Black, Swiss cheese hulk on horizon
The James Longstreet
immobile old freighter of the bay

Towed to the ignominy
of its last commission
in the curled arm of The Cape
Tides flex their muscles against it
But The Longstreet is steadfast
in its dark purpose

Standing target for practice

A sortie if planes home in on its bulk
Honing their skills
on this  “fish-in-a-barrel”
Thunderhead-etched pyrotechnics
Booming follows the miles over water

Against The Longstreet’s silhouette enduring
even God fixes sights
firing bolts across its bow
taking aim at our futures

Standing targets for practice

Vietnam? Cape Cod?
No difference to teens
before life’s ocean of conscription

Sand is cold beneath dunes
Beach grass rustles
to the pulsing surf
to the wind’s whispers
just below hearing
as if there’s a secret
that must be kept

We are targets for practice
We are meaningless din

Pulling our sweatshirts and blanket closer
The Supremes sing thinly
from transistor
“Stopped for a moment in the name of love—

Thinking it over”

I'm curious about you
want to touch
the places
you've been
and the places
your body's touched

but my mind screams
like a thunder spirit
all you do is
use her
rock her back and forth
all you do is
use ******
rock back and forth

South side
acting west side
and no direction
in my eyes
no future and I'm feeling
more and more
like a waste of time
nothing new

You have always found a way
to inflate yourself,
a thunderhead of you
a rainer upon parades
keeping your own side dry.

Praise your portolio,
record yourself accomplishing that,
but wait, there’s more of you
the lost boy
dressed as a hero.

The prison of ego comes first,
then the crippling psychic wounds
and the inevitable chaos
that just ****** you off
because there is just too much to manage
and you cannot do it alone
but you don’t dare tell anyone
so you fake it
and you don’t make it
and one day
while you are too busy
refusing to be grateful
for the awesome mystery of your own chi
a tagger defaces your BMW
in the parking lot of Whole Foods
and you weep into your tofu.

Empty angels dance
upon the thunderhead,
skip amongst the ******,
laugh amongst the dead,
twirl along the river Styx
to abandon those they've led.

Glowers
Prowls
Footsteps claiming
Owning streets
Avoid the eyes
Gimlet glinting
Don't mess around
Deadly ground

Wordless
Anger incarnate
No reason
No reasoning
A natural fact
Magnificent horror
Threateningly ugly

Closing in
Too close
Dead eyes
Predatory grin
Steel glints lightning
Turn and run!
Run, run fast away
Never come here again

                                    By Phil Roberts

The desert gradually turned to a grassy thicket
tamarack branches turn towards the fleeting dusk
above, ancient starlights fade in cimmerian skies
their ghostly glow choked by the sullen silhouettes
of churning charcoal clouds against the abyss.
The world feels as though she is being devoured
by nothing and emptiness.

Again the tortured-self awakes inside of Apricus
wrestling with its bindings merely out of gall.
It elicits ache in the belly of its captor,
the kind that only heartbreak makes inside us all
and once the tantrum cease,
it laugh a little before it speak

The darkness comes, not for you and I alone
but in the end all life is its sacrifice,
why struggle any longer to change the minds of sheep?
Has the battle not hardened our flesh, sharpened our teeth,
has it not made us hungry for what lesser men eat?

A thunderhead above him began to coil
tightening its hold around the moon,
each rotation siphoned the lunar light
till the well traveled soil of the trail
turn to a thin brush, then into a heavy wood.

Ask not if you shall stray from your path
rather ask if you will have the constitution
to find your way back in the black
of a stormy night.

Grandma calls from the back porch
Feeding moldy bread to the ducks on the pond
Fish came from the depths
And picked apart the biggest pieces

Brand new boots
Torn lace
Flapping on my foot
Tying the pieces around my ankle
Just the black toes of my boots
Toeing the edge of the toolshed roof
Your eyes grin up at me


Toss the hair behind your ear
Fingers
Touching strands
Beneath a rolling black thunderhead

jump

They drag the pond looking for your body
As if they wouldn't have seen you floating.from the shore
Cannons blast
And my eyes tear
And drop on the carpet
I don't know anything


Naked feet on the coffee table
Heaven needs no hand rails
Heaven is where you went
when your long neck broke
Against the wall of the dam

Heaven is where you kiss God's feet
For all of eternity
Kiss his feet
As he shakes the earth, sending buildings
Crashing down on lovers
Kiss his feet
He holds the gravity that drops bombs on children
kiss his feet
As he watches us **** one another
Over our ideas of him
I will be down here
Licking the deep cuts
I deserve
I will be down here
Haunted daily by what you might have been

Aaargh yes.....
With mighty clap
The Thunderhead with venom breaks.....
And jagged lightning streaks across the sky,
Blindingly, the white flash downward snakes
To impale the earth where frogs, unlucky, die.
Ha!

(If Mother Earth could speak...)

I’m the first light of dawn setting fire to the skies,
the awe that ends with a soft, sated sigh.
I’m the slow, gentle sway of ancient, lofty trees,
branches of life filled with wonders to be.

I am sands and seas; a warm summer breeze
blowing soft, whispered tunes over ever-changing dunes.
I am stars in the heavens sailing high overhead,
the sun and the moon on their tireless threads.

I’m the love of life; the pulse your heart,
the strength of will in a lovers fine art.
I’m the beaming smile on the fearless face
of a victorious child at the end of a race.


“And what are they doing now...

Waves of hate
washing wasted fields,
decimating all
as they reap tainted yields.”


You’re the time and motion in an open frown,
a smirk beneath the paint of a terrified clown.
You’re the only solution to a worlds desperate cries,
swollen cheeks scarred by too many lies.

You’re a baby’s cry in a cold, stagnant pond;
all it could have been, had it lived much beyond
the cull of the clan or the whaler’s call,
so many lonely roads, at the back of every mall.

You are every grain of sand escaping clutching hands
of every grieving parent in war-torn lands,
carried aloft upon the jet-streams breath,
washed up on beaches that have seen too much death.


“And what are they doing now...

Can’t they see beyond
their selfish greed;
their lascivious needs?

Can’t they be stopped
before the frenzy grows
too fearsome to feed?”


I am the here and now since the dawning of time,
crying confusion at a wasted design.
The questioning gaze on so many tired faces,
a distant rumble felt beneath shallow graces.

I’m the giver of life, each equal to another,
taker of too many wasted sisters and brothers.
Another broken heart from a loss felt too soon,
a cold wretched cry from across a crowded room.

I am the heavens roar on a wild, stormy night,
torrential vengeance of a thunderhead’s might.
A raging wrath you don’t ever wish to wake,
I am nature’s grace that you choose to forsake.


“And what are they doing now...

Sending to the fields
of fruitless death,
their sacrificial sons
breathing borrowed breaths

Unleashing desolation
from way up high;
A tempest of hate-filled
and remorseless fires.”

I’m the molten rock spewing from natures wounds,
the ear-piercing shriek of her decimating winds.

I’m the Tsunami washing away the filth of your deeds,
the quaking earth to halt your murderous greed.

I’m the tornados teeth, tearing lives apart,
the landslide burying your empty hearts.

I’m the freezing avalanche covering all in its path,
the raging storm unleashing thunderous wrath.

I am the flood; the torrent; destroyer of all,
the deluge of death at the reapers call.


“And what are they doing now...

Beseeching the heavens
with open hands
in the wasted remnants
of once rich lands?”
                      


Written by Darren Scanlon, 31st December 2014
Revised 20th July 2015.
©2015 Darren Scanlon. All rights reserved.

She survived the thunderhead of domestic disturbance,
She never planned on becoming the black sheep's shepherd,
Of her own meaningless drawings and poetry creations,
The demon split dimensions and how feeds on her patience,
That was before the red slits on her pearly white wrists,
The teddy bear thrashing and her hormonal cyst,
But that gave inspiration to climb out the abyss,
And continue writing what she liked and would love to coexist with,
Psychedelic language,
Her graphite's anguish,
Persisted to punish the the notepad with poetry painted,
But yesterday was cloudy,
And the short hours it felt,
That's when I realized I was writing about myself,

Dance!
She told him.
So he drug his feet across the newspaper
turning headlines into layers of ice,
gliding just over the surface of a world
to him forgotten.
Boom!
The bass dropped and his heart nearly popped out of his chest.
His ribs too visible beneath his South Pole
bowed, creaked and shuttered
but muttered something about,
something about feeling alive.
Clap!
A series of muscle convulsions.
Shutter glimpses of the unseen acts of lightning
looking for a cloud to call home.
This one bolts into the highest thunderhead
and waits to be told to go. Go.
Sshhhh!
The sound of rain blinks from his eyes.
He squeezes the fruits of life
and serves the sour mixture to those who look on
with amazement and terror,
soaked in his story of craze and misfortune.
Clap!
This corner raises walls to his perception.
This is the metaphysical explanation,
God can be found in his dance.
This is where his last meal came from
and he won't leave the next one to chance.
Boom!
B-boy breaks down the laws Newton discovered.
Spinning until the world learns to turn
so that the seasons bring rain
on the just and on the unjust,
not just those who can afford to ignore each other.
Clap!
The applause brings tears to his mother's swollen eyes.
Swollen with pride and shame
of the things she's been pushed to, and pulled from.
She's reaching above the waves,
he's dancing his way from hell.
Sshhhh!
The ghosts now dispersed at the first sound of silence.
Their consciences are begging
more than the boy's pride will let him.
But their shoulders were born cold,
and the boy skates for nickels.
Clap!
As if God Himself were impressed
by the display of acrobatics set in rhythm,
the storm system raged and umbrellas dotted the streets.
Camouflage for his tears, he thought,
he always has what he needs in its season.
Boom!
The soul-box pumps out the old clocks.
Time has folded itself, molded itself, so it's no shock.
Rhythm and blue depression mixed up with B Boy steppin',
It's harder to find a meal on cold pavement than you'd think.
Dance!
She told him.
And he sinks.

&@&!?*
B l o w i n g  W  ind and planets from your mouth
Your head fills up like a thunderhead
With candy cane lightning

           Burnt down birthday candle
            Stick o dynamite
                      Feelin alright
                  Fire makes the light
                            In the middle of my fingers
                      Fireworks linger
Until angels come and wave them away
Off into space
The hope of the human race
Floating on radio signals
Short crested waves

Crests that peak in white foam
Plucked by strings
Finger bones
The fool withone hand
Juggles like a pro
Joining the circus when he was twelve
And one fateful day
On the fifteenth of may
A lion had his fingers for dinner
Would you sup with me?
The prince disguised as the pauper
You would I bet
Share my last cigarette
As we balance on a chain linked fence
Trapped in a cage
With only one book
You wouldn't believe
Which one I took

Rapid City wears its patriotism like a shroud.
Corner streets are populated with less than
life-size statues of past presidents
squinting at the distant Black Hills
where the grandeur of Mt. Rushmore
casually crumbles their bronze dreams.

Wax settlers, loggers and gold miners
stake claims with souvenir hunters
touring a mine, panning for fool’s gold.

In nearby Custer, 75 breaths  from Wounded Knee,
shops hawk Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull, Geronimo t-shirts
proclaiming them “ The Original Founding Fathers.”
Mixed in are those in star-spangled letters and fireworks
proudly streaming “Welcome to America. Now Speak English.”

Rushmore was dynamited from a cliff
by a creator who spent the rest of his life
erecting grand Confederate gestures
out of ****** Georgia quartz monzonite—
finished and opened 100 years to the day
after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.  

Thirty minutes from Rushmore, existing in its shadow
on private land filled with dusty trails,
unfinished after seventy years,
probably still unfinished after twenty  more,
facing away from these great stone faces,
emerging from the side of great Thunderhead Mountain,

on an ivory stead with a mane of flowing river and wind,
exists the Oglala Lakota warrior Tasunke Witko
the worm of Crazy Horse the Old and Rattling Blanket Woman,
sibling of Little Hawk and Laughing One, memory of the spirit of
Black Buffalo and White Cow who walked with an Iron Cane,
all enclosed with him in this massive breath of white stone.

The history of this great Indian space stretches the land,
four times higher than the Statue of Liberty,
extending beyond the warrior frown, the pointing left arm.
The horse’s ear alone is the size of a rusty  reservation bus.
When finished it will be the largest sculpture in history,
bigger than the land, breath and all of Indian memory.

It was the Vision Quest of Chief Henry Standing Bear to show the whites that the red man had great heroes, too.
In a man named Korczak he found a kindred spirit,
a storyteller in stone, a survivor of Omaha Beach,
who when the first wife faltered, found a second
who gave him enough children to carry, sculpt the Bear Dream.  

The big chief’s face is still the only finished part.
Korczak’s wife and children toil with the rest,
struggling to capture the essence of a warrior
who never allowed his shadow to be snared
in the false glow of the white man’s light,
trusting only the rain beams that fall

onto his people, mountains, plains and buffaloes,
onto Paha Sapa, “the heart of everything that is,”
where the Lakota huddled while the world was created,
now a land of broken treaties and dying dreams,
drenched in the dust of tears underneath,
while this white face torn from red gazes East.

Thursday.  My Indian GP sees me.  Gives advice about my moods.  Nods.  Is sympathetic.  Writes my prescription. Warns me to be alert and careful, if I am weaning myself off the medicine.

Friday. I crack a lame joke with the black girl in the chemist.  Half-asleep, I apologise for mumbling;  mutter something about it being Friday.  Realise it’s the first time I’ve spoken today.  I pay, pick up the tablets, walk off.

It’s a beautiful morning;  cold, azure, crisp; real.  The kind of morning when you remember why it’s worth being alive.  The kind of morning when the traffic shuts up, and you hear the thrushes.  The kind of morning when you realise you can do anything.  Cumulus start to bubble up over London.  You feel like you can fly through the clouds.

A thunderhead eclipses the sun.  Six foot tall, fifteen stone;  broad and handsome.  Close cropped hair.  Black boots, black shades.  Tight, sleek, black jeans.  George Cross embroidered over his heart.  ******* stitched to the arm of his black NF jacket.  Walking with the confidence of a man who knows he is Chosen.  

I stumble.  

*the thrushes fall silently out of the sky

We saw the crosses
And the dozen of roses
Each for the 12 graves
Every tombstone reading
'Jesus Saves'
Then an open bible
With a funeral verse
That sounded like a fable
A flocking mass
All in black with poignant faces
A bald-headed reverend
Howling ashes to ashes
Clouds change to thunderhead
And the airstream consoles
The bodies that have lost their souls.

The seasons come and go
opportunities pass me by
no telling what’s next
each lesson becomes a piece of the puzzle
making for a new beginning
colors of the rainbow paint themselves across the sky
each different path way
leading to another dimension

Heads turn
the crowd erupts
staring me down
don’t know which way to go
the beckoning hand entices me forward
to reach the beyond
the unknown
the mysterious

Growing up
the world changing around me
my sweaty palms
slide helplessly down the slick rail
I grasp yet find nothing to hold on to
turn my head
staring down the dusty road
at what was there a moment ago but now is gone
vanishing without a trace
unseen steel weights
cling to my ankles
holding me down
the swinging lantern
flickers eerily on and off
propaganda caresses me into the matrix
little black and white children
with blue shirts and red eyes
run across the playground
laughing and playing
oblivious to the menacing
thunderhead looming above

Sleep I cannot find
Tangled among the trains
Crossing federal highway 1
Markings on a digital clock
Change & change again
These are the terms of life
Pulling me down lonely sidewalks
The village by the sea escapes me as
I watch barefoot the cargo ships
Quitting the coast
A sky of spilled wine stained before
clouds of purple and orange construction paper filling me to a cell with sadness so complete that I would die to not feel it again

Now I am in the grip of the sea
The smell of it
In my skin and in my hair
Corona reflecting upon the waves
Until a thunderhead rears as the mustang nostrils flared and the foaming spray from its mouth touches me

Then the cold-
Then the rain upon my head
On my arms in my skin
Washing the poison from my body

the calm that escapes me
waits for a space in the cloud
unabating
patient now
breaking down
building
creating
destroying and remaking
my mind up

cracks in
the surface
spiderweb crisscross
across the frozen eyelid
of the lake

cracks in
the surface
split dendritically
across the ragged planes
of my arctic fingers

capped with
weather-worn callouses

swimming through
my thick hair frosted
with sun drop water crystals
and dry winter dandruff

snowflake scalp fluff
finger fly skin flurries
and I'm a coldfront

I'm a thunderhead
icicle snowdrift
I'm a rolling cloud
ice gale moonmist

trekkin through the
frosted forest with

fairy dusted
smiles and
snow filled
mittens

I'm a
fickleberry
tick tack
pick pack
**** it like a
smoke stack and
poke it with a
thumbtack
through the front
and out the back
and swan dive
into the cork board

leave it for another day
move on forward but
don't forget to stop
and pray

tongue tied
in a knot today
like a cherry stem
tongue tried
quite a lot, I say

to carry them
ever-powerful silly
magic mouth sounds

I went for a walk today.

It's like trying
to see lightning.
I sat long enough
this Tuesday twilight,
brave enough watching
the twilight sky,
brave enough to forgoe
a glance to the right
to make sure a racoon
hadn't stumbled upon me,
and it and I, startled,
would scrap, resulting
with my hand bitten -
embarrassing cowardice.

Brave enough I watched
and the lightning climbed
a height! It etched itself
round the top of the thunderhead
that towered above and above
other domes that I assumed were the height,
but higher even, the lightning climbed,
and I wondered if it knew I watched,
cause it took its time- not a blink,
but a scrawl up the round height of the dome
at a height that I dared not know existed.

Could not be more unremarkable, me,
on the stoop, on a Tuesday twilight,
but the height, and the height,
and the lightning will be there, good-
good as my mother's skin under
her thin, summer top, good as the
first girl fervent enough to undress
with me, good as my wife inviting
me to come through all the boredom
and distress, good as the end,
when I'll know the lightning
sees me, cause I'll see the lightning.

A rattling machine gun aborts it's brainchild
Throughout my vacancy cerebral cortex mausoleum;
I'm just a jar of butterflies sitting on a log cabin stove
Burning
Churning a purging urchin out of turbulent ordeals;

Good thoughts hang along with trench coats
So it seems I'm jaded;
Catered to crushed normalcy
I despise my dormancy till my retinas are faded;

Seep into the cerulean belt
that watched over every soul dead;
Morph into a cloud
then graduate to a thunderhead;

Pouring my tears to a headache cacophony
Everyone is alerted;
So when I'm a surfacing tropical depression
I'm a ominous weapon
Here to annihilate the surfers;

Everyone is a brick in the wall
Covering the light of enlightenment;
I heard someone fell from that wall
And I'm that ******* that piloted it;

Drunken kamikaze;
With homage enough to honor honesty;
So I'm just here armor free;
Numbing the trauma center to give air to all

When I go to the beach I remember the first poem I ever wrote for you. It was the first real poem I ever wrote infused with something I'd never known before wave upon wave crashing in with love's desire like a never ending fire.

When I go to the beach I remember the first time I came inside you, the storm howling its voice harder than the headboard against the wall so no one could hear your muffled screams. Quietness ensued, our breathing as deep and easy as our hearts and then you said, "that was my first time...ever." "To come?" "Yes." "Ever?" "Yes."

When I go to the beach I remember the picture you gave me when you walked away, the one that sits on my desk now, the one with with the sea oats and the rising thunderhead and the horizon the same blue as your eyes, the one with the shells you picked up and attached to the simple frame.

Today, I went to the beach.

He passes through the room like a bubble in champagne, unattached, teflon coated, and somehow freer than the rest of us. “Jordie’s here,” Leong says in an excited whisper.

“Yeah,” I sigh, adjusting my mask, “saw him.” She smiles like a cat behind hers. Leong knows I’m crushing on Jordie and she finds it delicious information which she waves at me like a flag whenever he’s around.

We’re processing in, distancing and passing table to table. Leong can be with me because, as roommates, we’ll be quarantining together. Lisa joins us, she’s back from the restroom. “Jordie’s here,” she says, bouncing up on her toes to better scan the room.

I don’t look at him but he fills my horizon like a thunderhead. He’s all I can see, even when I’m not looking at him. We reach the end of a row of tables and bam, there he is, six feet away. He says hi, I say hi - I’m very professional as we exchange looping, harmless euphemisms for settling in for spring semester - then he’s called to the next station.

“If only we weren’t so busy,” I say, holding this fiction in front of me like a shield. “Yeah,” Leong and Lisa say, practically together, and smiling like thieves.

I have spok'n of you to passing clouds
And to the endless sky
Each wisp of far off thunderhead
Has heard my lovesick sigh

I've waxed poetic to the wind
And confided in the stars
The rain has matched my many tears
And washed free my heart's old scars

Each blossom in each spring kiss'd field
Reminds me of your face
And the gentle caress of the summer grass
Falls short of your embrace

I have passed my secrets to the earth
To stone and bud and tree
To the world and all it's beauty
My love, I have spoken of thee

some days you wake up and the noise in your head
is so loud and so violent it cannot be ignored
a cacophony of voices and memories and thoughts all fighting to be heard as soon as you set foot out of bed
and no matter what you do, there's no way that the noise can be restrained, not even if you tried tying it down to a spineboard
so you push the noise to the back of your mind because it's tuesday and you have to go to work
but still you find yourself half-dressed and lost in your own mind
until you pull yourself out of your reverie with a ****
because holy hell, it's already seven fifteen and you're about to be late

again


so you make it to work and the torture ensues
of small talk and forcing a smile
all the while reaching out to that one person who understands, telling them that your brain is like a subdermal bruise today
where you can't see it but you can feel it
you are constantly aware of it
and you don't know what to do
and that's when you remember the only coping tool that's left to you
to simply
drown
the noise
out

so you slip in your headphones and you put on that song
- you know the one,
that always silences every voice and sound in your head,
replacing them with lyrics so familiar they're warm like rays of the sun -
and slowly, slowly dissipates that thunderhead
the brewing storm of chaos in your mind
and in its wake it leaves behind
nothing, except maybe peace and a melody line

Today sunny
thunderhead
loomed on the horizon

but the storm never happened

wind warm
touch of chill
blew gently

but the storm never happened

all day I waited
behind the eyes
a slot machine
spinning wheels
one round in the chamber

but the storm never happened

whit howland © 2019

These place, these places that cut us with their ice and the sun
their wind and the rain
their silence and their sound
will fall one day like a thunderhead that has left its heart somewhere else
The diamonds we once mined for on the days when yesterdays were dying and todays were not yet born, you know what it is like to have lived a thousand lives and be embarrassed by nine hundred of them and fear they might resurface for how can one be and then not, how can one sleep and not wake, for death while living is so hard to understand.
These places, these places, how I have loved them for their pain, for if it hurts then I must have cared, and if I cared I must have loved.

Who can help but wonder
If it's better on the other side?
The ones under the thunder
And caught under the sweeping tides.
They take them waaay far out
Where the ocean washes brains
Away
I can stop
Yes I can stop
I will stop the rain

Clearer waters run
For smiling sunny days
They say they never stop
If only you would stay
I wander looking for them
In thunderhead disdain
I'll stop it short to find them
I will stop the rain

To find that sweet eternity
I'd wander just as far
As beauty stretches her long body
Holding up her stars
At least one tortured soul must go
That long road just to find
That love was only ever wrought

To be left behind.

Just like the holy spirit takes
A residence in each
Another kind of ghost resides
That no man can impeach
The waters run over my head
But baptism won't take
One sweet cure
And we all stopped--
I will stop the rain.

My fingers in yours,
walking so stately.
Cut cloud pours?
My fingers in yours.
Thunderhead roars?
I smile sedately,
my fingers in yours,
walking so stately.

I am not going to focus, in retrospect, at the awe of the fragility of a memory
This one in particular made me feel weighty and extremely present
And locked in with the air like a cast in plaster
The air moved around me like the tide on top of wet, gray clay
Cars passed like matches striking sandpaper
The songbirds were hushed and distant
The telephone lines sagged with the weight of the world
I was absolutely sure that the earth was not spinning
So I stopped and counted
Surely I could feel my heart beating
I could hear the water dripping
I gazed at the edge of the thunderhead passing by like a galaxy, a swarm of bullets
And an owl cooed, only an ingredient to the silent sauce
Like thyme is added to cooking wine on the stove
I hear church bells
The sky purrs and lifts, there are some flashes behind the hills to the right
But here by the hoarse gravel everything has a separate momentum than where that storm is now.
The momentum of waking