"New Plymouth"  

I
I, as a young woman, stand still
Like a ghost column in a Mausoleum  
Adjacent to the New Plymouth spit.  

I breathe in the invisible sugars of salt
And the stubborn incoherences
Of the sea washing green over layette white.  

The rocks are blunt teeth,
Fat and round like an old Frisco seal,
A Cerberus jaw barring me off

From fatal self-destruction.
What a laugh!
These flippants, these peacekeepers  

Have no idea, nor do
The gargantuan ships,
Walking on water like Jesus' feet.  

The sky is so pure and clean  
it's sectile, no clouds  
nor disturbances to be inhaled.  

II  
  

I hang like a death wish on the hotel's lintel;  
Outside copse's foliage joggle
And I think cold.  
  

The air is sullen and austere,
It knows what it's doing to me.
The air that kills, kills, kills.  
  

The radio stubbornly blubbers
More sheepish than a baby,
Confabulating the local rugby.  
  

I collapse like a sack of black potatoes.
I feel weirder than Pluto.  

I am an alien, an alien to the bulbous women
  
And silver lined suited men.  
The grand annunciation
"I hope you enjoy your stay"  
  
Makes my organs twist and puffer.  
It hurts, it hurts, it hurts!
This place cries for my demise.  
  
III
It's a rural community.  
Mothers in ghastly flannel and baby spew
swallow gossip like Communion tablets.  

The precious circulate the carousel,
Scoffing hot dogs like prepubescent piglets,
Sausages sliding like fat worms

And burning like hearts in an oven.  
The sizzling steam disintegrates
Like clouds of Statismospores

Spreading positively into ether.  
The sun beats like a muscle
Burning, burning, burning

My laundry-washed white.
I’m vulnerable.  
I was once pure and sweet like an Aryan,  

Now I am dying, dying, dying
From fat smiles curled like a snail
With grey fatty hooks under my eyes.  




IV  


Tiny bluestocking girls like me  
All congregate in the Library .
At last I am by myself.  

I still don’t feel at peace.  
My thoughts are frightening
When I am at my writing.  

They are even worse,
In fact deathly,
If I do not write.  

This climate of strange spacemen,  
This culture of monstrous noses
Has driven many women mad,  

Not excluding a woman like me.  
I’m bored to death, literally.
Now, now, I say,  

Carrying my golden bags of poetry,
“I love what will destroy me,
And hate what will heal me”.  


October 5th 2013

The child dreamed of flight since she could first walk.

She dreamed of stepping not on earth, like the workers--
Not on workers, like the rich ones,
And not on rich ones, like the gods, no.

She dreamed of stepping on nothing.

She looked first to the stars, with a hunger.
She wanted them.
She saw the spacemen with stars in their eyes,
Stars in their pockets--
Stars wherever they wanted them.

She looked at the lack of workers, rich ones, and gods.
She looked at the quiet.
She looked at all the nothing there was to step on.

With her feet on the earth, packed into painful solidity,
She looked at them and ached.

"The present is gone. Fantasy is a part of reality
and we take the breaks off. We're thinking clearly
yet not thinking at all, and this feels right.
We stop trying to control things,
The warm rush of chemicals through us. Is this brain damage?
We forget all the hurt and pain in life.
We wanna go somewhere else. We're not threatened by people anymore. All our insecurities have evaporated.
We're in the clouds now. Wide open,
We're spacemen, orbiting the earth.
Yeah, the world looks beautiful from here man.
We're nympholeptics, desiring for the unattainable.
We risk sanity for moments of temporary enlightenment.
So many ideas, so little memory. The last thought killed by anticipation of the next.
We embrace an overwhelming feeling of love.
We flow, in unison. We're together.
I wish this was real.
We want a universal level of togetherness, where we're comfortable with everyone.
We're in rhythm. Part of the movement, a movement to escape.
We wave goodbye.
Ultimately, we just want to be happy.
Yeah, yeah!
Hang on,
What the **** was I just talking about?"
*-Jip

This large square ceiling hanging above my body
is a blank canvass that needs to be painted
with bold strokes and bright colors,
with smooth orange and ocean blue,
rapid pummeling rhythms dictating tone and mood.

I have a pen in my hand that squirts out black bird ink,
but to me it’s a stone sculpting tool that carves deep inside my imagination,
and scoops up newborn thoughts before they disintegrate
when I wake up from my daydream.

So I climb on top of a cocktail chair with malleable
aluminum legs and I attempt to shape the dry whiteness
into something colorful and beautiful.

I want to create beauty because I don’t enjoy surfing the channels of Comcast digital entertainment
having to paddle through the brainwashing
and the ******* and seaweed that washes up
on my hometown shore.

The waves are all the same across the television screen, I am desensitized and numb to the upper class Anglo-Saxons,
who mind-****** my favorite poets and Hip Hop musicians in the mouth, so that they cannot speak with

honesty
and
compassion.

I don’t wonder anymore why some prominent media-figures choke on the microphone; it’s because they have been force-fed
chicken-****
and injected with
snake venom.

That’s why I don’t take all my time of leisure resting back on a tan cushioned boogie-board, riding a cable channel that will not take me anywhere except for an escape from the loneliness of living alone, away from close family and good friends.

That’s why I prefer to sit below a yellow and red pinwheel umbrella and stretch my toes in the wet sand, I don’t even need a beach towel to lie on, and sometimes I just want to sink into the grainy sand
and
forget about time,
forget about love,
and
forget about my reason for being here.

But back to molding a new form of living; that top white wall takes up the majority of my apartment and I think it deserves to be drawn on, painted on, spread with posters of voluptuous artists and cool brooding actors.

A canvass needs to have flesh, just as a skeleton needs meat and skin. I stack my sandy tan sofa cushions one after the other on top of the cocktail chair and I reach up to brush long and wide strokes of bravery and euphoria.

The bristle-tips flicked up specks of green apple paint and sunk deep blotches of red heart into the ceiling.

I danced on top of the spongy sofa seats while they swayed to and fro, but I didn’t think of falling down, what is the point of thinking about

failure?

That will only impede progress and I’m not merely trying to fabricate an illusion to drape myself with a safety cloak. I wish I could have pranced and jumped on the wavering cushion tower,
but instead I begun to grow a look of seriousness and submerged myself into a pool of
focus
and
concentration.

Nonsensical imagery floated adrift from my mind and the energy pounced onto my fingertips and I started to write and draw, and draw and write. I popped a small remote from my pocket and made the stereo sing opera, followed by jazz, followed by something bluesy.

Those songs carried me into this calming state where nothing mattered except for the now kaleidoscopic landscapes and the spacemen with hypnotic eyes. I wasn’t jacked up on Columbian coffee beans, diet coca-cola caffeine, nor psychedelic highs and lows, I was just going with the current baby.

When the canoe is in in the river and you’re rowing with a chipped paddle and without a life-vest, don’t even try to make an adjustment when the water gets rocky and the water pushes you around like an elementary-school ***** bully.

You keep paddling and you don’t throw a rope onto a branch and feel the scene; go with the flow and travel down-stream,
because where you came from is long gone and there’s no point in wallowing and pleasuring yourself late at

night just

to feel better about your ****** life.

But, I don’t even want to think when I’m in an artsy mood, I just want peace, and if peace won’t come to my doorstep and will not call me back when I left five messages, then **** peace,
I’ll settle for a shot of cheap ***** and a scrunched-up cig.
I stop drawing and painting and writing
for a while and take a nice long gaze
at my chaotic collage and smile until the jester frowns.

In huge messy cursive were the words, “LOVE YOURSELF, DO NOT SHOW YOUR EMOTIONS AT A WHIM.”

I was now beginning to struggle to smile. This wasn’t easy to be so straight with yourself, I’m used to bending my back in the wrong way

                 and not accomplishing anything in the process.

Remember when we thought we could burn the world down?
And now we can’t even manage a spark
We aren’t bored with passion or refused it
We just never knew it
And we’ve all become compliant
Being stale gasoline in gallon drums

We could be virgins or saints but we’re liars
And we wouldn’t have it any other way
Are lilac fields are wilted
And covered in swarms of honey bees
And we walk hand in hand through the hives
And come out swinging

Putting our trust into mapmakers who’ve never seen the world
Their limbs have all been broken
Now treading water with their hearts
This could be the most meaningful turn of the world
And you’d never ever know it
Until it came like a tidal wave crashing through your front door

We’ve been screaming at the sky until our throats are raw
And all we hear back is silence, not even an echo
I swear to God I haven’t felt like myself in so long
‘Cos all that’s left of me is confusion
We’re all mad here in this wasteland
With our dead cowboys and our dead spacemen

Forever Peter Pan in a business suit
Forever Peter Pan when my spine has doubled over
Forever Peter Pan on a morphine drip
And forever Peter Pan in a casket
And all that’s left of a name
Is what’s chiseled on your gravestone

Spacemen, cavorting, ridiculous jollity,
Fuzzing stars buzzing in the fabric
Space-time, folding, holding on
Spin, seven, nine, four,
Okay,
Just try to hold on.

Spinning lights flee by feeling
Hurry on Sunday
Slow
Circles.

Why? Why?
Why?
Why? Why?

You have no air.
You didn’t listen.
You had a warning…

Strap yourselves into the spin
Dazed and conned
Fused into your seat
Dancing in madness
Whistles, flutes and shakers
Unsettle your
Muted rhythm.

We sing for blessed distortion
Then drop away
Away
Who did
and
Why?

Why? Oh, God…

Bridge.

Wonder threw four bidden streets
and re-jet, the Prince Palls,
Ash on faced the walls.

Bridge.

Why? Why?
Why?
Why? Why?

Causes her arm.
Cause is her harm.
Cause is arm.
Arms are the cause of her harm.

Then-

Bridge.

Then-

Begin again…

You should not have done that.

Doe-eyed spacemen left behind--
But no one knows a life like mine.
And shared wavelengths are hard to find;
Nobody knows a life like mine.

Forgetting and forsaking time--
No, no one knows a life like mine.
I have no match and no one rhymes;
Nobody knows a life like mine.

The shipwrecked lovers start to climb,
But they don't know a life like mine.
I am forsaken and I'm fine;
Nobody knows a life like mine.

Humpty Trumpty yearned for a wall
He needed it strong and free to install
'It's gotta be huge like the size of my *****
And clearly discerned from the far side of Venus'

Peligro, Mexico, mind his massive ego
He ain't your mate nor your fondest amigo.

'I'll make 'em pay, so complete it real soon
And spacemen will marvel
When they stroll on the moon.

It's gonna be bigger and infinitely finer
Than The Pyramids, Machu Picchu
Or that crap wall in China'

Miriam Troth 2016

I looked up at the skies
Never knowing how high it really it is when I think of people who have reached the moon
They are just lies
I’d never made to path to reach the troposphere anytime soon

Because I never realized my dreams until I noticed time really flies or could run
While I felt jealous of the spacemen who had gone past an achievable reality
So one day I brought a completely upright ladder with a fluffy cloud at the top rung to block the sun
I ventured near the majestic Everest for inspiration with amateurish alacrity

After a few rungs I realized I was missing the soil
I was living in a dream without even knowing it
I’d never known blood, sweat and toil
Well I was feeling tired by epiphanies I came across each time when on the rungs my feet fit

After a healthy amount of rungs I came under the impression that I had gone quite far up
So I looked below to see how far I had come, understanding I still couldn’t see my **** cursed cloud
But when I did I was overcome by vertigo and ran up the steps faster than a hare whilst fearing failure and making this one shot my only mess up
My entire life I had been around the wrong crowd

Thinking my progress was enough at every interval of my life but that was the dream or a holy shroud
Time to make that shroud a proper cassock for a righteous monk
Because I was on my way to some form of success I had found
But I didn’t know the nature of it because of the people I had been among and I had run amok

Now eight kilometers into the journey of 10 km of climbing I could barely make out the familiar snowy white
And stopped for respite to think about the purpose of all of this because I had decided on this just to learn how to work hard
I realized I don’t want to work any further and I thought I was right to seek God and reach the peak of my might
And I continued toward

I had to work quite hard to finish the journey to the cloud because I had taken too long a rest
So by the time I had reached I was sweating blood
And I was about to climb onto my beloved spacious cloud knowing I had climbed the highest
But when I was about get down the ladder fell through the cloud and I grabbed tight onto the wood already missing my cloud as I probably would

As it sped downward I realized it was going into the top of Mount Everest
And I prayed for a miracle because I wanted to meet my Lord not land on the top of some dumb mountain
But much to my chagrin I landed in the snow near an Indian flag planted by a mountaineer who had also done his best or maybe more and I realized this was just a test
In glee and forgetting my past and then reminiscing it to cherish this moment and realization I clenched a fistful of snow and raised it to the sky and I had learned that you don’t reach God by a simple stunt he has to welcome you after you’ve proved yourself through a real endurance test like drowning yourself in the golden fountain

You don’t set the goal he sets it
He uses your ideals as benchmarks
But he may not stand beside it unless you’ve known enough adversity to still manage living the rest of your life in a pile of ****
But if you still believe in living in a dream instead of dying in one you’re gonna stay stuck on Mount Everest because you’ll still have to move because of the lack of oxygen and you’re going to die and get reborn as a dog that barks

Now I had decided to block the sun how the hell do I get down this dumb mountain now

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                            Children on an October Evening

We lay in the grass and counted the stars:

There must be a hundred of them
A million
A billion
A gazillion!

Nuh-uh, there’s no such number as a gazillion
Yeah-huh, I betcha there is – but I can’t count that high
You don’t have to
Maybe the stars can count themselves

Are there spacemen out there beyond the moon?
Are maybe over there beyond the trees
It’s okay; I’ve got my Roy Rogers cap pistol
Dale Evans can shoot as good as Roy!

Can not
Can too
Can’t
Can

My daddy says we’re getting a tv
We can watch the stars on tv
I betcha this is better
You’re just mad ‘cause you don’t have a tv

Do you see the man in the moon?
I think it’s a girl
A girl in the moon! Don’t be silly!
Well, what do you see, then?

The moon is so big and round
But sometimes it isn’t
But it is right now. It likes us
And there’s Peter Pan’s second star to the right

I don’t want to grow up
We have to
Why?
I don’t know. It’s a rule

Will there be pirates and Peter Pan?
And pancakes on Saturday morning?
I don’t think so
That’s not fair