(who's thoughts have been paused!  he's 100% clocked in and spun out, a hanging aluminum)
DAZZLING!
toothpaste spit outside into January's soft grass from a second story dorm room that's curtains reminds me of The Glenshiel..
(or maybe I'm suddenly feeling sublime death slowly knotting itself into my lungs, always been there but kinda like noticing your nose resting on your face for the first time)
On the bus home I thought of new years eve, 2015.
After the countdown, emerged from the underground
James Joyce pool hall,
rushing out to the streets
an asphalt madhouse
lunacy, absolute, and stabbings nearby tortured parkades.
Here's the new year made real,
a tangible calendar
an authoritative sentiment
while I listened to Donovan's "To Sing for You"
My new friends laughed, arms together,
I felt like I was standing on the edge of an undiscovered sun,
replaced by Vietnamese clouds
(Which I'll sail by come September)

II**

A crow waits on a balcony, wet and lonely from the rain.
Radios buzzing an electric tuba.
Smoke is the father and
dew is the mother
I am the son cold and clothed, while others soak beneath
canopies, cement gaps, they pray, I pray for them although I
wouldn't consider myself religious,
"Agnostic spiritualism"
yeah, the has a nice flow to it
but that's just my opinion..
Waking up before the sun has breathed
the first western factory.
Yellow hats
****** fists
a faint star is singing
I'm listening
ears are ringing
a static drone collapses
consciousness reaches a peak before subsiding to sunlight
(sequel to the last day, prequel to the days to come)
I'll fall in love again, I know it
I have it marked on my calendar you'll see!
Water a few hours still/room temperature/is shaking because my foot
beats against the carpet/
this music isn't exactly conventional or pure as the morning
more a glass shatter
or a psychotic scream in distant queer Victoria nightclubs.
Passing Christmas,
Oak Bay,
Spanish holiday (potentially)
and ** Chi Minh City market walks
(future events ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
A university lecture from Vandana Shiva,
watching my dad's cat for four months
(Where my room was destroyed in a forty-five minute
terrified chase thru the house to lock him in a carrier for an urgent vet appointment due to kidney stones, or what we thought was urinary crystals at the time. He howled the entire car ride there)
I think back to childhood, 1996 Apartment light and the December blizzard which buried parking lots, blocked entrances/exits n forced people to be patient for once, sit and talk, make love without setting an alarm for the morning after
(before I was even 5, or 10, long before I wrote poems, and lost those I would come to care about..)
Hopefully all those elementary school friends turned out okay.
Since moving, I've frequently passed great corner store curtains,
green and grey dusty
by the rusting tills
an empty town
where the soccer fields became overgrown and ice cubes melt slow on
people's fingers (As they wait for time to roll by like it always has)
a forgivable loss of community.
Even so, there's that consistent disappointment in lost years,
a waiting room, and I'm choking on oriental carpet threads lodged one by one into my throat and here I thought I'd eventually taste the Chinese
but it appears that they have instead swallowed me, downed me with tequila (label torn from passing months and birthdays not celebrated)
The holy temperate wind expands down and through bare branches,
argumentative hours
desperate hands
a loudspeaker CALLING!
and the WILD MACHINE cuckoo cuckoo past the insulation.
Silvery sweet, undreamed kisses, misunderstandings,
the cool reflection of a kettle while two wait for midnight and for the butterfly to creep up on their shoulders.
(cradled by cosmic lobotomy, hours where not one person can sleep,
and Sadhus give spiritual advice for those that need it, India, while I need their voices here on Vancouver Island, far from the Ghats)
When can I go for that intercontinental voyage??
to escape the warehouse cathedrals,
capital Christs,
nettled lipstick,
weariness in the age of wireless consciousness
and a spectrum of commonplace goddesses who wake with no lucidity.
My breathing getting heavier every day, with the weight of wanderlust,
an asthma designed for those who's material position is dictated by a secluded room
(slowly catching fire)
I'm only months away from the prophesied airplane..
all been leading to this
here, now
soon.

The only known alleviation
on this unrest for experience
resides in poetry.
mark john junor Nov 2013
the hard face
sunburned remnants of a man
allways loudspeaker for his intent
announces to the empty room
of his arrival
his field of landmines eyes
wander the crowd in the empty chairs
looking for the face
that will conquer or capitulate
looking for the ever present weak link

most days you can find her
in some park feeding ducks
some real some not so much
dont really make much difference these days
most days you find a smile in her heart
all of em real but not always so quick
most days nothing changes
but sometimes everythings gotta go
and she got no fear putting it on the line

he walked the carpet hall
with the framed pictures of three piece suits
and the victories they had over the outside the line desperado's
sunburnt remnants of a man
he walks with his shadow upright hand in hand
he walks in the darkness of the bright sun
looking for a face in the crowed emptyness
looking for someone that will conquer or capitulate
hes looking for her
but shes looking for you
cause she loves you
and the kitten you carry on your shoulder

most nights shes on the hood of her plymouth
drawing pictures in the dust of the road
sketching echoes out of the nights song
most nights shes driving a backroad with rockabilly
smoking her speakers
most nights you can find her in your arms
but not tonight
not this rainswept night

where we goin
why should this kind of thing happen
why take from someone never done you wrong
why do such things
is it any wonder you never see my face no more
is it any wonder im far away
most of the time
most days im ok...sometimes miss you more than even i can describe
Sum It Jan 2014
An abuser in eye painting songs of love
so sharp with disguise
Unrealized mystery of hypocrisy
burns dead skin of my heart
trip down already, isn't late to realize yet?
oh right! you... all smiles!

i loaned few quotes from bank today
a huge interest and whole heap of silence
the loudspeaker also broke down today
see, you, my hunny bunny sweet apple pie
what a pleasant day for my ears
and you.... alll smiles

caress me some like you love the fur
wasn't you who said "life's ours to live when alive"
i dont get it , which is why i hate you now
life is only act of dead people feeling alive
but yeah right.... all smiles

my sweetheart, please die!
Jennifer Dec 2014
This was a rendezvous that was forbidden by the Heavens, Earth and Hell.
There was never any sign of anyone approving it, not even my doubtful but hurtful heart.
It was too late; the feelings are bind to the spell that has been going out for years.
The remedy, the spell to break it, was gone buried deep within the unknown void space we call the Universe.
Only hold on to the present, forget the past,
These words echoing in my head like a loudspeaker, but herald no effect on my addiction,
*****, unpolished, impure, I am a jewel that sits undiscovered in the dark.
Waiting the opportunities that prevail but seem too far away,
And grasping to one thing they call Destiny.
Bad, bad, bad; but we think we are good
But aren’t we repeating the same mistakes we did?
Can’t we just accept our fate as star-crossed lovers?
That lays not a finger on each other, but desires that single touch and kiss.
Warmth it boils inside us, but cold we give off each other,
Do we prefer to implode than explode?
Never mind, the pain that accumulates,
This is an intoxicating game,
That witnesses both our attitude in playing it.
Until you die,
Do not exit the game yet.
Because I want us to work together,
To ****** this enchanted curse.
A poem that elucidates the heart that is unable to achieve what it yearns for
NuurSeraph Feb 2015
Were it motionless moments of Vacuum,
a nowhere Awareness,
a blackness of Space.

so full of Color yet self-contained,
where toroid cannibals feast on each other
never satiated nor satisfied~
Nothing is leaving and Nothing goes in.

this is a place in my memory,
a chip in the wood.
Devoid of a thought worth conceiving,
a sleepless hollow,
deprived yet still not Broken.


This is my precious serene,
a darkness deflowered,
a Secret no more.

Loudspeaker Monsters Awaken
Food as fodder for feed in their gullet.
Pronounced for Announcement
I proclaim to the World.
Ronald J Chapman Feb 2016
Knock on the door.
Who is it? I ask.
Special delivery!

I open the door.
I'm handed aa envelope postmarked Seoul Korea.
Sign here, please.

I walk over to the desk and open the envelope.
Inside the envelope is a letter along with a round trip plane ticket to Seoul Korea.

The letter says, "Congratulations you are the grand prize winner of "Why Korea is a Beautiful Country?" contest. Thank you for submitting several of your poems to us. Now get ready to take some pictures of your dream.

A month later April 1st

I find myself boarding the plane flight to Korea.
We take off, and I decide to try and sleep for the entire flight.

But I'm woken up by people screaming. Then hear a voice over the loudspeaker saying, "Put your life vest on, fasten your seat belts."
The flight attendants were running down the aisles yelling.

I see a bright flash as bright as a noon sun,

Waking up on a sandy white beach,
To the sound of ocean waves.
Feeling ocean waves at my feet trying to pull me back into the sea.

Standing up wiping the sand off my pants.
Looking around,
I see an empty beach, a deep blue ocean, trees and mountains.

Seabirds flying high as if searching for something,

Suddenly I hear yelling in a strange language from behind me. Turning around, I see bizarre looking people riding horses ******* towards me with swords raised screaming what sounded like "Mooreup Ggul-eo! Mooreup Ggul-eo!  I tried to run but was grabbed by one of them and pushed to the ground. Because of being scared of having my head cut off. I didn't say a word or move a muscle.  

Next I was bound, gagged and tied to a horse with a rope.

The men mounted their horses. They began moving down the beach while dragging me behind the last horse.

After what seemed like many hours of walking and with the sun setting we reached a grotto surrounded by cherry blossoms, roses and pine trees. Stunning like something from a fairytale.

One of the men removed the gag and untied me.
He grabbed me by the arm yelling something at me that I couldn't understand while pointing at and pushing me into a small cave.
When I turned to look around, I noticed the rest of the group were all bowing, and some even seemed to be crying. I was grabbed again turned around and tossed into the cave.

Then I hear a sound like a sad young woman crying.
I say, "Hello." No answer.

I continue walking toward the crying in this cave as dark as moonless night. When I come to an open chamber as bright as the midnight sun.
I'm shocked to see a beautiful Goddess tied to a throne by her wrists and neck.

I quickly begin to untie her. I try to speak to her. But neither of us can understand the other. But I remembered the most important word in the Korean language and say,  "saranghamnida" She stops crying looks directly at me and says, "jagiya saranghae."

After I released her from the prison of, her thrown. She jumped up
and put her arms around me and with her head against my chest listening to my heart. She kept hugging me. She wouldn't let go of me.

She takes my hand pulls me slowly towards the cave opening.
I tried to stop her because of the people waiting outside guarding the cave but insisted she seemed triumphant and not afraid.

As we stepped out of the cave to a beautiful red-orange sunset.
She bows to me, and I return the bow and we both bow to the people guarding the cave. All of a sudden, the crowd cheers yelling Dongroe! Dongroe!...

I fell in love with the incredible Goddess Yuhwa. Last night I dreamed that she was bathing in my steamy cup of tea. That took the chill in my Soul away.

Copyright © 2016 Ronald J Chapman All Rights Reserved.

Mooreup Ggul-eo! = On your knees!
saranghamnida The Most formal way to say I love you.

jagiya saranghae = Darling, I love you.

Dongroe  A ceremony in which the king and queen bow to each other, share wine and food, and have their first night together.
These words came from a dream I had on Sunday night February 21, 2016.
mark john junor Oct 2013
his loudspeaker thinking
shot through my eye
as he passes me in the crowded room
its over-speed thought process painted on his sweating face
he fingers loudly the moist pages of his life
wishing to replay the better moments
but just like everyone else
cant relive the moment
but you can live in
the pain of its regret for the rest of your life
if that's what you want
he's a follower of the herd
he sits with with them
and pantomimes their moves with precision

she sits in the exact centre
of the same corner each day
making notes of the coming and goings
and draws the faces
the funny faces
spiral notebooks full of faces
her glasses held together with scotch tape
her mind held together with
reruns of nineteen seventies sitcoms
and heavy medications
she is lonely but will never admit it
she watches him
and wonders

at the days end
she convinces him to walk her home
and together
they set out hand in hand
the sky and world around them a tourist picture perfect whitewash
he fingers her medicated mind
prying out the soft meat
looking for the dark stuff that tastes
like chicken
her misfire engines let him get only so deep
before her childhood memories
of a beautiful blue dress
and a apple pie brings enough
reality to his palate to end his fascination

they will end up married
because being misfit is better than
being alone
Michael Bauer Mar 2015
i was watching the television footage
of the calls for peace and unity
thinking of how far we’ve come but how lost people can be
before the sun glints off the marble steps and returns to the sea

some guys shot up a bunch of French cartoonists for showing the absurdity
of a middle age religious idol who insisted on martyrdom
because their father told them they’d get something good come kingdom come
and by another sad twist of irony made their victims martyrs too

i wonder why i feel the need to respond to what i hear
and if i’m too much of a news ******
taking in a steady stream of corporate malarkey
burning life away tuned out into the glare

i’m tired of trying to solve all of the problems in the world
i’d only like to sit and write today
and sit and sip my coffee in the sunshine
with no languages and nothing left to say

i was reading about government debt in the paper
and inequality, tensions overseas and Muslim ghettos
i don’t know all that much about it all, so i don’t know
but i let the words swirl around in my head then let it go

a European man decided he wanted more rocks and fruit
a century, or two, or three ago in his cold palace
so he strapped some trees together and set off to trade his ballast
for an empire of golden bodies in the sun

and for me it is the same as i sit here with my ball and chain
in the sunshine of the Americas in the modern age
soaking up stories, wasting time then turn the page
hold in another breath then let it out into the air

i’m tired of trying to solve all of the problems in the world
i think i might start making some instead
why not go out and light a torch and seize the day
a century of life or more or less and then you’re dead

i was thinking about going to see the warriors
i’d bring a camera and a notebook and an open mind
be love and ease the tensions of the ties that break and bind
disappear and skip off beyond the boundary line

i’d probably get captured and beheaded
but it would be fun to hang out for awhile
we could listen to good music and smoke cigarettes and smile
then walk out into the wilderness and look up at the moon

the militant awoke to a loudspeaker crackling
a voice in Arabic calling all to prayer
he dropped his rifle to his side and laid his body debonaire
southeast toward a warmer rising sun

i’m tired of trying to solve all of the problems in the world
i’d rather see them in another way
and lift a sword or pen and just start swinging
at the other strutting actors on the stage

i’ve been reading about the lifestyles of the ancients
how they built their homes from the soil
preserved the harvest from spoil
then scattered back into a grand decay

i was watching television
to see the call for peace and unity
and the victories of liberty
in the city on the Seine

i wrote a poem to free my thoughts
for our freedom and for those who died
so i can write and hold my pride
as a candle in the dark

i’m tired of trying to solve all of the problems in the world
to surrender my life to the master
who painted the sun and the stars and the earth
who drew my light in this image then shattered

**originally posted on my blog at https://sublimeobscenities.wordpress.com/ on January 12, 2015
Anonymous Nov 2013
"Why do i have these thoughts all the time?"
You screamed as the blade cut open your wounded mind
Blood rushing down your wrists hitting the cold, dense floor
"Why doesn't anybody understand!" you cried "They just think i'm crazy!"
The pills fly through the air
You scramble to grab them, but you down them in half a second
Your body slaps the ground
Covered in your own the ****** mess you created
Your pronounced dead


Hours later your sister and mom come home
"DEE DEE!" your little sister squeals "DEE DEE!"
The house is silent
She rips up the stairs knowing what you've been through
Tears streaming down her face
She busts down the bathroom door and is unable of finding words to say

Your mother knows something is up since you didn't answer her phone calls
Suddenly her 2nd daughter is yelling and crying for you to wake up
Little did she know what you had been up to while you were home alone
Your mom collapses by your side instantly in tears whimpering for you to come back
Not even worrying about the blood splattered all over the both of you

The last place alive you saw was the bathroom since you had been bagged up
And didn't even give you a chance at the hospital
Your dad gets the news and races home as soon as the ambulance is taking your body away
He starts crying which he never does since he didn't get a chance to say goodbye
"My little girl" he says getting choked up "is gone..."

The next day they announce your death over the loudspeaker
Your two best friends heads are racing a mile a minute not being able to comprehend what happened
You called them last night but they had other bigger problems
They still tried to talk you through it even though it just made things worse

You even tried one of your old friends but she didn't come either
She was too hung up on her own life
Since she had the same problems you did but bottled them up
But that morning she was hysterical
She went home that night and didn't even think twice but hung herself
Because she was dating the guy you liked and was gonna breakup with him the next day
You didn't even give her a chance to explain

Well at least you thought of all this before taking out the blade
I'm done dead to none but myself
I am lifeless holding on by a thread
that once held me together
I seep from every poor thought out paper I hand in
screaming please help the lost soul
in the corner
despair blares over the loudspeaker
and this time no one knows
to catch me when I fall
because they're too busy looking
in the other direction
this time I could slip into sleep
and never come out
of my self-induced coma
maybe I could finally be free
if my hand slipped
and those problems of mine dropped
into my mouth and down my throat
dead to all but me
Big Virge Oct 2019
I'm Hearing That ...
Some People Think ...  

New Poetry's ... TOO CRUDE ... !!!

Now I'm NOT Starting ...  
A Poetry ... FEUD ...  
  
But ...  
  
"Come come old boy,  
that views OLD NEWS !"
  
Rappers NOW ...  
Write ... Poetry TOO ... !!!  
  
Some Rap Is Bought ...  
By ... MILLIONS of Youths ... !!!  
  
Not Just ... " The Young " ...  
But ... Old Folks TOO ... !!!  
  
So ... MILLIONS Buy ...  
Wordplay That's ... CRUDE ... !!!  
  
Most People In The World ...  
Have Forgotten ... " Ted Hughes " ... !!!  
  
But Recite Words Written ...  
By ... Hip Hop Crews ... !!!  
  
So DEAL With It ...  
Or ... Go Back To School ...  
Cos' Poetry NOW ...  
Has Got ... NEW RULES ... !!!  
  
Don't Get On The Stage ...  
And ... Act The FOOL ... !!!  
  
Cos' ... What You Write ...  
May Not Be ... " Crude " ...  
  
What's Crude To ... YOU ...  
Is Simply ... " Your View " ...  
  
OTHERS ...  
May Not ... Share Your View ... !!!
  
Do ... " YOUR THING " ...  
YES ... DO ... Your Thing ... !!!  
But ... RECOGNISE ...  
Or FEEL The ... " STING " ... !!!  
  
Times Have Changed ...  
  
It's Time Right Now ...  
For Poets To Bring ...  
Words of ... TRUTH ...  

Cos' ...
Many In The World  
EPITOMISE ... " Crude " ...  
  
From Dealings Made ...  
AWAY From .................................................................­............. Public View .......  
  
To Racists ... Doing ...  
... What They Do ... !!!
  
So ....  LISTEN Close ...  
To ... This Here Prose ...  
Cos' ... Crudeness In YOU ...  
May Get ... EXPOSED ... !!!  
  
Like Powder ... Under ...  
A Coc'heads' .... NOSE ... !!!  
  
I'm A ... LOUDSPEAKER ...  
WITHOUT The ... " Bose " ... !!!  
  
These ... Open Mic' Gigs ...  
Seem To ... INDULGE ...  
Poets Whose Minds ...  
AREN'T Open But CLOSED ... ?!?
  
But Now You're OPEN ...  
To ... Lyrical BLOWS ...  
  
If This Is ... TOO CRUDE ...  
Walk Out The Front Door ...  
  
OPEN It UP ...  
You're ... FREE TO GO ..........................................  
  
But REMEMBER THIS NIGHTS' An ...
... " OPEN Mic Show " ... !!!!!  
  
Oh It's ...  
  
" Classic Poetry " ...
That You ... CHOOSE ... ?!?  
  
Well ...  
Have Your OWN NIGHT ...  
You ... PROBABLY Do ... !!!  
  
And EXPRESS Your Views ...  
To Those Who STILL Follow ...  
The ... " Laureate School " ... !!!  
  
DON'T ... Use The Stage ...  
To ... HURL ABUSE ... !!!  
  
At Poets From...  
The ... REALITY School ... !!!  
  
I Choose ... NOT To Lose ...  
My Cool For ... FOOLS ... !!!  
Who Choose To Use ...  
The Mic' To Be ... RUDE ...  
  
ANTIQUATED Views ...  
Have Their ... " Place " ...  
  
But To DEVALUE The New ...  
is a ... **** DISGRACE ... !!!  
  
Everything NEW ...  
ISN'T Always ... GREAT ... !!!  
But You Might LEARN ...  
From The Odd ... New Face ...  
  
Can We NOT Take Poetry ...  
To It's ... RIGHTFUL Place ... !?!?!  
  
A Place Where The MASSES ...  
CAN ... " Relate " ...  
By INFUSING Words ...  
of ... TRUTH and LOVE ...  
INSTEAD of .... " HATE " ... !!!  
  
We ...
NEED To OVERCOME ...  
....... " Ignorance " ......  
Before It's ... TOO LATE ... !!!!  
  
Who Are YOU To Tell People ...  
What To Say ... ?!!!?  
  
Isn't That What Was Done ...  
In THOSE ... SLAVERY Days ... ?!?  
  
Interesting Question ...  
What's Your  View ... ???  
  
Let Me Guess ...  
THAT Question's ... LEWD ... !!!  
  
Let Me Ask A Couple More ...  
  
How Do You DEFINE ... Crude ... ???  
  
What's In A Definition ... ?  
CREATING ... *** - is - ion ...  
  
Well ...  
Prisms To ... " Isms' " ...  
What Is YOUR Position ... ?
  
When ... Visions' Definition ...  
DEFINES The Way You're Living ...  
  
But ...  
Takes AWAY ............ The GLISTEN ....  
With ... " Fictional Inscriptions " ...  
  
So ... What's The ...  
RIGHT Prescription ... !?!  
  
Is it In ... The ETHER ... ?  
  
Earth Has Been ...  
... My TEACHER ...  
  
Air Is Just ...  
... My KEEPER ...  
  
Fire ... IS ...  
... The REAPER ...  
  
Water Runs ...  
MUCH DEEPER ... !!!  
  
So Do ... ELEMENTS ...  
DEFINE The ... " Preacher " ... ???  
  
Can We NOT Change ...  
WITHOUT ... RECKLESS ABANDON ... ?!?
  
We Have ... " Few Limits " ...  
But ... "SO MANY Limits" ...  
  
Limits ... To Me ...  
Go With POLITICS ... !!!  
As The Force Goes with ...  
  
... " Jedi Mind Tricks " ... !!!!  
  
Or ... Needles DO ...  
With A ... " Heroine Fix " ... !!!  
  
That's NO JOKE ... !!!  
  
I Ain't Taking ...  
... " The **** " ...  
  
JUDGES of ... " My Words " ...  
Just Make Me ... SICK ... !!!  
  
Time KEEPS Ticking ...  
Can You Hear The ... " Tick " ... ?  
  
My Poetic Style ...  
Is An OLD ... NEW Lick ... !!!!!  
While Some Still Walk ...  
In Parks ... " JURASSIC " ...  
  
So ... Who Can DEFINE ...  
A ... Poetry CLASSIC ... !?!  
  
The World ...  
DOES NOT ... Revolve ...  
Around ... SINGULAR Views ... !!!!  
  
Walk AWAY If You ... " Choose " ... !!!  
  
But ...  
PLEASE DON'T Use The Microphone ...  
Just To .... HURL ABUSE .... !!!!!  
  
Cos' When YOU SHOW ...  
Such ... ATTITUDES ...  
  
YOUR ATTITUDE ...  
........... IS ........

...... " CRUDE " .......
Written once i'd performed for a while, only to hear that, some of the old guard were complaining about the content, and styles of fresh young wordsmiths .... always an interesting subject to debate .....
David Huggett Jul 2018
Like I said before, I was into gambling. Betting on horses, football games, baseball, hockey, even pro wrestling. You name it, I'd bet on it. I'd make so many bets in a period of time, that I often lose track of whether I was winning or losing. I guess it was the thrill of making a prediction. Hawk, on the other hand, was much more tight-****** with his money. There were two reasons for this. Hawk was of Scottish ancestry. This may offend some, but it made him wise in the knowledge that a penny saved was a penny earned. Also, Hawk grew up on, while I wouldn't say, the poor side of town, I would definitely say, on the modest income side of town.
We were at the old Exhibition Park, now the multi-million dollar Queensbury Downs, an ultra-modern, magnificent edifice. Exhibition Park was a rickety old place, really a disgrace in its later years. Believe me, it had many, many years.
Anyway, the nags were running one night and Werewilf and I decided to try to make some money; Werewilf thought of himself as some kind of horsey guru, but he had the odd good insight that I would sometimes cash in on. The evenings winning was progressing as usual. Werewilf hit a winner on the Daily Double and made enough to double his bets on the rest of the races. I was donating to the upkeep of the barns and the jockeys wages. I maintain that I had a part in building the new Queensbury Downs.
After the seventh race admission was free.
That is when Hawk showed up. He would spend his admission money on the last three races. The eighth and ninth races were a bust for all of us. The final race was going to be the saving grace for me and the Hawk, and Werewilf was definitely buying drinks at the curling club later.
Hawk and I looked at the horses and saw a big old grey that looked pretty good. The odds were favorable on Grey Goose, so I place my bets across the board. Hawk bet him to place. Werewilf had money on the horse as well, so it looked like a shoo-in. We were all tensed up in anticipation for the race as the horses were at the post.
"They're off!" the track announcer blared over the loudspeaker. Grey Goose cantered out of the gate and was so far behind at the quarter that he had no hope of placing. "How about an eight-horse pileup!" Hawk yelled. Forget if Hawk, this was horses, not cars. It wasn't a good thing to hope for anyway.
The rest of the pack reached the half when it became evident that Grey Goose had to let go of a load of horse buns. The laughter from the stands echoed throughout the place. Hawk seemed to take the whole scene as a personal insult. The race was over. Grey Goose finished what he had to do and came in dead last.
Hawk said, "I just paid two dollars to watch a horse have is a daily dump! I'll never bet on a horse again!" Wilf and I thought the whole thing was hilarious and considered it money well spent.
Later we met Moneybags at the Regina Curling Club in the exhibition grounds. Hawk was still grumbling about his two dollars. Moneybags was at the races too and thought what had happened with Grey Goose was very amusing, even though he had money on the horse too. Hawk was still grumbling. Moneybags accused Hawk of having Rectinitus. "What the hell is Rectinitus?" we all wondered.
Moneybags, low key, said, "Rectinitus is a medical term. It occurs when your ****** is connected to your optic nerve, culminating in a ****** outlook on life. But don't worry Hawk, It's very rarely fatal."
Republished from "Ghosts in my closet" George Merle 1947-2014
Sam Temple Apr 2015
Howling wind seeps through the 1930’s brick building housing prison education
Biting cold as the last gasp if old man winter’s breath tries to maintain its grasp
Bundled inmates frantically type in a vain attempt at kinetic energy creation
Plodding ever towards the twenty-five word per minute goal
Signifying they have the required the typing skill set needed to pass the dreaded G.E.D.
Muffled loudspeaker shouts indiscernibly at the masses as line movements are the order of the day
As I’m leaving I run into you on the kitchen floor
Sharing with the appliances your miserable company
Giving me your melancholy stare
I can help you not be alone but I can’t help with lonely
You called me boney as I put my back against the cabinet and sunk into my seat on the hardwood floor
Now we both feel lonely don’t we
We aren’t a pair, a puzzle, or each other's other halves
We’re not even complicated togetherness
We’re two people and we’re alone
No amount of bodies on the kitchen floor will fix that
I had to go but still I sat, in the ditch next to you hurting my neck looking up to speak
I missed my ride home I was looking for a girl that I knew, she had the same name as you, have you seen her?
Sam says she was last seen in the basement dancing, equipped with a convincing smile
The ******* the kitchen floor looks like she's been here for awhile
But I’m too boney to lift her up and make her dance side by side with a memory
I guess we’ll never know who she is
Where did the dancer go? She’s dancing with dust bunnies under the fridge
She drunkenly holds onto the steering wheel
This version seems a bit more real
I don’t feel as well as I used to due to two names just listed on the loudspeaker
Thank the lord that I don’t
Or I’d be dancing with the dust bunnies, reliving a memory, feeling lonely on the kitchen floor
I’ve certainly been there before
Nobody ever sat with me, I erased it from memory
This is the difference between alone and lonely
Ceida Uilyc Dec 2018
We didn’t know each other too well,
I thought of her as the prettiest girl in the class,
Intelligent but shy.

It was just the 20 minutes every Sunday of the Catechism Class
Which I attended out of constraint
Only when my lies fell flat
And mom wasn’t convinced


We connected the most in the last two years
Gossiping about boys
and
Taboos of Catholicism
She only listened with gleaming eyes
And I was the loudspeaker that shimmered her tears
A few minutes, perhaps an hour every month.

Then, I heard she had cancer.
I tried visiting her,
But she wouldn’t come out of the house,
Her mom said she didn’t want the world to see her hairless head
The Chemo had taken a toll.

Then I saw her in the choir section from the balcony
On a cold Sunday morning mass,
I caught her out of blue when the mass ended
Her hair was back, up till the ***
But my smile dwindled when I saw she had but one hand
I couldn’t talk a lot
So I told her ‘God Bless’,
Walked away and cursed god for his twisted blessing.
Cure for a hand.

Then, I heard she died yesterday.
10 Years fighting bone, blood and breast cancer.
I couldn’t stop my sinus tearing.
They were hot from the guilt of not catching up,
They were gushing out of the sorrow she was better than me,

Then why not me, but her.
I am a sinner. I should’ve been taken.
I took my childhood diary
It was the same words I had written 10 years ago.

Why her? Take me instead.

I played the
Prayer for the Dead
The Holy Mass on Loop
And I realized
I was never gonna meet her again.
She will go to heaven.
And I will look up from Hell.


I don't have a photo
I don't remember her voice

Just
A fading smile
A forced respect
God, will I remember her ten years from now?
In memory of Benitta Treesa Joseph.
The cancer ate her.
Rest In Peace, Love.

Say a prayer for her,
not a like for my poem.
Just want a prayer for her soul.
MKF Jul 2014
Make it easy,
Say I never mattered.
Scream it through a loudspeaker
So the whole world hears,
And write it on your arms
So that you won't forget.
Make it easy,
Say it was a fling.
Erase the "I love you"s
So that they never show
And sweep our memories under the couch
On which we once were intertwined.
Make it easy,
Say it was a lie.
Run it up the flagpole
So you feel good inside.
Make it easy,
My dear,
And please,
Make it quick.
For Trevor

— The End —