BlazeVOX

An.online.journal.of.voice

A compendium

BlazeVOX Vol. 4 : 2k6

BlazeVOX [books]
Buffalo, New York
BlazeVOX An.online.journal.of.voice A compendium

Copyright © 2007

Published by BlazeVOX [books]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without

the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Geoffrey Gatza

First Edition

Volume Title ISBN ISBN 13

BlazeVOX Vol. 1 : 2k1; 2k2 & 2k3 1-934289-47-7 978-1-934289-47-1
BlazeVOX Vol. 2 : 2k4 1-934289-48-5 978-1-934289-48-8
BlazeVOX Vol. 3 : 2k5 1-934289-49-3 978-1-934289-49-5
BlazeVOX Vol. 4 : 2k6 1-934289-50-7 978-1-934289-50-1

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 BlazeVOX
An.online.journal.of.voice

A compendium

BlazeVOX Vol. 4 : 2k6

SPRING
FALL
UÄtéxibk E~I

BlazeVOX [ books ]
 Apex of Tome

Carol Novak 10
Sabyasachi Nag 11
Ed Higgins 16
Gerald Schwartz 22
Lance Anderson 30
JF Quackenbush 34
Jillian Jayde Hastings 38
Tyler Funk 41
Noah Falck 45
Marie Hopkins 48
Michael Fix 51
Joseph Cooper 65
Matina Stamatakis 70
Duane Locke 76
Dereck Clemons 90
Christine Surka 98
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino 102
Carl R. Brush 107
Leonard Gontarek 110
Radu Dima 115
William James Austin 121
Peter Magliocco 126
Raymond Farr 130
Edna Wallaroni 134
Florine Melnyk 135
James Sanders 153
Shishir Gupta 205
Andrew Nightingale 208
Gautam Verma 213
BlazeVOX 2K6
Fall 2006

Poetry Persists
< god Damn
In Memorandum
God Damn, Poetry Persists !

Our Fall issue is a bit late this year

due to an historic snow storm to hit
Buffalo, NY. With all of the normal
confusions and discomfort that
comes from power outages and cold
weathers, Poetry, well I should say
poets chose to practice their art, not
deterred in their business and
conducted the Robert Creeley
Symposium, On Words, regardless! I
was hidden in blankets hoping for the
best after my home computer was
knocked out and was useless. I was
placing the finishing touches on this
issue and PooF, all goes black. All the
files were safly saved and nothing but
time lost. But it was a hard feeling to
adjust to! The frustrations that
followed were nothing compared to
the real angst that I felt in not being
able to work. I wrote by pen in the
dark. Kent Johnson still came to read
at Medaille College. God Damn, it
inspires me to no end the lengths we
will go to not yield for our silly art!

Enjoy, Geoffrey Gatza

Photo by Bill Wippert/Buffalo News The nightmare was only starting on Oct.
12, as motorists guided their cars under and around leaf-covererd tree limbs Editor
that collapsed under nearly two feet of heavy, wet snow.

On Thursday, 8.6 inches of snow fell -- the snowiest October day in Buffalo in the 137-
year history of the weather service. The record lasted for all of one day, as a foot of
snow fell early Friday. The old record was 6 inches, set on October 31, 1917. The snow
began melting as bright sunshine emerged and temperatures warmed into the 40s. But the
wind continued to howl, raising fears more trees would topple. Schoolchildren who began
the week with a summerlike Columbus Day holiday ended it with a snow day. "Our street
looked like it was hit by a hurricane. It looks like the apocalypse. It's unreal," said
Matthew Colken. "One hundred-year-old trees are down."
BlazeVOX 2K6 an.online.journal.of.voice
Carol Novak

Playpoem

performed by
Carol Novack & Elizabeth Smith

Mountain, Table, Anchors, Navel

Creator: Jean Arp (Hans Arp) (French, born Alsace. 1886-1966.

Lived in Switzerland 1959-66.)
Museum: Museum of Modern Art
Medium/Support: oil with cutouts / cardboard
Date: 1925
Dimensions: 75 cm h, 60 cm w, d
Vendor: Davis Art Images
Sabyasachi Nag

Confession at a Calcutta Bakery

The baker ran a blazing knife

through a perfectly symmetrical head-
bald, copper, rounded,
out of the skull, down the ribs
in one slick act,
never expecting blood.

I asked if he sold donuts or bagels.

He never heard of them. A bun, I explained,
caramelled, creamed, mapled: the donut;
garlicked, sesameed, raisined: the bagel -
really a matter of taste, with one common hole
right through the centre, as if

someone had knocked the very soul

with a practised tap giving them the lightness
to careen down the long road over blood,
spittle, even a brittle, reflected sky.
He shut his ears in disbelief —
I took off my undershirt and showed.
The Spill

It's morning. He rings the bell. You hurry with the steel
cleansed; it will hold the day's milk. He smiles
in greeting. You bury the bra-straps in your blouse
and look him down the sleep-kohled eyes into his black
heart where moon-beams slime on a stainless mirror.
Far on the horizon a white sail-boat with heart-shaped oars
occasionally rise and splatter so you know the darkness
is not frozen, just still water. As you look deeper and longer,
the oars multiply into pouts drinking off your nipples;
hands cupped in fantasy, squeezings you can't stand anymore.
You take a step back. Spilled milk follows an umbilical line
like time, Oh! only if the turns could be fore-told.
You raise your voice; close the door on him, loud.
Your sobs can't reach him anymore.
Break-in

The mattress is slit into perfect halves.

Flash bulbs are splitting from panties
pinned to the window grill, the dresser
prostrated, washings smutty with ash
from the upturned urn, China sharp-
edged on the floor.

Father sits at the kitchen table

arranging breadcrumbs like tanks,
face reclined on the unused hand,
asthma getting worse.

Outside, it’s a peaty afternoon. Over

the traffic, over the factory’s drone,
over cornices scraggy with pigeon shit,
rain is rifling down.
The Ants

We sat still on the wet grass

watching the ants crawl up
to their queen in obsequious reverence, invisible
under rose petals they carried as offering.

What free people could tolerate that?

On our knees, we dug the hard autumn ground -
forked the intestines out of this evil regime
that demanded so much just to procreate. Still

alive with houses, pyramids, petals - the damage

we thought deadly wasn’t beyond repair.
The fools went about their toil
as if we had never come.
The Sharks

Our home for two hundred years will become

a quartz cemetery for croc valises,
buck-leather jackets and snake mittens.

The transformation is sudden but predestined.

Anyone with good eyes can see the paint
curling asymmetrically like shark tails.

Some sharks move in concentric circles

wrapping coils of current round their prey;
eyes on two ends of a long hammer head;
they have no linear vision, no sense of time,
they won’t leave traces after a kill.

Even the banyan on our courtyard will be gone:

roots that seal the holes, bolster walls,
plaited on steel girders like a sister's hair,
planted deep like the secondary soul.

Those roots could have reached,

touched and held the house
in one apocalyptic embrace.
But alas, a difference! Land sharks,
with numbers and laws, are far more clinical.

Sabyasachi Nag has recent work published or forthcoming in Desert Moon Review,
Lily, Loch Raven Quarterly, Perihelion, Saucy Vox, Verse Libre Quarterly and Void
among others. Born in Calcutta , India , he lives in Toronto,Canada with his wife
and son. He works in human resources for a living.
Ed Higgins
Walking The Back Field

Ascending night over the farm’s fields,

an orange-green sunlight disappearing
to the west off the timothy pasture where
I am walking the perimeter, checking fence
as I always say to my wife, wanting to seem practical.
But really for love of the cool August breeze coming in
from neighboring hills as the late summer sun sets low
just above the distant coastal range. The horizon is scorched in such flame
distant mountain fir trees must be turning their backs
to the brightness descending behind them. I am watching
my young whippet crisscrossing the field ahead of me,
trolling for field mice in the waning light. Though she seldom catches one.
Soon she will be harrying our grazing Jersey steers through the near-dusk.
In wide, fast circles she will run the four of them until confused
and worried by barking and heel-nipping energy--while I worry
one day they will connect in their panicked kicking--they head back
for the barn leaving the field to her canine authority and smug satisfaction.
Now evening moths flickering over the grass distract her,
and as if our oxygen intake were a magnet drawing them,
mosquitoes like iron filings, their blood music harrying our ears,
makes us hurry past the feral pear tree along the far fence line.
So returning from our inspection around the farm’s edge,
that’s really only been to touch again falling darkness, evening’s soft magic,
to feel later summer grass clipped by cows under our feet,
and smell clean, cooling air as we listen to crickets and the owl
waiting in the pear tree for us to leave her hunting ground.
When we have returned from all these favors
the dog and I pass through the barnyard again
putting out the lights in the chicken house and calf pens.
spent speech

perched at the edge of

misperception our
daw dark heads cocked
as if I understand you
thief of my words
silent as battlefield eyes
crows steal from corpses

I will eat anything though,

verbs, nouns, modifiers,
small articles
dropped like errant french fries
in fast food parking lots
where starlings waddle
like overfed customers

whole sentences too

even when harmful
infested with sarcasm
bitter taunt
the surface porous
of your identity
or other caustic rhetoric

what might be mispronounced

misspelled
at this far distance
from your steel blue eyes

but I am eager to find

what words
will rescue me

our voices catching

on the tip of meaning
off corrosive tongues

into the swift

undertow of
feeding our distance
poem fishing

the puzzle always

is each poem
rising
out of the ocean
that is language
or the seabed of imagination

if the two can be separated

beneath their thrust and direction

words: a buoyancy of darting fish
at some distance still

swimming toward uncertain

fishy truth or just
into the slipstream of thought

some of which I have tried

(clumsily, I see) to catch.
well, then

WHAM! life, forchrist’ssake, hits you in the ass

like a bunker busting bomb so to speak
or like hell-on-highheels, as my mother used to say,
who was only 4’-10” and needed the lift
Well, "LIFE! YOU CAN'T DIE WITHOUT IT." she joked ON her
DYING bed, forchrist’ssake.
size really does matter

well, especially when he once came across

a very large brown-to-blackish bear eating wild berries
along
a
very
very
nar
row
trail
indeed.
so

he grumps
she’s uppity
both barbed as the sharp wire
but after lunch
and the smell of one another
for several tense hours
they think
whattahell, we love
each other don’t we?

so they playfully goose

one another
fooling around
on the posturepedic
knowing how and when
to reconcile.

My poems and fiction have appeared in Duck & Herring Co.’s Pocket Field Guide,
Pindeldyboz, Monkeybicycle and Bellowing Ark, as well as the online journals Lily, Cross
Connect, Word Riot, and Red River Review, among others. I live on a small farm in
Yamhill, Oregon with a menagerie of animals including an emu named To & Fro, and I
teach writing and literature at George Fox University, south of Portland, OR.
Gerald Schwartz

Yet Not Yet

The masks of the tongue thin out

And dry as husks. Say yet. Not yet.

I won’t hang around here in vain. What’s

There but bare branches and dusted bark.

No words for putting layers of fur on

Winter yet. Not yet. White glows tight

Without its frosts. The only bird that

Lands here is pure talon. In the mirror,

The feedback of a million bits of winter

Pollen. The veins of the creek encrust

Their own walls. No stones rounded

Or rounding. Meanwhile our hands are

Made of knuckles and something un-

Nameable cleansed. Putting down the

Flaps, I’m getting off. Yet? Not yet.

Farther Than Thought

Out in the blue beyond the corporate

Nexus where all comes true there are

Three (at least) things on earth to point

To: the moon, the sun, and reality. I can

Put my thumb on one of these. Dancing

Baby walked into a chop-shop with

A needle taped to a Duracell and dared

Emerge with his tattooed. I don’t think

I’ll touch a face like that again. Deep in

My sleep I sweep dirt into water down

The Hudson. Let me tell you what it’s

All about: snow unfolded over Ben

Johnson as The Wagonmaster. It was

All farther than thought. One day we

Will refuse to turn away. As a kid I

Kept a toy horse and a harmonica in-

Side a tar-black toy-box. Some people

Drink poison. I knelt every time I went

To open it.
From That to Which

If not the humming sun, the blood

Against it, running, then what? An

Egg serpentine rising up through a

Pool of warm liquid. The blue rinse

Entering through the windows.

Scrubbing powdered remains of

Dead moths. Something runs like a

Fault-line between us. Although we

Offer each other matches, muddied

Appendices. The pulse of wet skin

On sleepless heat-drenched nights.

Open hands buried between unread

Living sections. The unused planchette

Begs to scrape the ceilings. The screen

Door never really opening. Red brick

Dust covering the surface of everything.

Before pollen. Before there was night.

Lake waters nearby bubbling up with

With a hydrogen thing ready to couple.

No Memory

Do what you will and pure loss now

Is sun-up charged with fields of marigolds

Red as all get out whitened unpained you

See you need us too. Trenton makes the

World takes what is given is not taken no

How no why toil with your power hand

Made worn thorn meek made white line

Fear turn to life pack it up and give it to

Ardor in the ice field it is one to rock

The lake the tree never was anything here

Burning is light cold patience the lost word

A blown kiss now the house is ruined the

Wind is free beating wings long gone driving

Anguish to anguish turning to mineral down

To the little soul we wait for.

Lance Anderson

THE FERRY TO KADIKÖY

Huddled smokers
backs to the mosques
slide homewards into the dark sea night
carrying the tired day in their eyes
and on their teeth.

The captain drags

another ferry past us
and yet another strip of land.

And from that lonely horizon of lights

as far away as this morning’s ride to work
will come tomorrow
our new day
on cranes to haul the sun.

Our seafaring fates are sinking, mates,

on a long chain cast out to sea.
LOCOMOTION

There is no sexiness
in pedalling fast
but at least you don’t
have to share a seat.
Well that’s your opinion.

On this train to Warschauerstrasse

we might as well be going to coldest Poland
instead of to Susanna’s for some pie. I
gaze out examining the half-
mirrored interior scene beside us –
a carriaged twoness with me in it
racing over phraseless signage; You
intent on reading China
warming your Fahrschein
where your heart is, Me
writing far-away lines
intent on winning a bike
when all I can think of is trains. Trains!
My heart lies in trains.
It makes me happy like
even mad people
have a sense of dress
since bowler hats
are hard to come by.
Transport, public - much seat sharing!
I’m all for it.
The way we all treat our destinations
and chat like no one’s near us
(or still sit and read like no one’s near us).
Susanna bores you I’m sure
you’re only coming for the cherries.
So, dear husband of so many years of mine,
where would you
rather go tonight?
I could have packed my bags for weeks,
but I'm still looking for a station.
And every platform
just seems too mundane,
too pedestrian.
At this pace we'll roll out to far worse than Poland and
have to stop in each other’s arms
just to get no further,
stranded beyond the safety of a scheduled table
- beyond remembrance until
years later between our tracks
new lovers will sprout
where we started out
in Priesterweg
long ago in
our Enchanted Frost Season.

And one of them

(this time the engineer of the two)
will observe:

The train that ate coal so well,

stopped too long and rust devoured it.
 FINDING NEMO

Disney has consigned me to write to you.

There’s a film of Sydney. You’re not in it, of
course. It’s about fish. But even water has to
touch some definition and it’s time for a new
sensation. I’m sick of sublimated jealousies, of
looking at parents and thinking what ugly
children. The fuel tank of my Sacred Heart has
been punctured before and leaky, but I never
thought I’d end up killing coral with my
poisonous chemicals, when all I wanted to do
was fertilize everything.
It’s a shame things have to die. Why don’t you
contact me? We never knew each other but it
was fun being close. I still know your breath:
loving and damp as a jersey worn out in the
rain. It’s a shame that mere one kiss didn’t shut
my mouth proper so that by the time the meal -
a real spread! – was over, I’d blurted out the
death of us. Like the paralysed practising his
legs, Peter: the memory is still always worth it.
It’s only with the past between us that I wish I
could have told you then.

Lance Anderson, 28, went to college in London and lives in Berlin where
he is one of the co-founders of the literary magazine Bordercrossing
Berlin.
JF Quackenbush

Another Manila Poem

Out the window na where in the fog

of lead and gasoline where
there are places I haven't been

and the clatter and blare of horns like

like horns like branca does horns
like not at all. Down ng the streets

ng Manila heto I met the ghost

ng un meztizo putang in ringlets
and a dress blown scandalous in the times

she lived and fucked the streets of

Manila dry for peso coins collected
in blue like cobalt silk parasols.

Now in the rainy season now grey with petroluem

ashes my quiet american eyes under panama
hats at white blazers at dark dark

sunglasses comes ng it on it on her.

Comes ma sakit na ulo, comes back
paalam na po, si putang where sings

na na po kayó, heto na ako

ay. heto na ako ay in black streets
in blaring yellow decommissioned places.

Heto na la fille in fields ng green grasses

snakes at other things ng other things.
Mo so what will we with skin

what will we with blood left running

what under will we where the whores been
buried what will we as hindi heto na we

what we were and buried will they be

heto na in ashes at taralets you
and I and I ikaw these things they make hindi.

make hindi I will abide at ng sakit heto

na po. So kayo ng ulo ay ako, ako ay asiwa.
Oy, ako ay ikaw ay ako no mauhow in situ.
Household Activity No. 65

And how in some day sometime hence

will that guy measure the volume of the shadow
cast between the drywall where patched

he has patched the hole punched through?

Cast against to castigate and collicky
sometimes yes and castrated where

Cast in shadow by the mold made unfolded

mildewy in the water stained rust colored
gone black maybe again.

Lost shadow cast the face in tesseractism

perspect from here and on the other side
where steps up from the flatland

walk in further directions call her

ana is as kata he forward myself
walk ana past the locked doors left.

so sit he will sit in dim light

dirt floor unfinished where within
and among the lagging and iron pipes

is left the shadow of her hypercube

breasts suspended and no longer moves
kata kata kata before when there were

other pieces left to unfold we

unfold together.
Alexandra and The Priest: Part 1

It was Fall and in open industrial workhouse rooms where they met where cold weather crept in at the
joints where in
her seams that needs mending as stretched they got as her joints bent back.

Fall and without where yellow in the dead tails of dead leaves of dead things dying
where left they were left for burning or to be eaten or to rot.

Came Alexandra to where they met she and the man whose pockets held her
in his sleeves where in his sleeves he would wrap wround her arms to hold her down to her sides.

Watch we would from the bridge and underneath when the priest came and upon Alexandra the other man
came through broken windows, through dust smeared unclear pains of soap glass in the old factory
came upon Alexandra.

The Priest would not follow never watch nor would Ye Olde Electrician nor the Reeve King nor the
Hedgeward King
but at times where Manimal would misbehave and one of the three would have to follow him down
so Alexandra so Alexandra.

Alexandra awash with the wetness of various silver and shiny things of beads and pearls and semi-
precious
as she was to the other man.

Manimal would have to be restrained in restraints and straitjacketed still so to abuse himself for her would
not
and so too was I as I watched down the hill as the Electrician, him his back bent and angled sharply,
spat on the ground beneath him

where walked the Hedgeward King directed round the knoll and down into the gully where kept was
Manimal at such times
as he was incapable of behaving.

The Reeve King never blinking never giving up an ounce or scrap of his territorial demarcations on the
map, the map that he the Hedgeward
King and at times the Priest would argue at not that it mattered to us of course. In the gully it never.

So were there Ronaka and I said Manimal said the girl said I said Alexandra in her slipdress flimsy and
sort of less than substances
where for substances she would follow up the hill the other man, he who impregnated her eyes with
stars and flowers.

Needles of course. That's what we were. Things of needles, made of needles and living in Parkland where
in The Stormdrain District and in Underbridges
we were chaffed with runoff.

From above was Parkland drawn in quarters all symmetrical and pretty all the scars like gullies and trash
piles and people and the benches
covered from above by trees and foliage.

But in Fall like bones they covered over every one and out would come the scars and cold and white
dressed but naked her nipples hard Alexandra
would take communion from the Priest and follow when the other man came for her

and came for her ‘til she was soon naked and shivering in his wetness in the empty iron beds of the
factory floor long like hangars long
with coats hangers on and by the time we'd get there she'd be cleaning up and done crying and
praying most days and there'd be money.
With this we'd hit the vendors at Arcadia. Vendors selling all hotdogs and licorice and spicy things like
kebabs and sometimes
sometimes a fallafel or some vindaloo in a tin we'd buy with money Alexandra made.

And this we'd take, we'd give a little here to the Electrician lit up in his fingers where they arc lit
underneath the drains in The Stormdrain District
the Electrician is sometimes and would leer at the children like us and I the Dodger would

have to Maintain or threaten to maim and with knives would beat back Ye Olde Electrician. The Priest
would spike and spiking sometimes not even
notice what we left on his leaves for him to stay nourished. And of course

of course there came the tithes to the Hedgeward King in Underbridges and The Reeve King at Fountains
Heads. We serve of course at their majesty's
whim Dodger I or no, Alexandra beautiful and tarnished or no.

But Oliver hated the others hated how the other men would come and come on Alexandra. He loved the
sadness in her that was thick like
porridge and made her warm to hold her in the Levantine Quarters outside Arcadia where we
sometimes would.

Even I at times would hold down Alexandra in Underbridges and beg her not to go out again for the
copper of the other men. I would hold forth
My hands full of candies and coins I'd liberated. Liberation theology being the main

concern of my learning in those hours I spent and saved. Property is theft writes the prophet, peace be
upon him, you have the right to food
money, so said the prophet’s son. So rock the Casbah say I and we will live in the Levantine
Quarters outside, or down in Abyssinian Tribeca.

I can get money would Oliver or the Dodger I to say to Alexandra but. No. But. No. Her eyes would sad
and she with skating pond blue cold eyes
iced in sleet would touch my face, or Oliver’s and no she'd say just no.

The Electrician’s arc lights flashing and wires exposed in copper would hold us back sometimes, say not to
follow, Oliver most often but sometimes
me and occasionally Ronaka Billabongzie when he wanted for entertainment.

He'd hold his copper plated palms to our temples and cut loose his showers of sparks and we'd seizure in
our arms and be laid down as laid
was Alexandra for our suppers.
Jillian Jayde Hastings

#1

The death wind blows through the grass

Shaking the lonely loins of man
Tingling matter forms the thoughts
Empty forgotten child smiling
The chair on the porch creaks
A sigh left behind in the dawn
Cracks fill tender places
Laughter crying through the night.
Rustling breaking veins crawl
My mind is lost along the path
Dead and still and broken
Wind shakes the rattled panes
Broken necks like swan calls
Eating through the marrow
Bleeding out the suns last scream
No breathe left to feel.
#2

I shall sit under this tree and remember what love feels like when it starts deep in the belly and spreads to
your fingertips, warming and filling you up, piece by delicate piece.
I will remember how a single innocent touch is more passionate than the most sexual embrace.
I will remember to lose myself in a moment instead of questioning every glance.
I will love and be loved without forgetting the words my own voice speaks.
I will be tangled up in you tangled up in each other.
I will lay naked in the dawn and let the sun caress my skin like your hands long to.

I shall sit under this tree and remember you as you are, as you were, as you always will be.
I will greet you with my heart on tender strings, with palm raised, belly up and allow myself to be wounded.
I will open my secrets and my thighs to you and you can discover me in both.
I will see you, all of you, toes to eyes to heart to thought and I will enjoy you equally.
I will remember that my story will continue with or without being tied to yours.
I will cast surly glances and dagger-tipped tongues when I hate you; but I won't hate you long.
I will kiss your eyelids while you sleep so you can dream of how I love you.
I will give myself to you, an unadorned present wrapped in this flesh.
I will know every part of you and I will please them unselfishly.

I shall sit under this tree and remember to let my cup run over.
I will allow myself to overflow unto the earth and be tossed to the heavens.
I will let my words drip into the empty spaces in my heart and be filled with laughter.
I will let my sorrow finally rest and slumber deep inside.

I will sit under this tree and remember to admit to myself; I am falling in love.
#3

Right about now when the booze

and the lonlieness
m i n g l e
All I start to FEEL is a need
that keeps burning a
H O L E through my brain.
All I need ia a mans hands
between
my
thighs
...searching
(for a way) to make me come.
I am like a tidal wave that is
b r e a k i n g over your
sand....
Blowing piece. by. piece. of you into the night.
All the blood is
d
r
a
i
n
i
n
g from my lips
while I SCREAM out to make it hurt.
I beg to p i n c h e d and s l a p p e d
and thrown off the bed and
fu ck ed
on the floor.
Until everything. turns. black.
Right about now...
I have got my HANDS on you and
I am making the starsexplode in your eyes
and your breathing is CRASHING. DOWN. ON. ME.
I need a man inside of my insides...
scratching
and clawing
and pushing his way
Into what might be my heart.
Tommorrow I will WAKE UP lost?
and blue.
But tonight....
I need to earn these bruises.
Tyler Funk

Marble Orchard

A headstone can prove mighty hard to afford

Last minute shopping in the marble orchard
Drinking neath the eyes of a statue of the lord
I bequeth unto him this broken bottle's shard

Behind our backs the sun began to set

As we sat high above the cemetery gate
Not much for conversation? I asked my uncle chet
His eyes shown only blankness in his newly expired state

The millionaire undertaker drove home to fuck his wife

He left his shed unlocked and he failed to douse its light
So I prepared my uncle chet for eternal afterlife
With a stolen shovel in my hands you know I dug all night

Yes in the twilight hours I tossed that bastard in the hole

He weighed a ton and never moved an inch while on his own
The undertaker saw not one penny, not to mention the shovels I stole
I had my uncle six feet under by the time a new sun shone
Money Scares Me

Money scares me
And it sleeps with those I know
Yet Money carries me
Even though it frightens me so

Like a parent who's not

Afraid to beat me down
Money's the prison
That holds me to the ground

Like a slavemaster
Issuing a double scoop of rations
Money makes its case
Rewarding random subservient actions

Yes Money scares me

And yet without it I am lost
Because where the money's keeping me
Everything has a cost.
Sublimination

We're being outright

Lied to in the news
And most people haven't
Even noticed any clues

But they boldly set out

Pushing unsourced opinions
They tell you about
Remarks with no known origins

They run through a bunch of headlines

And barely touch on fact sorting
It's hard to read between the lines
When reporters do no real reporting

And after they're done releasing hot air

We people at home never know nothin' new
Yet the report has a way of making us care
Though we've got no reason to
We seem to think that we do

With no new information in my mind's dusty lair

I wonder how I got those new feelings in there.
 Watching the Slicer

I watch the slicer

And I watch its every move
And I watch the butcher
Working into a groove

And I wonder
How his life could change
Through just one little blunder
Of leaving fingers estranged

Would it be worth it then;

His ten dollars an hour?
Could he be forgiven;
For weilding such power?

Then he'd watch the slicer

And he'd watch it's every move
And he'd look at his hand
Limbless and smooth

Tyler is a 21 year old part time student living in a tent in Connecticut to save on rent.
He's currently working on getting various poetic and fictional works published in hopes
of staving off what one of his friends fondly calls "The Vast Iron Cage;" or being sucked
into the monotonous slavery of capitalism.

Much of Tyler's poetic work was inspired his membership in a band called Discombobula
with his two friends Scott Kuhlen and Ian Lynch-Passarelli; a band in which there are no
assigned musical roles. Each member takes turns playing instruments they are largely
unfamiliar with. As a result, much of Tyler's work is very silly.
Noah Falck

On Baltic Avenue

A stew of junkies monopolize the corner.

Some argue they would make for lovely art
hung inside, on a museum wall.

Hobos thumb down cars

on a blistering asphalt
as a pack of bastard children
experiment with matches and spray-paint.

You finger the dice

and imagine the future
of a lot selling for only sixty dollars.
The One Where I Open the Door

No one thinks the day should begin with a spilled beverage, or a whiff of breath that takes the petals
right off a flower, but too often it does. And looking up to notice the sky shouldn’t be awkward.
But when I crane my neck I feel like the boxcar of a train concealing traveling hobos, all camped
out and tucked away in dingy 3rd generation sleeping bags. My neighbors look and point, and drop
their mouths into O’s, and then I miss the birds when they decide to dash into a funny fishy shape
over the treetops.

Today will be different. Today, I think I’ll walk into the ocean, maybe hang out at the corner bus
stop, and learn how to tag a wall with yellow spray paint. So many afternoons are wasted looking
at a clock, or daydreaming about the shape of her breasts. This afternoon I think I’ll plant a tree in
the crack of a sidewalk, say hello to the police on their flashy mountain bikes, even if there are no
mountains around. And when it is time for the sun to disappear, for her to find her way to my
front door, I will practice the politics of fresh breath. I will not think about the phone bill, the gas
prices, or Eddie Murphy’s deep, troubling laughter.

There is a reason she pressed the faded orange light of my doorbell and it has nothing to do with the
moon being erased by the jigsaw puzzle of clouds using up the sky.
The Gods Look Like Patio Furniture, Especially When It Rains

During the trip

hundreds of parachutes
dropped from the clouds
no one holstered within.

The trunk of the rent-a-car.

The sound of the sun on her shoes.
Rain falling across town
in the postman’s path.

Beneath the urban sky,

a northwestern wind wheezed.
Everyone’s emotions were like a bad haircut.
Air entered and exited
at an uneasy momentum.

A pretty girl had trouble

erasing the kiss marks
from between her legs,
now tingling in illumination.

The triangle television screen

featured The Pose of the Week,
which made her backbone
feel like the throat of a man
stabbed for wearing expensive shoes.

Outside tires dashed through puddles,

surrendering at the parking lot of a pub
where hairpieces hung like potted flowers
and Aspirin filled tiny bowls
scattered throughout the bar.

Over the loudspeaker

a voice sluggishly read passages
from the best-selling book
The Gods Look Like Patio Furniture,
Especially When It Rains.

Noah teaches Language and Thought at Grafton Kennedy Elementary. His work has appeared or is
forthcoming in Bat City Review, Word For/Word, Good Foot, The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel - Second
Floor, melancholia's tremulous dreadlocks, and others. He lives in Dayton , Ohio
Marie Hopkins

Cup

sticky room temperature and

orange bits float within
the serial number on the backside
I ate you
up
?
and now
sitting at my desk,
you remind me

of my inverted breasts,
hanging like icecream cones
on a warm summer day
Le Mardi Gras

The last fool dances wildly

A crazy man by the gas lamp
On Bourbon street
His arms are up, his knees
Are bent
Ad the odd small umbrella in his hand
Is striped in green and
Gold.

Above, the balcony strewn with beads

Made of bakelite, and so many
Masked revelers.
They fill the ballroom,
With its French door spilling light,
Against aged copper filigree, oxidized to that
Particular shade of green.

See?
Two naked women in view, dancing.
And someone has placed a Venetian mask
On an old stray
Cat, black.
He is wandering down
Bourbon Street,
Waiting for the night to end.
After Dylan Thomas (portrait of the artist as a young dog)

Cart of green, green cart, green of grasses limb

It was in the fourth month, late in the day
The brother of my parent, known as Jim
basket by the bar, a piglet at bay.

Awakened at dark odd hours, dreams of snakes

Never before in my grandfather’s home
Squeak of mice, I knew was merely floor shakes
About my head, the sheets pulled up in dome

Little and young, male child in car not there

Up upon metal drum barrels she stands
Her head now seen in mirrored fragments glare
Then and now too, he hears, his ear kept manned

By myself, I sat on that passage cart

Yelled/ spoke/ bellowed/ cried out/ my lips, apart

-----------------
Marie Hopkins is a student at Brown University, pursuing a degree in Literary Arts. In
addition to the works she has published with college presses, she has a side-line in
Journalism and works as a stringer for two local magazines. Marie lives in Providence
with the love of her life, two rug-rats, and a revolving number of pets.
Michael Fix

The Bombing of the U.S.S. Thomas Cole

Start any voyage

begin breathing,

eek out one’s utterance:

MACBETH!

Start this voyage: steam ahead,

all ahead full!

Screaming engines blurt,

your bubbling breath

calling MACBETH!

Call out

continuously—calling

MACBETH!!!

Too small to ride horses—ride a boat

ride Newfoundland hounds,

hounds with blurred back fur

barking at enemies

We steam ahead

always steaming ahead

Ah,

to steam on a clear day

when all gulls screech

….macbeth….

Wake up, bloodied pillows

strewn betimes the bedsides.

Come down stairs

of dark walnut,

see people connecting.

Screaming

—you are: MACBETHING!!!

(1/3rd of our leg traveled.)

Now come upon the lido,

perhaps the poop

All starry-eyed voyagers do it,

Stare at the early sun,

try to believe it.

Then chests warming

see Leda on the deck

looking a succulent swan,

some deep urging voice:

MACBETH HER!! AH, MACBETH!!!

Grabbing feathers and such,

she returns no claws

smoothly—she turns from swan to sun

back—then implodes.

On a voyage to the Taj.

Scream young one (while you are)

scratch for the summit

scream!

always screaming

scratching MACBETH!!

YES! MACBETH!!

(Half voyage; horizon seen!)

Now quieting down…shh!

quiet lights dimming a full sky,

clear, cloudless sky

opening with a deep “I, am.”

Electric chest pains through

and through the growing sunset.

These voices sharpening their

syllabic ‘Macbeths’.

And some certain time

occurs and MACBETH!

returns darkly

you say, “Macbeth, oohh Macbeth, Macbeth!”

Ah! where does this voyage go?

Whereto now?

Ah, macbeth!

(Oh, where is my Leda, now that 3/4’s gone?)

Where to now, Cuba?

what land does my body lie over?

How many MACBETHS?!?!?!?

no.

No,

now I say MACBETH!!!!!!

one last desperate heaving breath.

One rattle

from an explosion of starlight,

the hull cracked and caved

(maybe an iceberg?)

maybe an alien.

No,

IT WAS A SCYTHE!!!!!!!

MACBETH!

MACBETH!

AHH, MACBETH!!!

then……

upwards—some shadows

descending under everyone

and living without their residue

no macbeths left,

I go to birds,

the otters of the sky.

Tell Me More about America

“I am not Roy Rogers,

I am not Bob Evans”

Dozens of people-full of clout,

millions perhaps,
-want me to talk about,
America.
-I am not going to do that.

How can I talk without vitriol?

-I want to drench you in America
but I can not,
so I wont
-and I can’t
-so I wont.

What in the Sam-Hell is America?

-a thousand ears straining
A ten to the tenth,
of crème-de-menthe,
swilling rednexxxxxx?
what de heck do we care,
what we call America?
the “once-New-Found-Land,
the “Land Of Jobs”
celebs,
gobs of famous,
-amos
-tori
-and Andy
they all want to be famous, everyone will, does, can have, has had-
their 15 minute minutes.

“Everyone wants some.”

“Mmmmmm, mooooore coookieees pleaaseee.”
Want spotlight,
to wax,
feel the imp pulses,
do the same,
to their legs,
hips,
groinages,
faces,
-effigies
they are not America.

Not even an American-so-called as they are-

can tell me about America.
-It is lost at sea
-the fore man is aft
-the mizzenmast devoured deviously by hordes of squirming termites
-sailing naked to the pie crust moon,
fading into black,
-blue-
-blue-black-
-the pale Horse saloon pale blue moon,
-I saw it standing alone.

Like our Americans

America
Amerigo
Amir
all of the clown dollop pharmy reps
preps
steps
plans
-the best laid plans
-America, is not George, and unfortunately not Lenny.
not a penny
arcade
Do not tell me about these.

Its not the scrapple from the big apple,

kerplunkin’
spelunkin’
carved pumkin
lifestyles of the rich n’ scramish
eggman-I am-
apeman
powerman
powerman
powerman
deadpan
flash in th’ pan
deadman
deadman
deadman
-walkin’
-coolin’
-relaxin’
miles ahead
-away from ordinary
Miles’-stones.

Big wheels that keep triumphantly turning,

suv’s piloted by the invincible//mary keeps on burnin…..
people who roll {them}
men procede w/ glowing plastic,
talkin’ bout dead Americans,
tell me of a few bobs, daves, franks
-all the Phils who landed on Utah
-tell me about America,
I dare you
I dare you
I double the square root of 1.000.000.000.000, triple doggie dare
you
I AM NOT GOING TO DO THAT.

Do it-do it-do it-do it

do it-do it-do it-do it
cave in caveman cave in
talk country talk talk
you think you know you think you know

Think you encapsulate

extrapolate
this huge mass this huge mass-broken glass
every type
environment and boinging bigot,
into a poem?? into a poem??
eh?
eh?
you think so dude?
do ya think so?
huh? huh?

Tell me about the people of the sun.

I might listen.
oh sirens of deliriums make us forget,
the patriots,
the gridiron politik,
our Republic
Of Stylised Apathy
-Pathetic Manured Pathologies

But I digress:
Almost started to tell you about America didn’t I? When I really do not know
it. I was cemented here by placenta; driven into a board with nails; my
congealed bleeding blood is only red, red, red. You can not bleed white or blue
in addition, don’t try. I don’t know a damned thin thing about America, so tell
me, please tell me sir or ma’am, please please me, tell me, try me, try a little
tenderness, caress my back whisper or whimper….“America”, into the fuzzy
nooks of my ear, stand near, to me, tell me “I have found you “, just read it a
little longer, tell me America, tell me where you are and who, tell me who I
am and where.

“Don’t ban France (you morons)

don’t put your boot in my ass
with your pickup truckulence
or I will poop on your lawn.”
Death of a Playwright

The dreaded hour when Art died.

I was having a transcendentalist argument,
about the nature of U.F.O’s.

In the houses of erudition,

-education-
People Peopling,
conversing in casual attire,
not knowing Art;
and the death-that Thing.

Wonderment of force,
-basked in confusion,
aghast at that Art;
-and the death.

Wondering-Why, Oasis?-Why?
-damn limeys-
can’t release another great album,
-why?-
the Contenders are all AWOL,
-far and away from the Danger-Fields,
no postwar naval dramas,
no assaulted showering nudes,
-No,
-“What’d I Say, Ray?”
ONE, LONG, calendar-year of DEATH.

Art dies a lot,

Art died today.
Art worked(s) for us,
for a company,
-for accompaniment.

-Art.
Tried to save a girl in chains,
-she left
-into black pools of voluptuous memory,
(poetic interpretation: History)
-she floated on her blondeness,
-smiled coquettishly-upon mastaba, pyre-Warhol.
left Art for Simon-Peter and Art-Funk-el.
Art smiles from frames now,
-gazing on these people peopling,
-these Americans,
-who write words,
-these people peopling,
these tiny american Idols:
-lost-
-lost-
-lost-

-MY GOD-ART IS LOST-

-he is gone…..
But today-
-quiet!-a ray!
-hope.

-Next?
probably the Pope.

Paddy’s 3400th Dream

-An Englishman lifted u up

into a heat duct-

And as he tickled-
-u collapsed.
Flowering Trees
I go home,
put on something Spanish.

Laura Linney—Ms. Linney,

sits gazing
from a window—bay window
sipping tea.

Driving homeward,
bound—from work to home,
bound home;
bullets zip casually
through the highway air,
plinking: plink, plink
like out-of-tune steel drummers.

Ms. Linney—Laura Linney

drinks tea now
swallows hard,
not worried about esophageal cancer—or
less-than-stellar teeth.
She is remote—a tundra.

With the calypso trek concluded,

I donne,
and wait for the canopy,
they say sleep is.

Laura starts to vaguely dream,

scratches her sleeping knee too hard,
awakens—bumps right into her tote.
She is desolate,
sort of.

I think about—well
I think about, probably
30-40 different things
as I lay awake (writers may know)
I think about 14.
I think about 22.
I think about 5.
5 is hard.
Laura can’t sleep,
Sorry Ms. Linney, we missed your sleepening call.
She can’t sleep.
Thinks about flowers,
thinks about flowering trees.
-aren’t trees flowers, under their tresses?

I fall asleep….
I fall….
I fall….

She is: AWAKE.

It blares,
You’re still Awake!
Ha!

“zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz”

“god”-she cries. “Why

can’t I ever sleep?”

I am wearing a tight-fitting
sergeant’s uniform, just got home from the Citadel.
I think it looks good,
but it’s really tight.
I save the titanic.

You’re awake!

“zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz”.

______________________________
Michael Fix is a student at the University of Buffalo. He earns his living by raising and
selling lab monkeys to the bioinformatics program. He says, it’s either them or me and at
least they don’t eat them. When I raised cattle, boy it sure did make you think about
burgers differently. His book of poems, My life with Reagan was nominated for a
Pushcart award but was blocked by a strong petition by PETA. He does not hurt animals
with his poems I have been assured.
Joseph Cooper
from Autobiography of a Stutterer

Twitching his leg b elow the table he thinks

about t onguing a girl for the first time. There is no
reason why a child should not develop
schemat izations of his own based on op erations
of his choice. He remembers rumors of a g←←irl
in school uh←←← masturb ating with a
ban←←←an→→a when it b roke off inside her
and w→→onders if his tongue is at risk. Our
concern is with the dev←←elopment of a
schematization for some children who we feel
socially to b←e valuable but here is not the place to
d iscuss this [link]. A man holding a
tel←←←ephone is startled at what he is hearing.
An amp lifier b irths a dropped jaw.
D←←←←←on’t answer er←←← to
dis←c ussions now banished from our secondary-
school textbooks.
 The th→in skin in the middle of the neck
spoke tones of a b arely foreign mission. It
becomes obvious sp←←←eaking is a c omplex
activity that children can p erform hap pily. They
can exp lore situations that are incredibly rich in
their f←←luency yield. An instant remix. I have
wanted to speak of things. This exp eriment can be
a valuable one b←←ecause children can calibrate
the results of ph→→ysical relationships with
definite coordinates. B←←←y continuing to
redesign the self I p rogressed by slow stages up
stairs and down. Tears d←←isap pear in a
lowered head. Unravel the vocal chords now
suddenly dislodged and find the instinct of self-
preservation neglected by sticking t←←ongue
between teeth. The climax is a por←←tal of veined
lineaments.
 I am v←←←anishing under the conditions
of man←←ufactured precision. A visual p aradox
cuts a sudden p ath in front of us. They disp erse
quotations from the recollection of a sound. I began
notating my thoughts things I wanted to sp eak but
couldn’t. The hollow throat began attaching
p←←←ap erclips together to make chains.
B reathe. C ats have got your t←ongue.
An←←← airplane glides a p←←roposition
overhead. Make a keyhole of your lips. Lay your
d←←ialect under mine and sp eak privately in
place. No value judgment has been implied in what
has been said. D←←←oes he suffer from any
neurological disorders? I met you and you touched
the inside of m←←y m←←←outh in a yellow cab
b ack to your apart←ment.
 D←←←irect instruction is usually pointless
and unnecessary. You d on’t have to read if you
don’t want t o. We can just skip o→→ver you.
Your teeth are c oncealed whenever it happens.
Language is d←←amp and clammy and I don’t
know why I cannot breathe. He tried to shrink
away and drive them off. Our eminent paths
flashed through resident drool. As children we
would hang foot long P←←←opsicles from our
mouths pretending elaborate tongues. We do not
give very much attention in this book to the drawing
of graphs. As may be reasonably inferred
elucid ation is wreck age. Several unacceptable
solutions were offered. A major reason for this long
delay is the d←←←etriment of the choral man.
 He that ob eys the law of himself will find
out how much heavier one word is than another.
Identify a p←←←←owerful passage. Anchors are
ready to plunge at caesura. Unmasked we control
malformation stratagem. He stretched his gaping
mouth s→→→till wider. Now he is an agent
delivering a message through enemy territory. A
graph was drawn to compare all voice
measurements. Sp eak for five minutes explaining
the context of your passage. Who’s story—is it
now. A fixed state of m←←←atter is released
st reaming through interrupted architecture. Do we
have to read aloud? No doubt something of old
public execution. Ass→→→ignment of oral
presentations strained the labor of my voice.
Matina Stamatakis

Exploded View 1.0

must Darjeeling be you

too verklempt hotness oil
coil me around rubber hose after
midnight on your ephemera
bubble

I see sun splatter

in directions all fringe
of consciousness when
I slipped in the tub
called 9-1-1

here's a giant sequoia

(get well card attached)
ersatz me made of leaf
finger painting a child
of bamboo

must break she so easily.

Exploded View 1.5

spent evening digging up

exoskeletons in the backyard
she broke me/ broke me not

how dulcet sound scrapes

as electromotive perfect
healthy flow of platelets
how do you do do again
the dig abscission of skin
I uproot a girl mouth of cunt.
Exploded View 2.0

take this girl rot heliotrope

shove her bloat call white on
blue on the ebb of hem of rift
fleshy eelpout not so fallow a cow
exscind for now gestation

come now wake will from dream lay

the beaming of glabrous nights
without a raincoat I smell
a thousand naked thistles
know her as a crime
of fringed orchid bleeding
Formica plastic lip

drip she who lisps a moo.

Gradual Phaseout

3.

They become corrupted

sure the line segments were beyond the law

reach the boil of oceans

rapt in milliseconds

I thought about how old fish heads are

slave descendants
just like shit

but they refuse to open a window

2.

you should know

I'm not from the suburbs
not the city
or nautical underbellies
gasping for air

this
a moment to attract a band of neurons
with a dwelling in the electrician
who tells me anything too bright
is not to be transplanted into my brain

all assumptions
principles of action
from his binary star a fizzle-
pop exploding molecular
gone too far

the following are: bathroom victims

late prophets and astrophysicists
without degress
who speak easily of Muhammad
but do not know the mass of nebulae--
a void by far too large
to calculate with fingers

1.

this is a closed system

of origami fold--against all events
unfolds a strange rash from radiation

exposure

nothing grandiose
fragile as a pressed cumquat//kilowatt

I kiss-heave the stardust--

wait to fizzle

still

ca. 2000

Tibia quick
[raise monitor transmit
this robot]

21st century melodrama

about a boy naked Sue
in the backyard swatting

erect

zinnias while momma

looks at sausage quietly

contemplating circumference--
nice foot these shoes can dance
the zapateo but scuff
and transmute
into armadillo heads
what used to be silver-gray
but now just umber

the system is vacuous as night sky (pressed)

through a valve

all wild indigo has been drained out of palm

like grape jelly out of a feeding tube

with torque/ quick/ now/ deliver

torso through the projector

call it 2006 automation's after-ripening

of car parts in gullet--breathe--
here's one for the compost
a big one--judging by size
foot 10 shoes lined up in a row
of genocide victims
in Zambia--decompressed
into arboretum--

*swat*

<kids everywhere are starting to realize

it's not Smuckers.>
Duane Locke

E MAIL TO DAMNISO LOPEZ (DAYLIGHT)

Daylight saving time

Became
A dead nasturtium

Desert date palms present

In closed day bed

Advice and vice from Sermon

Seek the Dauphin’s blonde daughter

But France now a republic

Her eyes colored

Like Swiss blue glacier
Motorcyclist rode on roads
Paved on her pupils
Her eyes shouted
Slot machine gear noises
Her lips
Broken coral colored silk threads

Lemon colored ball tennis

Played
Played without a net
She supplied the resistance
E MAIL TO DAMNISO LOPEZ
(CRISS-CROSSINGS)

The criss-crossings
Of mica sparkling curbed intersections
Co-exists
With the much kissed bronze doorknob
Of a Gothic church
On the way to a simulated quay
On a concrete parking lot
Painted to resemble an ocean,
Flat waves
Painted to resemble three-dimensions,
A dock, gull-decked,
With the vibrations
Of a superfine Aeolian harp
Was my orientation to the morning
After a surrealist wandering.

I even passed a jazz band

Practicing and rehearsing improvisations, When in my stroll The precisely planned
city became A phantasmagoria.
I walked without being forced
By forethought of destination.
I turned right
Or turned light
According to inspiration.
I was as peripatetic as Aristotle.

A bin apples as green as ocean waves

Was an Arcanum.

The unforeseen was seen

And soon became with familiarity
An unknown.
I was a Buddhist, not a walker
Who as he walked
Was thinking about something else
Other than
What he walking on
Or walking by.
E MAIL TO DAMNISO LOPEZ
(MALLARMÉ)

Mallarmé confided
To George Moore
That he, Mallarmé,
Was often tempted
To jump from the bridge
The two walked on,
Fall down on the sharp points
Of the rails beneath
And bleed to death
In order to escape
The mediocrity of which
He, Mallarmé
Was a prisoner.

With keen attention

To details,
I hear the etudes
From
Long, thin-legged, orange insects
On the pollen
And purple of a weed.
I disappear
Into an infinity of possibilities.
I feel cogmogonic
Without being concerned
With origins,
Causation, absolutes,
Or universals.

I’m happy, having cleansed

Myself from theological beliefs
Long ago.
It is wonderful being decentered
And non-logocentric.
I observe what I have never
Seen before,
And never will see again,
Specks of gold
On a black leg
Smaller than a pencil mark.
E MAIL TO DAMNISO LOPEZ 210

“Hedge-crickets sing,” John Keats

“The real is transitory, mobile, fleeting, elusive, Temporary; the unreal is fixed, absolute,
Universal, eternal,” Norris Benjamin.

At Hadrain villa,
The ruin, the remained,
The tourists counted the statues,
The statues,
Surrounding the swimming pool.
Some say the statues were nymphs.
Some said
The statues were housewives,
Carrying jugs of milk
On their shoulders to feed their offsprings, And great-great grandchildren.
One astute sage and observer commented
That all the girls
Had the same face,
The same face as the beautiful boy
Who drowned in the Nile had.

And thus it came to pass,

Thus it came to pass.

It came to pass that I wrote

My poems called “The Elegies.”
I wrote my elegies
In a room that leaked
When it rained.
In writing my elegies
I had to move and remove
To keep my hair
>From getting wet
As water poured through the leaks
In my room.
I lived in the Tampa slums,
On North Jefferson Street,
The number one crime street
In a city of crime,
In a city where there are no universities, Only buildings, Buildings with Admission
offices.

“Philosophy ought really

To be written only as poetry,”
Ludwig Wittgenstein.

I named my collapsing house

“Duino,”
So I wrote my “Duino Elegies”
In a collapsing house.
I lied to myself
That I was the last
Of the castle poets,
But in my elegies
I would not mention angels,
Not even
The angels of the false Denis (translated).

Figure it out, figure it out,

Figure it out.

At Rapallo I saw a sign

On an American-styled restaurant,
“No dogs allowed”
So I ate at a plein-air, plat-
formed
Ristorante
Where a strangers’ dog
Sat under my table.

Figure it out, figure it out.

Figure it out.

“Dump Plato,” Charles Olson.

Breathe.

At five o’clock
This afternoon I decided
To erase from my vocabulary
Meaningless words such as
“personal,” “politicial,”
“Immediate,” “eternal.”
I hope by six o’clock
I don’t forget. It is so easy
To forget in a country
Where my no one hardly
Has any memory. In this
Country all that can be
Remembered is the “Maine.”

You figure it out.

“We need not fear gods,

For the gods are us,
Our invention, but if
The gods are us,
The gods should be feared,
If the gods are us,
The gods are to be feared
More than anything,
More than anything,”
Norris Benjamin.

Accept the vatic, for

The only real poets are Oracles,
Oracles without a Delphi,
Without an Apollo.
All true poets are oracular,
But without an Apollo,
All true poets are in love
With Daphne.

You figure it out.

The
Word
Cre-
Ates
The
Thing.
E MAIL TO DAMNISO LOPEZ 1994

The razor blades Of dawn Their silver sharp edges

Shaved away The all-covering black beard
Of night, Shaved away
The thick black eyebrows On the dark face With closed eyelids whose
dark skins Were backgrounds To brighten stars That served as ancient maps For
ancient travelers who were always lost Thus made discoveries Of what was hitherto
unknown

The one who knows his address

Will never have a home
The one who seeks the road
Will never be a wanderer

It was a cold morning the children

Wore thick woolen gloves
And thick woolen caps
That with multicolored stripes
Covered their eyes
It was a cold morning
A cold coming we had of it
Children clapped their gloved hands
Dancing holding gloves around
The white mound on the whiten earth
The children sung joyously
Believing they had found a snowman
Although the snowman was lying down
Not standing up
As traditional snowmen stand and salute
The children sung the old songs of joy
As the children licked peppermint candy sticks Soon, the school bell rung and little
ones Went to school where teachers wore black gowns And walked around in circles
Left the white lump That was a brownbag drunk bum Who froze to death On the
coldest night of the year

Cognac colored wild flowers

Swayed and gyrated
As if dervishes doing
Sacred, mystic dances,
To worship praise the sun
The god Sol that kept
The earth multiplying and warm
The holy dances
Colored the air cognac
But the air
Quickly took off
Their cognac colored dresses
To be naked
And preserve
The natural sacred
Of a sacred world
These nymphs quivered
In dance around
Castoff dresses
Colored cognac

The sun runs

On a paved road.
Concrete covering
Seeds concrete
Choking seeds
Until the seeds suffocate
Until life
Is aborted
The center
Of the road
Is a tightrope,
The sun walks
On the tightrope,
The sun slips,
Falls to right
Side of road
To dissect
A bright red convertible
Driven by an apparition
That wears cap
Tennis players wear
In tennis matches
The empty space
That is the driver
Steers the steering wheel
Covered with convicts stripes,
The black and white stripes
That convicts wore
In 1930 movies
The sun moved
Faster than the car
Going forty miles
Over the speed limit.
The sun ran far
Ahead of the speeding car
And soon
Became a red glow
In a gap
That was bulldozer
Through a mountain
To make a road
When the driver drove
Over the red glow
He discovered it was
A red wheel chair
That his tires tore apart
As he drove on,
He saw a hitchhiker
Holding up a golden
Glowing thumb.
It was Apollo,
The driver sped by.

______________
Duane Locke, Doctor of Philosophy, English Renaissance literature, Professor
Emeritus of the Humanities, was Poet in Residence at the University of Tampa for
over 20 years.
Andrew Nightingale
ALIEN PROPULSION SYSTEMS

Alien propulsion, a blue sky hovering

where there's capital. Money markets leveraging
time zones. The fronts pass over and hell money
prints itself. Jet streams open idle satellite links.
Pre-emptive information flows. The structures
feed on the inert foreign body. Getting nowhere
helps an alien to move. Aimlessness
fuses arrival and departure. Capital fills
the troposphere. Travel isn't always goal oriented.
Unknown forces, buoyant but akin to
a false consciousness. Foreign subjects
make apt purchases. Unleash forces that propel
uninhabitable bodies to mutilated excess.
Humiliation brings the spent home.
Back into exile. Limits on repetition
are patrolled by unprofitable deaths.
Autoasphyxiation is not possible in the mall.
Not among the plastic shadows.
Subjects late night shopping. Warranties
weeping with opalescent speed.
Reverse engineered, power becomes a network
of differentiated vectors. Advanced methods
made available discretely. The seat
where the traveller sits has been converted.
The vessels have been tested. The craft analysed.
Failure relies on gravity and a glass ceiling.
To rise is to decline fixed expression.
Craft cannot easily be replicated. The power
breaks down. No one position sources contacts.
Impossibly hard, yet weightless and bendy
like kitchen foil. A gaze that can transport.
A flash of white light picks up each passenger.
Takes them places far away. Gives them life.
Wishful thinking cannot penetrate
their chic shiny solitude. Every movement
is a kind of transmission. An articulation
of irreconcilable differences. Following
is not allowed. And kicking leaves no dent.
An autopsy, taking place on all these
broken machines. With propellant leaking
copiously everywhere. Broken vessels
are still vessels though they carry nothing.
Function defines them by exclusion. Dissection
recreates usefulness. New interfaces
are assembled between blade and cut.
New machines being proven by borderline leaks.
Playing proper part in society.
Autopsies are fully functional.
Successors driven by precise intrusion.
Death erotics, built on an attraction
to dizzying heights. The possibilities of
chief executives. Borne up by the chariots
of sharp pecuniary gods. Perhaps they have
good hearts. Suffer oversized livers. Perhaps
they bring us closer to the stars. We should
continue to sacrifice our children. They
still need gainful employment. Something
to aim for. A seat in business class.
Carbon wants, flowing freely into a void
of disambiguation. The triangulated void
is unrecognisable. It's been called
many different things in its time.
Acceleration tries to fill it. Failure
embodies it. It has given birth to
Structured Design Methodologies.
Complexity past the point of no return.
The void sees its reflection. Only
its own reflection. Can't be far enough away.
The others, tasting the physics of ready cash
grow lazy. They court the corporate classes. It's like
earning interest on someone else's current account.
Who would give that up. Someone else's chips.
Stolen chips taste better and trigger
powerful responses. Stealing time from
alien labour enriches. You can stay
healthy longer. Avoid bringing death closer.
Conspiracy theories excuse your morality.
Being here, as everyday users of
the anthropic principle. A self-consciousness
that's never superseded. Meritocracy is one way
of concealing an illegal propellant. Giving
the others a chance. Letting them fail.
The top of the ladder requires snake handling.
Moves not listed in the book. The torque
twists the mechanism. Right out of shape.
There is no going back.
Spotted youth, the guidance locks on
to something new. A First Course
in Marketing. Travel and otherness rolled
into techniques to shift product. A unit
powered by precession. A manufactured freshness.
The sense of newness leaves resemblance
as exhaust. Vapour trails of misplaced simulation
fading. These young men occupy themselves.
It can't be healthy. Discharging into
a discovered space.
Paradoxical hope, the acquirement
of alien systems for self-development.
Instantly something else becomes alien.
Perhaps acquirement is not the thing perhaps
it's wonder. How natural processes are distorted.
Used and manipulated. And yet
the manipulation is itself quite natural.
As banknotes are part of nature. Always going
to manifest themselves. Work the same schemes.
We give birth to aliens.
Your pocket, they say it lives in your pocket.
Dark matter in the fluff. A ten quid black hole
been through the wash. Now you can go shopping.
And become someone. Chaos chemicals interfere
with a good quiet runner. Nothing
is left on the outside. No epiphany
or unexplained event. The synchronicity
of shopping. At least that is left.
Blue-y whiteness, a white that is loveable
and blinding. Very hygienic quite unlike blood.
The user is washed to a place where nothing sticks.
Damage is a dead idea. Everything is ok.
Soon if a gelid mind can be uploaded.
Its scarred dangling limbs rinsed away.
Nothing will get dirty forever. Everything
is never touched. No blame in outer space.
Although unimportant, the exact procedure is
nevertheless quite simple.
An alien text is selected. Not an
arbitrary text but one that's esoterically
propelled. A text
to motor speculation. Otherwise I'm
immobile.
Travel
is controlled by those
infiltrating the Academy. Country roads
are lined with us hitchhikers. One
remove from rocket fuel. Close enough for me. Aliens
make my accelerant unstable.
At last, a shore is visible in the distance.
An empty platform sliding up. What happens next
belongs to another species with special lubricant.
A way to move smoothly. Like they're frictionless.
Say a soap bubble or a dandelion parachute.
They carry themselves gracefully through time.
Softly and without any explanation. Setting down
in silence. Must be made in Germany.
Incomprehensible mechanics, no less now
than they were before. It has all been said.
At least an episode of the X files
is entertainment. Broadcasts radiating
in perfect spheres. Inflected radio light.
Only this ends in a mess of obligations.
Too many payments send out tentacles.
Those lists of quantifiable transactions.
They move at will. Outlive
all my aimless speculation.
The sky, a disguise for winds that display
fearful resilience. Looking up must be
enough. Look up but don't try to harness the wind.
The wind says pointless things. Filling any sail.
It's movement and rest signal and carrier.
Beyond the ken of arbitrary constraints.
It bloweth where it listeth. Beats at my window.
I should not have listened.
Dereck Clemons

Wormholes 1: Figuring In the Light

He is at the edge of it. Along the lip

of the cup in his lap he runs his finger.
His face hangs
at the T.V. Smiling animated
bubbles
zip inside a
toilet as his thoughts float
to the car parked outside his house a week now.

A boy once was stuffed into the trunk

of a car outside his house.
The kid in the driver’s seat mimicked
the kid in the trunk by clenching his jaw. By widening his eyes.
Their pupils dilated.
He stares at this car and rubs his ear.

He’s got to piss

so in the cold bathroom now he’s pissing. His member’s
plunked out his white thermals and dangles between his freezing fingers.
Piss noises drive away
the quiet morning and he gets a mind to play with himself
by writing and drawing on paper
and folding it
in terms of balance
in relation to the figure that came before it he’ll have set before him
and so have a collection of creatures with long and short necks
and round and skinny bodies like gourds
and other vegetables. Like leafy plants. With pearly teeth.
*

Doused in red sunlight

furniture bleeds into the walls. Into his thinking
and the room around it.
His wife pulls a blanket over her shoulders.
He’s holding the remote.
What’s you, says the remote. Doing. Me?
Yeah. It says.
Well. I’m looking for sexy
somethings on T.V.
and finding nothing that gets the blood rising
I keep clicking the remote
while I
fidget. While my brain fidgets.
While a couple ideas fiddle with each
other to see what comes of it.
Like maybe they’ll
lock legs
and make a baby.

And a gremlin comes out more worn than either part that made it.
Its face like paper being crumpled collapses
until it’s got no face.
It lands on his shoulder and through its tangled limbs
it lifts its head toward the car parked outside the house. He wonders
who left it there.
All those empty driveways.
Theirs is the only one that’s not clean
off-white pavement.
Being gravel.
Great driveways.
A nose sprouts above the gremlin’s brow.
Its mouth is slit into its ear. Its eyes are pinpricks.
It mumbles something under its breath as it scoops his dandruff
and tosses it down his back.

The gremlin says but about this twilight. It leaks

through figures into landscapes and people.
Fissures. It’s how you hear me:
I follow this pale light into you.
You’re a good thing to tie this thinking you do to.
Tie your own thinking to it. Your brain. So:
The light and your mind leak into vessels
so their own squat bodies will
leak into landscapes. And so your
body outgrows its skin and bone structures
into light which can be folded
and balanced. Lines more than the paper you fold it by
hold the mind which climbs into structures. And so it finds
itself living in places it didn’t know existed
until it was folded. The mind leaks into them. The figures fold into it.

In finding a figure to get the flaps

of the brain to cross themselves
a form is built that holds itself together
when even much of the brain is concerned with
pressure building in the bladder
and soap scum. It becomes a movement the brain
falls into incorporating concerns into its moving
so suddenly it
appears opposite the object and does with it
what it will. Consume. Repulse. Use its energy to the brain’s ends.
A martial art for traveling this leaky universe
of puddles and people. Thinking like a fluid thing.
So with this way of folded paper. They’re available
points of entry and exit. The twilight and the car parked in it.

He turns from the car to his wife. She’s pulled her feet up on the couch.
She pulls her hair back.

His leg jumps. The shivers come. The shakes.

Wormholes 2: Compressing Grasses

This lump is a hermit curled up. He squeezes

his brain like a bag of winds
and flies to his body. He turns his head
to the bird perched on the overhang over him
and says so you’ve come to my shack to shit on me.
My blankets.
You know that’s why I’m wearing these.

The hermit looks at his stomach,

says the collusion
of landscapes and light both in the brain
and out
draws a bird
from the lining
of my stomach. It drops from the sky to the shack
to the grasses.

He gets up, his knees pop. The blankets

slip off. He leans back, his spine pops.
He wipes his hands on his tunic.

He sets water to boil, adds leaves, flowers

and stares at the kettle. His light leaks into it.
He walks into the field and squats.

Though at first it seemed constricting

he lives in the seam between waking and wakefulness. He’s left
sleep for another life. Though in this one he still shits.
He compresses his gut.

The bird shoots out the grasses

and settles at his feet.
Its face slides to its neck.
A gremlin gave me this body, the bird says. It spread across
a blanket its instruments and pricked
my arm. My light dribbled into a chalice.
You know it’s all such unnecessary business
for leaving bodies
but to stealing a portion of a person essential.
It drank and grew stronger.
And lives longer.

I was a gremlin once, the hermit says.

In another life.
But see now there is a gleam of anger
in your eye. It’s no surprise you’re
come to me.

He sets a cup to the ground and the bird drinks it.

Whiskey, it says. It spits.
Oh, says the hermit. I know. About that.

The bird tips over. The hermit eats its head.

He shoots into its body.

I’m getting hold of you

good vessel
to shuttle me into bathrooms. Door frames. A driveway.
A woman. A wormhole. Through you
I move as these figures pull together.

He sees he’s sprawled on a couch before a big window.

Beside him a woman plays with a cat. He glimpses a figure
in which he says I know. In which he drinks with himself.

His mind is compressed into more than itself.

Into more of itself. More than matter dribbling
through the universe. It thinks. His mind is compressed
— he comes to — into a figure. He leaks into a kettle.
A bird settles at his feet. He comes to
staring out a window at a stranger’s car parked on the street.

More than a week now. His eyes shift. The window sinks.
Wormholes 3: Ridgeway

He remembers being dragged from the trunk

and smashing his face in the street. He remembers being
unable to drive away fast enough. Speeding across town.
Rolling with the lights off into his driveway.
God. But yes, the gremlin says.
An eyeball sits in a corner of its mouth. You’d have it go that way.
You’d have them screaming and running out of dope houses.
Wormholes 4: Wormhole Lady

You just came through there. He points to the hole

burned in the wallpaper.
She smoothes her skirt
and runs her fingers through her hair.

She flourishes a hand. A gratuitous amount of energy

bursts from her head.
She falls into the coffee table.
Quits moving.

I came in a bird through the deep, she says,

and dropped into this living room of dimming light.
Into this woman.
I leak through the universe as part of one person
pulls into another forming a figure a fellow can get into.
Here’s one in you lady. Being this lady
with this thinking and speaking figure out there
now in here. Now you. It moves you into a figure.
Then another. You do. In you. You find you
are the one moving through you. Then the fellow. The back of his head
is opening. So there too. There already
and already now speaking and flinging its voice out.

My wife’s lips
though they move I don’t think that’s her speaking.
I’m leaning next to her limp body
with my hands in her hair and what I speak
she speaks it. My own lips don’t seem to be working.

Kneeling now
I’m realizing my scalp
is burned and sticky. I told you that already, she says.
You shot through the wall
into your skull. Or I did. Into mine.

------------
Dereck Clemons graduated from The Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2006.
His poems have received awards from The Academy of American Poets
and the Workshop's John Logan Contest. He lives with his wife Wendy
Trevino in Davis, California.
Christine Surka

Opening

Now when it’s too

Bright churches peak
Into the sky; steeples
Pierce its tiny skin.
Identifiable shapes,
Coloring book
Houses — I am
Glass and clear.

How about
We ruin plans.
Get off
(at the wrong stop)
This life is a brick.
Move-Out

No one’s awake to tell this

To: the world is full of light-up caves.
The leaves were layers
Of popcorn the night
My room disappeared.
Bags leaking down the steps,
I’ll wonder how the walls hum.

We’re good kids, vacating

Soundlessly. I watch the fridge
Flood the gaudy rug, worksheets
Scrawled with failure.
We’re good kids, pruning
Our school reports. We have
Nothing to wake up for

But the tremors, keeping

Us awake. Stiff books,
Plastic bowls, yarn rugs
Sit stuffed together
Wrongly. I skip,
Losing the pinpricks
Of your reality. I skip
So the pinpricks lose me.
Relative

I slept here once.

I ate glaze at white-washed
Counters.
I dreamt here once.
The emerald stairs
Tumbled to linoleum valleys.
And the basement was pleasantly haunted.

We hid
In pearl bathtubs, diamond shower stalls So they’d never make us Go.
On the walls
They stuck gaudy stars
Wishing their lives would glow.
I crept
Into droopy caves of velvet.
I slept
On lushly carpeted foyers and dreamt
About glass ceilings.

I thought
The world shut off
With our last giggle. I thought
Only we were hiding.
When the reigning chandelier glistened
Even in the dark-time
I thought
It would never break.

________________________
Christine Surka is a student at Brandeis University studying biochemistry and planning for a career in
research. She is involved with her school’s publications, particularly the literary magazine Laurel Moon
where she has had numerous poems published. Recently, she has also had poetry published in Void
Magazine, Words-Myth, and elimae. Christine also enjoys photography, painting, running, and mountain
biking.
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino

Ekphrasis No. 15

Static
Boughs re-
Call a
Tender poise

Drunken
Boys be-
Hold a
Lifeless choir

Stoke
Notes into
Wooden
Flutes
Ekphrasis No. 16

Mechanic a
Spit o’
Ecstatic re-
Lease

Javelineer
Crested
Quiver a-
Gog stride
Ekphrasis No. 28

The gods
Who suff’r in
Tandem
Cleave ises grammata

Picturing
E
La e la
Pragmata declension

Per
For or in each
Mien
Yet now no long’r

Ex
Chaotic frieze a
Broad relief emerge o’
Harried

Examin’r
Circularity sheathed
In
Yeses

Gibbon
Or less’r bird
We
Conscious ones

With
Figures
Found
In words in tones express’d

Active
Interpreting
A
Seeing . . . seeming . . . something

Lyingly
Invent’d a counterfeit we
Tu
Quoque
Ekphrasis No. 29

Airs
Rise in
Waves above an
Airfield.

Sails
A-
Head, un-
Said, detonate an

Un-
Thought. A
Phallic
Steeple, inverted

Un-
Christianlike. A
Breach
Before dancing

Air
Balloons.
Imperialistic
Psychic mesas.

Reich
Helmets.
Id
Tor.

___________
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino’s Ekphrasis poems have appeared online at
5_Trope, at mprsnd, at xStream and at Zafusy. He lives in Brooklyn Heights,
New York, where he edits the online journal, eratio.

http://www.eratiopostmodernpoetry.com
Carl R. Brush

Family Counseling--One-On-Ones

Callie

I just don’t want them to argue all the time. They tell us not to.
Caruso and me, of course. Could I have a glass of water, please?

Marilyn

I don’t care so much about my career–

I am being honest. I said I would and I am. I still don’t care so much–not
about the career itself. But when Jerry used it to denigrate me–that’s what I cared
about. Am I making sense?
He said I had a better chance of being an astronaut than singing opera.
Before that, I was happy raising two great kids and giving voice lessons.
No, I never minded his being gone so much. I liked my space. He did, too. I
thought it was a good arrangement. Is that bad?
You see, after he said that astronaut thing–even though it might have been
the liquor talking– he could have hit me and it would have hurt less–he said it in
front of Callas and Caruso, too–That was the end for me. I’m sure you can
understand. Anyone could.
I didn’t say he hit me.

Jerome

Looking back, we were like a combo with no rhythm section. Nice solos, but
nothing to hold it together. I don’t know why I didn’t see it–hear it–from the git.
Yeah, I drank–drink–a bit more than I should from time to time, but, hell,
musicians, they’re–you’re surrounded by that stuff every day. I don’t do weed or
coke, and you better believe I have plenty of chances–daily chances. Sex, too, and I
never did that either.
You think I’m lying? Think whatever you want. But I’m telling you, when
you’re talking to her, watch out for how she twists things.
Me in A.A.? Sure, the day she starts to clean up her act. Which will be never
because she thinks her . . . let’s just say she thinks it’s impossible for her to generate
a bad smell. Look, I took–take–care of my responsibilities. Kids eat good, wear
good clothes. And that damned private school. She never could have bought that
with her la-la-la lessons.
Sure, I was against it. All that money and how much better can it be? We got
good public schools here, but ooooh, no. Comes from her snooty opera crowd. See
what I mean? Blue-collar. Tuxedo. Never make it together. Not in this life.
Did I say she’s a bad mother? Just give me some credit is all I ask. All my
money after expenses went–goes–to the household. Keeping a bunch of jazz
musicians together ain’t cheap and it ain’t easy.
Oh, you been to the club? To the C-Note?
No, I don’t own it, but managing the house band is a nice gig.
Well, sure I took–take–the kids there. I’m not ashamed of it. Why
shouldn’t kids should see their old man at work? Everyone there loves them. Not
going to hurt them no matter what she says. Jimmy’s teaching Caruso the drums,
and Callie–ten years old and it’s a miracle what she does on the keyboard. But
there, again, she can’t take it home. Her mother would have her on scales the rest of
her life even though she’s a natural at improvisation. Hears changes like pro.

Caruso

I feel like I got to take care of Mom, you know? When dad’s drunk or he’s
hungover, he’s pretty mean to her.
No, he’s never like that to Callie or me. Not to anyone, really. I mean, he
might kick a chair or something, but . . .
No, I don’t call it mean if he doesn’t come over exactly when he promises or
if he doesn’t come home at night–of course that was before he moved out. The
club takes lots of time, and he’s always sorry. Mom doesn’t really understand. It’s
not that he’s trying to hurt us or anything.
Well one way is when I play piano for her to sing arias and pretend it’s like La
Scala or the Met and the audience is all cheering. Mom is happy then.

Callie

Well, once was when Daddy told Mommy our house was like a refrigerator.
She got so mad, but I don’t know why.
Marilyn

Some people have said that, but I don’t believe I put an unfair burden on my
children naming them after opera stars. I was just trying to give them aspirations,
isn’t that all right?
Not only music, no, just in anything to be the best at whatever made them
happy.
Well, it was a compromise, really. Jerry and I could talk in those days. So
Caruso’s middle name is Miles, and Callas’ is Billie. My mother was so disappointed
we left her out of the naming, and for a boy’s name, too, even though it wasn’t
really a boy’s name, it sounded that way to her.
Well, doesn’t it show that Jerry and I thought alike once? Even though he
thought jazz and I thought classical, we both thought music, and we both wanted
to bless our children with ideals to live up to. But now–I don’t know why no one
believes me–he cares primarily about his next drink, and it terrifies me every time I
have to let the kids go with him. Because I know he drives when he shouldn’t, and
the degrading atmosphere at that club. Truly speaking, if you looked at this
situation as theater right now, I’m embarrassed to say it would be like a soap opera.
But if he does something to hurt them, believe me, it’ll look more like a Verdi opera
complete with murders.
I’m not joking.

Callie

Caruso’s older so he gets to do a lot of stuff I don’t.

Four whole years. I won’t even be out of middle school by the time he
graduates from high school, so it’s not really fair. I have to go to the bathroom.

_______________

Carl Brush has been writing since he could write, which is quite a long time now.
His work has appeared in The Summerset Review, Flashfiction.net, and Right
Hand Pointing. He has participated in the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the
Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Carl
lives with his wife in Oakland, California, where he enjoys the blessings of nearby
children and grandchildren.
Leonard Gontarek

landscape

everything is language. notice how nouns dot the river as darkness approaches.

wouldn't this be like talking about food when you're hungry? they've lost me.

now wind filling trees like siren. lifting the leaves, letting them go exactly, past

your house. pigeons and crows. forming row along gutter. darkness is indeed landing.

moon throwing crumpled paper on water. lit and unlit windows drift

in the evening. but for now the old Chinese waiter is falling smashed into the carp pond.
Distant City

A man (me) reading a novel. Autumn twists through the trees. The chair faces out onto.

Someone steals into the room. I may or may not hear (her). Pearls click. Ice settles in drink.

Into the room with a gun (and a silencer). I turn a page. In the book, the woman has discovered,

going through his things, her husband (a cheat at work) has been unfaithful, The floor creaks.

Bang. Someone hits the remote. They can't take it. That kills me.
The Evidence

Because we do not believe the predictions, the evidence,

The actual hurry of snow. Calm is called for. It does not exist.

How could it? It is nowhere apparent when summoned, nor when the woods are still.

My heart is beating.

December can be murder on milkweed. Sky pools like lake, the rest is slate.

My neighbor burns leaves in his backyard, but his smoke comes into mine.
Imperfect

Lies. The light, for instance, in March. Stage back-drop of ship, afire, in mist.

News travels of war, fast, imprecise. Tropical birds stirring huge-leafed trees.

Wind. Smoke. The way we came. Woman, at Walnut and 16th, fiddling with her flowers.

Buckets, cellophane. Street whacked with cold sunlight. 3 o'clock.

Woman on the subway, cologne I love. But it's sample insert in her shiny magazine.
________________

Leonard Gontarek’s books of poems include, Déjà Vu Diner (Autumn House Press,
2006), Zen For Beginners (Green Bean Press, 2000), and Van Morrison Can’t Find
His Feet (My Pretty Jane Press, 1996). His poems have appeared in The Best
American Poetry 2005, American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, Field, Fence,
Volt, and Exquisite Corpse. In 2005 he received poetry awards from Mudfish
magazine and the Mad Poets Society. He was twice nominated for Pushcart Prizes,
and twice received poetry fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
His work is forthcoming in The Autumn House Anthology of American Poems and
Prayers. He has coordinated Peace / Works: Poets and Writers for Peace (2003-
present), and The Philadelphia Poetry Festival (2002- 2003). He conducts poetry
workshops at The Arts League in Philadelphia.

www.leafscape.org/LeonardGontarek
Radu Dima

a midnight somewhere

there isn't enough mist.

the sun's already been packed up and
picked up,
smattering of sprockets inked
on the back-cloth,
diodes doused down to a petty death,
pinions unfitted and limp,
the night-machines now cranked up full-blast,
pixel-plastered cardboard buildings
raised to a temporary isolation
(lonely walls
of lonely rooms),
stoneblack sharp obsidian shadows
of ancestral weapons
pulled apart by freeway flickers.

they, of course,
sit face to face
near-enough to smell the moon's
rehearsed benevolence reflecting
off eachother's skin,
but since there is no mist they
are unable to move:
the car-coughs are soft and
liquid,
the factory smoke-machines are
silent,
all cigarettes have been
extinguished as if in honour
of some moment
in which a comet would
intersect the sun, a skein
of planes would press its cry
into the city and something
irredeemable would be lost,
carried on the faint blue traces
of burnt leaves.

if only some
cold front would enthuse
above the warm humid breath
of the city sweating up
from sewers, open mouths and air-conditioners
there might be a chance of fog
covering the streets and their ankles,
darkening the city beyond shadow
so that there would be no streetlamps other
than as beacons of a further north,
and they would lie
for three days waiting,
hearts slung in each other's chest
fearfully, as if it were an exchange
possible only in dark silent rooms,
in wombs,
on the quiet floors of oceans,

sturdy eyes collapsed back into

the somehow-blacker of their
pupils
so that when the mist finally rises
they would be free from the scenery
of second shadows in a second cave,
each trusting only
the strange unfamiliar beating
of another heart.
Axel

in this journey from

the centre of the earth
little is left to chance:
the deathbark of a dead dog,
the softdrip of hourglasses handled
by children's fingers smearing
them across horizons
into another light:
they will spend their lives
patiently recollecting each grain
into a hue
to settle into their minds
like the weight of something
of infinite importance
forgotten,
grasped only in-between kisses,
the lost, worn webbing
between fingers speaking
of our deeper past.

no oceanself has yet

been spent:
so many carried
upon its skin one must
imagine something further,
inked by storm and gale
into being
fitfully thrown against
rocks and nights.

we've lost much in the crash,

our lifeboats sundered
into wave and wave,
our hearts left to the sea:
dolphins tried singing them to life,
but no.
moire

fleshweave as mantle,
as co-ordinate of self,
all nimble escaping from
seamstress fingers,
all cannon-blast
and jailbreak.

the hipjoints of the chosen,

angelmarked,
limping from kissweight,
shoulderblade as wingspan trim,
as the sight of us unangeled,
everything embedded in this cloth:
a feel of touch, a sense
of love.

threadlength and
corpselength, dead
weight but not as ocean:
briny broth of deadthings,
livethings, weighing down
the bloated blue earth,
instead: outline,
as chalk paradigm
bursting at clothseams,
of us pressed into ground
by the endless, godless
loveweight of the earth.

hands threaded
into hands, the landspan
of your body annexed,
the trembling of rimfingers,
the sudden dizziness at the edge
of the world.
Pyrrha

I said your shoulders

could have been
burdened with wings

that you could have either

been reptillian or hallowed,
sunkissed on rockface,
sun-dappled scales
or blazing tinfoiled teeth,
gene-mapped back
into the mind of God
or talked about by poets,
words written into your back
like prophecy
lips placed on your lips
like love.

I said you might have

only appeared
at sunrise or sunset

clothed by the aurora

or naked under starless
city nights,
beaded in dew
drank in morning coffee,
moonlight-blue breasts
cupped by the freezing
half-light, kissed
under streetlamp flickers,
waist-deep in snow
or arms-outstreched
above the cityscape
like surrender
or redemption.

I said your lips

could have been
silent and smiling

swollen by kisses
or cracked by thirst,
stolen and painted
onto the faces
of angels
or billboarded
into the skyline,
that you could have been
lost at street-corners,
in dime bars, at ticket-queues
or graceful in intersections,
eurydice travelling the underground
or standing on mountain-tops,
breathing in
the sky itself.

_________________

I'll keep the bio to a minimum since I'm not sure if it's required in any way: suffice
to say I'm from Romania (hence the name), 19-years-old and a student of
philosophy. I've been writing poetry for a few years now, both in English and
Romanian, and after reading some of the major online poetry journals I've decided
to try my luck at being published. I hope you'll enjoy my work.
William James Austin

highness

city of new york

street level.
I
lowball looking up.
no cloud formations,
not since the twin towers imploded
and
flushed
the
sky

bottom burnout. even the wind tunnels offer no relief. too long in the blast path your
skin peels from bone. spend most of my time crouching. overhead carpet
bombing. a clean sweep to precede the invasion -- that’s what we hear. that’s what
gets on my nerves

less a military reduction than a psychic one. the spectacle of organized carnage was
long ago fashioned by media appetite for new images, new product, leaving
nothing to fracture save the individual brainpan

the last real idea was to waste the romantics, those eyes in the skies, so to spook. first on
the scent unscrewed the language. there was little under the lid, of course.
instructions in pigeon japanese wrapped around a second screw driver -- that’s all. no
engine for the thinking machine, the wordworks, at least not anything
sensible. faces exchanged for digital flat-screens. spiritus noblesse, if
such a thing ever existed, somewhere lost between zero and one

the brain-bombs produced mass illiteracy. language incarcerated. techno fads

and megabytes pass for art. analysis gets you nowhere while the
crime of passion is, well, a crime. really, there are laws. and
literature a phenomenon occult. writing goes on, yes, but its insides have
been scooped out. a few charlatans still roam the city, trading empty
suitcases

so the days line up. one by one they drop off the board. sun and moon trade
glances. the tides rise and fall. stores open early and close late. work, rest,
wake and sleep. cornflakes in, culture out. the occasional “deformity” elicits sympathy
and aspirin. everyone’s infected. no one will admit this, of course. it’s
always someone else whose impression needs sharpening. we worship anything
sterilized: the images, the images and the machines

411 from overseas that the euro has been counterfeited. a second news
flash involves the occupation of third world nations by capitalist armies.
huge populations of pissed off underclasses. all they want is their “god
given land,” and maybe give the wife a good slap without some
foreigner making a big deal out of it. anyway, it’s pretty obvious that god,
or whatever, is a brutal master. where’s the morality in that

okay so I go cautious down high broadway, thinking backwards. I’m flashing

on how things went after the breakdown. right away I lock onto this rusted
image of wescott, the one I call “highness,” swinging his 1950s ragtop to the curb.
never been out to his place, but heard it was end to end antiques. wescott
worships the old ways, so we have that in common. “been hunting for you since
lunchtime. I need a favor. get in,” he says, a bit annoyed. “well, I’m
around, here and there. what do you want?” I shoot back edgy. “just
get in,” he says. I look him over for about five seconds and get in. wescott
owns a housewife and law firm on long island, the north side where most of
the money is. he specializes in corrupted files and had
cleaned up some shitty business for me a few years ago. seems I strolled out
of a new england university library a tad heavier than when I went in. rare
maps of the colonies, or some such, taped to the lining of my raincoat. guess I owe
him since he had my back gratis. don’t feel too guilty, though. the guy’s got an
endless list of favors he wants doing, and I’m always the one doing them.
did I mention I did some time as a teaching assistant at a major university?
did I mention I left that gig for the nam? wescott and me, we’ve been around awhile

anyway, the favor’s a familiar one. he’d been too long in the burbs, needed
a thrill or two. so he rattles some insipid conversation in my
direction for a few minutes, then gets to the needle point: drugs . . . and sex. the
drugs kicking, the sex as wicked as a pony on speed. there’s no
mystery here, no reason to play it coy. I know that he knows that I know
where to go

it was a way of feeling something, of repairing the micro chipped day-to

day. my only problem with wescott is that he never commits. he hunts
me down when the mood strikes him. otherwise I’m a former client
too pro bono to bother with. don’t mind too much. like I said, I owe him - but I still had
my rules. like I always insisted he ditch the gucci shoes. that sort of presentation just
jacks up the fee, and I got to maintain my reputation as a sly
negotiator. naturally I always insist on a taste. I lick the edge of
everything he does
for decades I’ve been a familiar down in the hole. I always bring repeaters. so when I turn up with wescott, again,
eve skips the third degree she shines on most of the moles. she pumps us a quick nod and aims her thumb at the back
stairs. “what’s on the menu?” wescott asks when we reach the cellar. his eyes fill with drool. “well, I know eve came into
some designer coke a few days ago. and there’s a new girl in town. either that or the altar boy you liked so much. he’s still around.”
“what do you mean, designer coke? coke is coke.” wescott challenges, knee-jerk suspicious. “I just
mean that it tops the regular. this stuff really gets you off, and lasts a really long time, not the usual twenty
minutes of low altitude flight. plus a hard-on to crack bricks.” wescott smiles. I know he’ll be satisfied whether or not I’m
selling the absolute truth. he wants a lift. he wants it bad. besides, complaining might put him out of my loop,
and that’s something he definitely isn’t going to risk. no way eve hands over the keys to the
kingdom without my say so. so we walk the dim light down the hallway. a door opens, slowly.
we g o in

no doubt true what freud says about sanitation, that if you don’t pay for
it, you don’t clean up. now that’s an antinomian bumper sticker. my own tour of
duty in the nam, for which I -- if you can believe it -- volunteered, taught me a
few things about wringing out dirty laundry. the more I debased myself, the
better I felt. it wasn’t too long before I was dreaming the formalists away, lost in
narcotic reveries, thinking fondly on my psycho family whom I hadn’t
contacted in years. war was hell, but I’d found my bit of heaven among the
ginkgo. and though the smack is easy enough to come by here in the states,
I’ve never felt that good, that protected, again. as if god looked at me,
gathered me into his eyes, and shut the lids

wescott and I both feel that feeling when zohaib waves us inside and
closes the door behind us. wescott’s body immediately relaxes, as if it senses
-- before mind makes thought -- the distance between its own desires and the
public street. no one here to stir shame from adrenalin, not without an invitation.
it’s been said we become the thing we most fear. true, I think. the best
defense is always offensive. “how goes it?” I say to zohaib the arab. “s’okay,” he
mumbles back. zohaib has the necessary skills for the job. he can break
a man’s back with one massive arm and still leave him orgasming on the
floor. sometimes I’d kid about his monk’s bald spot, but he knew not to go postal on
the regulars. last time I saw him he’d converted to judaism. when I got up the
nerve to ask why, he pointed at the top of his scalp and said, “the yarmulke.”
actually, he said “ya-mee ka,” but whose counting

do I have a problem with zohaib? no. I like him. he’s family. the
uncle bisexual every genealogy molts from one branch or another. good
with advice for the boys, good with advice for the girls. he’s everyone’s
confederate because he belongs to no one in particular. a sweet big-
bear. unless he’s in a mood like now when wescott forgets to tip him up front.
“hey, bitch!” zohaib shouts, “if ya don’t know how to behave, you can kiss
the fucking street.” I should have been better paying attention. it takes me less than a
nanosecond to home in on wescott’s mistake. I grab the back of his
shirt and fast drag him to a stop. “apologize,” I tell him, “and tip him double the
usual.” wescott’s no fool. he knows he’s crossed the wrong line. quick as a
panther he has five twenties in his hand and, eyes properly lowered, offers
them to zohaib. “don’t ever do that again,” zohaib says in a menacing
whisper, patting wescott on one side of his head. seems the street found wescott
after all

the “chamber” at the end of the hallway contains the

mechanisms. its metal door sports six locks of various sizes and musculature,
which zohaib undoes one by one. as this gateway to hell’s intestines whines
open, we all notice the familiar insurance executive hanging by his wrists from
the door’s backside. he says hello as we move past him into the belly of the
room. the dim light from the hallway leaks into the candle-lit space. the candles
do double duty, of course -- one had to see what one was doing when one
dripped hot wax on one’s flesh, didn’t one? à gauche the proud rack
stretches its joints, spinal hungry. à droit flagellation. iron masks and head
bangers hang from wires bound to the grease blotched ceiling. at the far end a variety
of wigs, gowns, panties, nylons sequined and striped -- beneath those a row of high
heels, pointy and open toed, canoed and sling backed. assorted shelves
cradle the usual restraints, skin rippers, bear traps and what not. two
wheelchairs face each other aside the operating table at the center of the
chamber. and bookcases filled with -- what else? -- books. I notice the
new acquisitions: william blake’s collected, and nearly everything by derrida.
“so what’ll be? zohaib asks, scratching his crack. wescott, his eyes pleasure
wide, replies to the effect that some of that new cocaine might be a good starting
point. “then what?” “then I’d like a midget, a midget with really small hands”

I’m not a god believer, but every damn day I thank whatever hole he
vanished into for eve’s gift to us all. where else may failed romantics go?
post-breakdown the city was as cold as a meat locker, and as tasteless. early
on I sided with the deconstructionists. obviously -- to me at least -- the
only humans still walking around with their trousers off. endless
questioning, endless questioning of the logic bone, endless questioning of the
logic bone and the impossible solution -- if that’s not arch-romanticism
. . . trust me, it is. anyway, religion is bigotry. so is politics, for that
matter. right or left, it’s wall to wall control freaks. luckily formalist
jets, when they napalmed the last real idea, missed irony huddled in the
corners. no left wing without a flap on the right, and vicey versey. each
the necessary in-side of the other’s box. these politicos all one under
their pointless steeple. acknowledging the solidarity of deviance,
worshipping it -- that’s the only way to feel anything within this mad calculus. pain --
that’ll keep you alive. role playing’s good too, reaffirming as it always does
the alternate, secreted performance. as far as I’m concerned, perverts are the
leftover teeth of the human race. the rest is floss

we have to wait for the midget. his name’s lincoln, and he lives in a $6000 a month
rental on the upper east side. takes him ninety minutes to shove his chauffeur’s
ass into a pair of pants, jam it into the limo, and bum per car uptown. midgets, it
turned out, were very popular on the sex for dollars circuit. lincoln, according to
lincoln, scoffed up a few hundred grand a year. no reason to doubt him. when he
finally popped in he looked like a web banner for designer everything, dressed to the
ninety nines -- obviously not a customer for his own product. by this time wescott
and I are both pretty wired on the good coke. lincoln would have none of it,
though. “never work with my head up my butt. unless I‘m keepin’ an eye on the
chauffeur, haaaa!” he says in a sandpapery voice. I leave him alone with wescott,
figuring they can spend the next few hours folding and
pressing without me

so I’m out of there -- and reinvested -- racked for the buying and selling. it’s a long train
downtown. invasion the next sick thing

------------------------------
William James Austin is one of the greatest human beings to walk this
earth. His poetry moves the fuck out of me and a musician whose work
you probably know. He has always been a part of BlazeVOX, a contributor
to the first issue and a stalwart friend. This pieces is the first
chapter of "DESOLATION PARADISE" entitled "highness." It's from his
new book, 9 Underwor(l)d 0, which will be out this Fall. His projects
include Blackbox and Koja press. All and more can be found at his
website, WilliamJamesAustin.com
Peter Magliocco

On Hearing of Gunther Grass' Nazi Past

Old father, you covered wartime evil

under the sanctified military decoration
purpling your brave heart, shielding it
almost from a lifetime's worth
of slow accusation and the truth
vining its factual spawn across
your body's human cross
years splintered with tears
of rain, blood, & mildewed sweat
a generation of thieves brought forth
above the silencing whisper of history
seeding not the fallen olive tree
branches driven back into dark seas
where betrayed comrades drowned
preserving Hitler's act of old cowardice
for the wordless unseeing depths
inhabited now by their sightless brood
invisible to some deaf goodness
the swimming martyrs still salute
entombed in sunken ship remnants
corroded by nature's draping way
a god's heart the size of a star fish
slowly crawls from your primal lungs
oozing with spent yesterdays
of time's forgiving
My Gnat's Voyeur Eye

In Baudelaire's hashish dreams of Paris

the late 1980s come to a close for me, yet I see
more than mundane history wedged between cobblestones
faces of time trod over, the limb of sexual device
spasms into a weltered core of another oneiric space,
drawing me a horny stick figure on Picasso's canvas
during a blue period's winter thrash -- too numb
for a model fuck with undouched mistresses
prancing on Charles' evil carnation tatters
in a dim atelier, wooden-floored, where years
later, the nuclear-splitting of figural essences
gives way to the modern age -- & I cringe
before those mountainous slopes of Stein
shoulders, hear Cocteau's querulous admonitions
to keep my muddied soldier's boots away
from the magic carpet of Man Ray's dreams;
avoid Dali's cursing or Breton's stare
of hauteur cutting bone-deep fissures
across my artificial sternum, before
exploding (with laser-guided precision)
as one final crimson ray into the Seine?
Now these years of my lost fantasies
vanish slowly, daily, in the smoky epiphany
of another era's majestic personages
rendered sketchily -- in ash -- for ultimate
configuration of Art's big bang
in my gnat's voyeur-eye.
Cat Up a Tree

In lands made pagan by brash desire,

in symphonies of sheetmetal
cascading in killer waves around us

I sit baking on the porch

draining the last Bud, T-shirt peeled off
& nudie belly pregnant with fatty
tissue spilling (like crazy putty) over the belt

dreaming

of the secret sins only movie stars create

which foolishly we ape, & emulate,
so that modern literature can fit
inside the glossy pages of a Hollywood zine
reeking with sex pictures, & I wonder
after a time
why the squirrels don't commit suicide:

why

the crimson sunset still

appears greater than any digital copy.
I yet draw the cartoon figure of a cat:
these words are its contour, a fur of verbiage
to miaow-out during any vain literary grooming,
as it aspires for the highest, most edible bird
of axiomatic truth stuck on unreachable branches
across history's proverbial dawn, until
an evolutionary marriage with mankind
produces this surrogate offspring,
how artfully human,

namely me.
Drunkenly I rip off the gold nipple rings
from the karmic entity-of-self,
realizing the goddess haunting me

is the female impersonator's image

on my computer screen's vanity mirror
the next beer can is thrown at.

==========

PETER MAGLIOCCO edits the lit-zine ART:MAG from Las Vegas, Nevada...
He's had poetry at places like THUNDER SANDWICH, LILY, UNLIKELY
STORIES, CARNELIAN and elsewhere... His pending book of poetry & art, EX
LITEROTICA, will be released by Publish America (www.PublishAmerica.com) in
'06.
Raymond Farr

[zero] as earth's blithe ( h )

in a moment gone bone

infidels rhyme sovereigns
plummeting to ( h )earth

a zero's dry axe handle

soars across ( h )
has yards of it store-bought

sibyls minding store fronts

look down upon volumes
hyped with black wings

either it is gorgeous: 1558

impramatur: [zero] 1855
or it is joke like a pencil-hand

note: ( h ) has its moments

a pause in the writing _____
is but a comb on the floor
 zero cutting steeples to steppes

in modality's industry
of hymens through woods

precincts
of zeros
cut steeples
to steppes

evinced by terrains
too manque to impose

plausible zeros
progenitor erlkings

kits of ice
are the steppes to watch
 zero's injun little pilgrim

three pigs is a long time

for zero to blush

the grim in pilgrim

ourselves the being of

trembles like velocipede

supposition our anodyne

injun little pilgrim

legitimizes peripeteia

the art in hearts' olde stalk

zero on the horizon

towers bodies till corrupt

now to be a chickadee

no matter what
chickadee resembles / corrupts

no matter what
velocipede imitates / expresses
 each depot's a heart

innovated in cages
rigged since the west
hymens mete dracula
a possible amount

who is it stands
& stone piers here
howling at limits'
hymns across eyes?

in aspects tooled by
tariffs' wet mind
each steeple obliges
each laggard's a tale

a depot's a heart
vrooms into populace
pontiffs indulge crambo
bent at the knee

---------------
Raymond Farr attended Florida State University. He now lives in Ocala, FL. His work appears
most recently in/at Aught, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry & Poetics, Hutt,
Xstream, Zafusy, Otoliths, 580Split, & Sidebrow.
Edna Wallaroni

I will not wear a neck tie with my suit,

that fashionable full Windsor collar
makes even the most fearsome lions
curl up in their owners warm lap, purring.

It’s a fucking noose

For you and that damn

kid in Indonesia who assembled it
Together, ready for that fancy tie-making machine
with that shiny flex-all robot arm to solder fold over fold
in a rhythm akin to an angry cellist climbing scales, marking time

I won’t wear my blue suit to the poetry reading

I’ll go naked
Waggle my penis at you, you fuck!

----------

Edna Wallaroni is a transgender performance poet living and working in Denver, Co.
Florine Melnyk

[ buffalo Focus ]

This is a real treat for me to bring into focus Florine Melnyk’s work. She is a major
force in Buffalo’s small press publishing community. Her behind-the-scene’s work
can be found in her editing and selecting for Starcherone Books, Jonathan Skinner’s
Ecopoetics, and currently as poetry editor for Buffalo’s weekly art journal, Artvoice.
Her keen eye has been a real success for publishing but we seldom see much of her
own work. And it is that very keen eye that is the focal point of her poetry. Here the
poet offers us that futile search, that ‘looking for a reason’ that is not found in
poems, but in life. This is her first appearance in BlazeVOX and so we are offering a
gallery of her poetry for you to enjoy.
The Green Beyond

She’d never been here before where all her shoes were acceptable or no shoes, as she
had decided to run into the invitation barefoot. The people there were all new, or
old friends seen at never viewed before angles. Perception was not clouded by
distance, past and present assumptions left at the door. She delved into their
thoughts head first without regard to the consequences. Warmth enveloped her as
she took in the discourse and the sweet nectar overflowing from the flowers in the
garden. Voices drifted in and out of her desire leading her to the fountain she
sought. To step through the flowing water was to enter a dimension where
language vanished into only sensation — thoughts and ideas must be expressed in
new ways, words become ineffectual and one finds that what they had wanted to
“say” becomes texture, light.
When did purple become
So endless and cold?
Leaving green to fend
For itself.

I talk to sweet
incredible orange messages.

please take your notes and

your food
I hope you find meaning
in the morning sky
take your bus pass
just incase the pink is gone
colours never were your forte

cats don’t go on walks to school

even if they are white and gray

Yoko Ono just walked down my street

God is great and I’m not subtitled.
Samuel Beckett is on my refrigerator
i found my watch

under the dresser

just when I ran out of

time

looking for a reason

to remain

in time at all

wishing for green

limes
in a glass flowing

with reasons.
Myself

looking at myself
looking at myself
looking at myself
looking at myself

when it’s all just

illusive illusion

looking.
Meaning

1.

Creation
implied

cast lovers

to shatter

a construct knowledge

of inculpable

Being(s)

unforeseeable damage

artless sculptor

tinged, opaque

(un)like prism

refracting drop of water

we originate

to struggle

and vanquish

or just hold on
2.

pulmonary cell structure

hidden

social malfunction

metastasized

a red-white clamor

against starry

multitudinous blue

states represent (ed)

a chamber

among minion(s)

a scarlett barren

to present tense

Valentine

mitosis
3.

Signification of

umbrellas black

nostalgically

waiting arch of

restless

gestures

frantic moments

recall

lovemaking revelations

the intensity

and depth of

perplexing conniption

contained, in

discordant

illusion of

hope(lessness)

You do excite me
4.

Coffee’s interstice

Gauloises note

time’s passage

Les Mandarins

linger orange

across

famelique

spermatic cord

folie a deux

delusion calls us

un

crème carmel
5.

Misanthropic

tendancies

migrate upstream

always

following the

lightning impulses

of society’s

hidden masks

like larvae

inside

chrysalis

waiting to

be

Re-born
6.

Didi, Elise,

& Me

impromptu tea

mashed potatoes

with grape juice

intertwined

linguistically among

hot chocolate,

birthdays,

& reminiscences

floating

delicately on

whispered

air
7.

Appraising

glances

reduce strumpets

to

ruble

within streets

of

colored nothingness

wounded

angels

fester among

contentious

indestructibles
8.

Despair

remembers

History’s truth

tyrants and murderers

fragments

alone

marilyn munroe

a moment to

hide

cold clear sky

deck wood

waffles

without

whipped cream
9.

heart

be a happy cynic?

2 bees

or not

two bees

yellow black

among purple papers

green with thyme

time

minutes,

seconds,

awash in suffering

erasers

buzzing

brushing shavings

across white

paper

flowers
10.

Soul

fragmented blue

shattered pieces

upon night sky

falling

scattered

flowing flowering

ancient breezes

whispering back

colours

forms

spilling red

into waves
crashing
symbols

not hearing seashells

11.

Anonymity

comforting

ordered chaos

unexpected

long wooden tables

bar tops

smooth
slight patterns

of fancy

dismembering

memory(ies)

longing to

exist within

notes of

guitar strings

wafting music

on rooftops
12.

Destination

favours jokers

monkeys dance

free

orange icesicles

roam

crystalline-fantasies

chanting monks

enlighten

winter’s lonely

tango

lake-ice mirrors

escape route

of

possibilites
Waiting for my ride and contemplating existence in front of Medaille College
5:45 Thursday 9/23/2004

Watched cars never pick you up

fearful abandonment

Lin Hoy once said.

benches invite meditation -

worn weathered philosophies,

discover loopholes

Why am I here? Why am I still here

divine purpose or impaired memory,

doom or opportunity?

Howard’s express goes by

blue car…red car…green…
James Sanders

Interrobang Nocturnes

The Future
What does it mean for anything to be optional?
lubrication through a pronged absence
or the future with all its chins
I'm getting under McNugget covers
because when you ride in the
car you always adjust your
seat there is a pack of mints
you find yourself alone
around the extender, the affirmation
and removal of tattletale footage
intimate anthems clung
with an identity in it
still sleeping in its bed
and its still there.

The night-colored McNuggets pose

you always adjust your
floater in your odored
pose next to a lair-brained
substratum. Nuance muck in cloistered spiracles
the next time do not have snuck in
as an absent photograph
of loafing the water
split among various selves
as soon as possible
close to a closed surface
I'm getting under McNugget covers
that I am a rose in
identical people too who food tastes differently
through an impersonal tunnel un
certain with removed jive, that
I'm mine each time the mechanism clouds up
masking it gradually in the basement
still seeping in an imaginary pumpkin in place of a head burning
with mints nobody can in their figures
be there in their fingers' figures
like a shift in realism of the weather which
Kenny Chesney can take his shirt off in
like a statue with the genitalia kicked in enough
to be illegible in aspect only
someone must have noticed
in long shakes
until it becomes so specific
that it cannot be mitigated from the tense
where you always adjust your
immediate matter from there
and its still there.
Someone noticeably limbers the umpfing of details
that someone playing among the space bars when
they are the color of the
immediate matter from there
through an impersonal tunnel un
certainly branching where it does
not matter enough to them. Life
as an impersonal tunnel
with an additional application
examines each other
for more than anyone
from outside the tunnel
with a hair that comes in
from the cold and the
combination bonus. From each of them
as liquored up figure skaters
around the extender, the affirmation
that you belong in the faun line
with one of unlimited source detours
with an identity in it
that dishwasher-safe dishes are unable to remind
country singer with sad fro and fat legs
on the edge of mindless black water
walking willingly into the wide black
prosthetic arm sparkling from fantastic
lines to be believed, soon in TV-colored drizzle
as an absent photograph
including someone who looks like someone
who knows how the alternate universe will end up.
There does closet. There
where they are as soon as I dream
like a zipper on a dog
wearing a dog suit
except pursuant to a writhing glee
shaped like toilet paper in cold pink trees
thinks they're something
through an impersonal tunnel un
parallelily in the manner of unidentified leaves
with an identity in it
someone must have noticed.
Let's go back.
Someone came back for the utensil
someone must have noticed
wearing a dog suit
except without sequence, arranged like leaves
attached to no particular subset of branches and
from a direction from which no sound comes
in the manner of unidentified leaves
from a direction from which no sound comes.
And from that direction from which
an eight legged gender
examines each other
in their eyelidless expectancy and vents
from which the sound of noise escaping from itself
incline before eyelids and no-nos
in the shape of sharing in effort
of life's spangled joined idiom
leaves as a canceled idiom, drizzle
leaves in the lines of a potential mind leaves
until it becomes so specific
agrow in silhouette fuzz before dialtone
: the only thing that spelunks through the sparkly things
: intends the rings through which they leave
me in mind of the hoofed mind depends:
can the top banana fit in my bandana
with elation through central things
where they put their lips on the barely colored glass things
so that certain skin grows chirps against the cold blue weather
in the manner of a conversation milkily surrounding
as phantomish gunk beneath the breathless ginko beside
Mrs. Winners and its spike-colored booths
the one with the pink rooves and C's
with vertical blinds and the other forever
except without sequence, arranged like leaves
and feel a nice lozenge might help
the way millions of bunny rabbits with no eyes
before lemonade, taking it personally with ambiance
or where you always adjust your
prosthetic arm sparkling from fantastic
immediate matter from there, resume
with a jungle colored safety belt, but in the end
leaning into a toilet-shaped heart or its substitute
like a shift in realism of the weather which
results of a perspective, suddenly
unscarabable sheets although clarion burp pudding slat,
or the future with all its chins
to make yourself inch through the flame-colored aisles of the Kroger
again? The angle at something involuntary
as in separation uncertain superstructure waits
with a hair that comes in
in a way that has to be so difficult, monochromatic fog
with an identity in it
as idiosyncratic as a Dr. Pepper in a German car with underwear
near the ravine that baloney and syringelike sounds
the sound of a telephone ring assembles
the end of the week in weeds
or the future with all its chins
and elbow heart sails in waynelike roots and
future episodes to cross over
wet furs phrases trying fissure about it
like a family without a remote control, hued in me-colors
that assumes back, through someone who looks like me
walking willingly into the wide black
file cabinet into nudity
substratum. Nuance muck in cloistered spiracles
formed a lollipop from a similar conversation including
whether the androgynous force field got drenched
in the uscape barely widening enough for
much of the safety information presented in this brochure
except pursuant to a writhing glee
to be a combination of introspection and orthotics
like a statue with the genitalia kicked in enough
to be a zombie with a phantom limb and an extra utensil, encouragement
masking it gradually in the basement.
Which rooms should have a door?
McUcket nuggets creamy undercurrents instill wonderbra
with wooden wonder whether
it will clog whose box?: PS
combination bonus. From each of them
when together they are completely differently alphabets
of curvy daylight
moving together
like a zipper on a dog costume
there is no beginning and no end to only because
someone must have noticed.
Who are they
moving together
anyway? Maybe without the various periods
someone must have noticed.
Someone's mind goes many different ways
in the manner of a conversation milkily surrounding
with a hair that comes in
moving together
sunlight-like but with a dirty umlaut bent
less of me than in some
dialing a scented telephone
as an impersonal tunnel
except without sequence, arranged like leaves
that someone limited when
the indefinite article clubbed them
in a Midwestern accent with a wall of muffins or
simply parted like a wardrobe full of wet coats
underneath the various tampered
indirect laxative "momento" adjoined
around the extender, the affirmation
strobe overlain. The coming nearness in
strahl of sedimentary conversations inserts as elastic
without time spank, the plastic eyes of stuffed animals
attached to no particular subset of branches and
the program in Ballroom B of the hotel
certainly branching where it does
seeing these flowers against the
under the chair only increased and
the gold watch on a teddy bear going forward with
self-esteem problem: a private, meaningful
immediate matter from there, resume
without touching the doorknob in your responses to them
where they are as soon as I dream
in the manner of a conversation milkily surrounding
a mannequin with hand in silk grab bag
icily organized in which
you always adjust your
leaves in the lines of a potential mind leaves
not just the limbs to sleep as an adjunct
from which the sound of noise escaping from itself
stops over a baked potato. Multisurface
receptionists at the treeline but for longer
to be a combination of introspection and orthotics
shaped like toilet paper in cold pink trees
leaning into a toilet-shaped heart or its substitute
a few minutes ago, seriously becoming nightlike to open
across the room: it revises personality
the way millions of bunny rabbits with no eyes
look at a genderless mannequin in air conditioning
in a way that has to be so difficult, monochromatic fog
of the grin, or personal like plush scissors without a fulcrum
in it. Again, no one
that I am a rose in
whether mutual deadener like a quilt full of dominoes
can't vary with pale shouts outside
or intervals in recognizable tones
with an identity in it
as the phone violets across the
icily organized
eight legged gender
no fluorescent indications of other talking inside or out
violet not outside to talk
with one of unlimited source detours
themselves. No one without adjectives
results of a perspective, suddenly
themselves. No one without adjectives
but my own-- to be
as the phone violets across the
chocolate sound on their own way leaves of outside myself, then
if we quiver as enough of the same mind
including someone who looks like someone
or at the bottom of the escalator,
no fluorescent indications of other talking inside or out
as air= density of air in photograph
when together they are completely differently alphabets
like two unidentified arms accidentally enlarging together
to be a combination of introspection and orthotics
in the manner of a conversation milkily surrounding
whether in golden lines into it again. Then again
like a statue with the genitalia kicked in enough
from a direction from which no sound comes
largeness meticulously paraphrased
off which mannequins shine
inserts thingettes
when in cowls: how much can
the place have only an obscure rain
again. The angle at something involuntary
britches dew: to
the actual edited body, an impervious dimension where
to make yourself inch through the flame-colored aisles of the Kroger
until it becomes so specific
it bodies with luckish
ice lives
that people rain
vinyly
to narrate
complicit
it smiles not unlike parts
across the room: it revises personality
the light on someone else
except without sequence, arranged like leaves
attached to no particular subset of branches and
vary like life size zones or an ability
that assumes back, through someone who looks like me
the way millions of bunny rabbits with no eyes
do, inside-out.
Habits discolor with excessive verbs
like a family without a remote control, hued in me-colors
to cubicle outside tiny black air breaks awake
near the ravine that baloney and syringelike sounds
not matter enough to them. Life
dialing a scented telephone
formed a lollipop from conversation including
violet not outside to talk
but my own. Leaves, not unlike visible microphones
but autobiographical with a reported device:
where they are as soon as I slit
trochaic cupcakes
baloneylike
versions hose in
leaves in the lines of a potential mind leaves
but my own. Leaves, not unlike visible microphones
in choiry to habit there
attached to no particular subset of branches and
habits that insert of other people
until it becomes so specific
across the room: it revises personality
in opaque shrieks beeing around a zero
that it cannot be mitigated from the tense
as far as it can-- group secret in secondary trees
in shape of sharing in effort
whether mutual deadener like a quilt full of dominoes
or an inflatable ability without yucks
that can never be canceled
in the warning-colored restroom, honkless
the musical chairs of facial resemblances
sprained into phase that the hotel bedroom cascades silently
a spanish snowman with "substitute identities" although
head gone in head at thicket into song
like other segments of those opposite of snowmen
can't vary with pale shouts outside
as its deletion. Passengers gently silver
results of a perspective, suddenly
misfiring oblongness like in a phonic glint
out of breath, the oblong interior wall slick from something secret
and repeat sliding glass doors stare
joy of a city as light does ellipses
which in wet are choice-shaped flowers
that the immanent silhouettes july out as personas
with a hair that comes in
like hair on a persona that doesn't know us or
sparkle groins in it, except
with elation through central things
that are leaves in lost blocks of not-telling
except without sequence, arranged like leaves
within cubicles all marred by water damage. To repeat:
someone must have noticed.
Which rooms should have a door?
Phones make the air thicker
with a hair that comes in
again. The angle at something involuntary
booms
in opinion
combination bonus. From each of them
but my own-- to be
above from root of varnished incident
the sound of a telephone ring assembles
like a florist with frozen lips--
when moment will see your aisles
like the ankles of food
removed by long needles
the strucks of procrastination
rubbing buddy-butter
like manure in ballroom-dancing
in zoom and wee
to be less of each other.
I don't know why I always talk about McNuggets. It's
less of me than in some
microphone-colored lake midnight bounced
off of decline at a distance
or symptom of a thrum as an adult.
The wind's middle finger anthracites the alone
instead of deviating to the personal gadget
oozing personification
ivoryily intimizing the flutes of the Burger King glare,
that it cannot be mitigated from the tense
in long parts that belong to separate habits. . .

Each line is an air

from a direction from which no sound comes
cielinglike like hot beads in gooey trees that an impersonal tangles
as enforcement is tangled in childhood
each must of bot gone missing again.
The coffee table's synthetic excesses
keep the me-mops flip-flopping
no beige rug of the afternoon hotel room with
extra selection of towels of a mature instinct
to ever disappear in incidents anemones
habit like a selfish star, privacy-down. Each habit
like two unidentified arms accidentally enlarging together
when together they are completely differently alphabets
like other segments of those opposite of snowmen
near their tan-line-iversary but with substitute mouth:
without touching the doorknob in your responses to them
as it splits, undetected due to its contextual incandescence
but my own. Leaves, not unlike visible microphones
or pixie dust on the set of a western
in which several teenagers in parkas berate a fat kid
in the lobeyness of the food court
or at the bottom of the escalator,
incrementally less than
someone whom I was familiar with looking on
although his face blended in with the plants
that can never be canceled
out into the future tense to
tighten into euphemism
in starry daylight
the space bar sprouts deeper
in it. Again, no one
flickers of some popped synthesis
in angles completely white question marks
like groinless bees in a chapter about the open air
underlined at the last second
to occur
as if Grover had peanut butter in his fur
thinking in snow:
like suntan lotion on an oboe
let's begin or end
as an impersonal tunnel
but cannot.

[Every no]un is s[had]owed [by

e]verybody
we
enie roast with gong
and m[in]ds
a meninging in
as hours
Old Spice
locked hairnets in outer
phrases
the laugh end of eyesight
lamps
 hab[it] at
[in interval]
Doubles dovetail to pace
lairs made out of lunchlike outlines
fake marlin and a bottle of Boone's Farm on upholstery the color of a common pseudonym
to take it easy on the "beans"
snakes that need English
passing bits in two main rooms
a few minutes ago, becoming nightlike to
open, going through Scooby Doo's dirty diapers with adults
in angles completely white question marks
factor in quirky affection grouped at gray
results of a perspective, suddenly
as an impersonal tunnel
with regular variations passing and
in front. The ghosts of extra things
including someone who looks like someone
used shapes whose name matched
usually with only one unifying factor between
the way millions of bunny rabbits with no eyes
accept a certain midnight. The overpass was runny
like hair on a persona that doesn't know us or
with a hair that comes in
in angles completely white question marks
invisible except in front of the light
until it becomes so specific
you find yourself alone
like bubblegum in a glass of wine
or helicopters up in personal night
in which someone is
at this very moment with its unique edgelessness.
Striations background niceness
with regular variations passing and
all objects too light, such as happiness, but bend
without being able into open behavior
in which a vivacity in branches unslithers
an instant pocked by habit like
the way millions of bunny rabbits with no eyes
as pale as an ear
instead of deviating to the personal gadget
left suntan lotion in the florid valve
as its deletion. Passengers gently silver
us against a backlit background
that any person is in love
against. With each lucid fricative finning into the future
as a series of discarded habits
and us question marks at the kitchen table
like manure in ballroom-dancing
and vertical blinds against a silver fog
again, ear-shaped eyes
to be alive baa-like in pile form
misimprinted with a higher percentage of decisionmaking
and colorful balloons of various declensions
if we quiver as enough of the same mind
as another. Each sliver robing into its own picture
or variations of a fully-adjustable pulp for those
with an identity in it
that the kids with their eyes blacked out
erect a throat to suck out the metaphor
backlit perpetually with kudos
or at the bottom of the escalator,
inherent with Goldie Hawn
and conversational linoleum \as if your machine has been woof-waited
without touching the doorknob in your responses to them
whether in golden lines into it again. Then again
things this serious are ventilated
and steer
lateral mimicry from outline to outline
increasing thickness and liquid hokum
like inflatable quotation marks worn under the armpit
without a whole lot of output
or fresh instance in which compartments have been
the place have only an obscure rain
instead of deviating to the personal gadget
withering the personal rain
an f of little pebbles tangled in a public bathroom and emotion
in long parts that belong to separate habits. . .
do trees blue
over themselves? in quivering
droves? did we have conversations
that met a certain length
along the periphery doubling as an evergreen
outline of intermittent attitude tools:
its christmas on the public habit
like a numb map with fingers
that can never be canceled
as it, undetected due to its contextual incandescence
attached to no particular subset of branches and
chewing the fingernails of the fruit of my heart,
forms with them
the extra s

again. The angle at something involuntary

again. A chairless whisper
wrists the enamel
less of me than in some
by the temporary hush
like bubblegum in a glass of wine
is lush with a convincing portrayal of the future
someone must have noticed
in the lobeyness of the food court
out of breath, the oblong interior wall slick from something secret
in the social armpit: must it always
multiply insides
out into the future tense to
shift zero-colored water
the kind that the thicker touch each divided in ticks
likely to appear to purr so individual
that no other person grew out to the rumor
disassociated in stages from which
panthery in a fest of convincing portrayals from
optiplex with seagulls and x's whewing
whether in golden lines into it again. Then again
it's an emotional haired pita
on its insides
but to remove any chance
for decades
someone made a move for the door.
Which rooms should have a door?
There is a coast in immobile
glade of irony and hair
that a disgruntled enigma before the dark buffet
the fir trees in the episode
describe: a gorgeous occasion separates them
behind the curt swimming pool
a series of ways to use potato-like vowels
but autobiographical with a reported device:
dinky emissions as extra cooperation
to ever disappear in incidents anemones
by the temporary hush
the musical chairs of facial resemblances
bluff as if Charley Pride mangled the dosage
the monster pretends puns with Judy Garland air
that completely altered ceramic "genres" of alive
from her/him and
the third fitting genitalia of the imaginary friend
more equivalent than usual
to America's favorite home gym.
Why don't we smock from mood to mood
sacks of sound very green while the
members for midnight acceptance
to make a head lake
and loud tangled by localized water
the chain of cheerfulness crusted
as so far a vased typicalness most places don't have
in the "uncanny valley" where they're not quite real, but real enough to be uncannily
creepy
to mingle at the X's for eyes
like groinless bees in a chapter about the open air
can't vary with pale shouts outside
in it. Again, no one
in recognizable's floral cables could
spread an air in telling is not states
or not. The future is too common
an Oklahoma of the lifestyle in ways
without touching the doorknob in your responses to them
yet there was no difference
privately dark
like a zipper on a dog
from a direction from which no sound comes
or darkness spread hypothetically
through trees that wave
on its insides
against nothing
and nothing on its outsides.
For decades a film of murked up trees
as a series of discarded habits
deaf like chocolate on chairs
in a way that has to be so difficult, monochromatic fog
made itchy by neon
in zoom and wee
hot as its own map
enlarging each grown-up
into the end of a rainbow
but my own. What the first part
got up in leg spotted with seconds
like artificial caves in an articulate universe
that can get pretty confusing:
a spanish snowman with "substitute identities" although
happy, eats a danish thing in Subway
throughout the tautness in lacy conversation
a few minutes ago, seriously becoming nightlike to open
convincing portrayals from our snackish hearts
which in wet are choice-shaped flangers
on his insides
until it becomes so specific
its christmas on the plain
in them. Blam!
Ignoring is a stickiness of
everyone, welcome ifs!
Phones make the air thicker
than the future with all its blubbery fingers
as it splits, undetected due to its contextual incandescence
each finger like a zipper
down around someone's
intimate anthems clung
in front. The ghosts of extra things
vary like life size zones or an ability
multiplying as aware was cut
in long parts that belong to separate habits
summarized in a blaze of
habit like a selfish star, privacy-down. Each habit
privately dark
the lights have lies
removed by long needles
less of me than in some
chandelier surfing through part of me
and patience
whoever gets the closest to sincerity without going over
relying on three main tones
except without sequence, arranged like leaves
in a bathtub coated in vaseline
but my own. Leaves, not unlike visible microphones
soaped up Cobra Commander less than
I want the dulcet man boobs
flushed with moonlike rumors
+1
immediate as a tooth
enlarging each grown-up
florid with idea and oompf:
the program in Ballroom B of the hotel
where people kept their hands dark to keep their eyes in
again, ear-shaped eyes
and extended dirty rainbows
including someone who looks like someone
though I won't be there tonight
walking willingly into the wide black
pseudonym in widths extracting sharp detail
from the "th" sounds that sill under everything. It is
a spanish snowman with "substitute identities" although
its christmas on the public habit
to even me, in an inward robe next to the itchy sink
to ever disappear in incidents anemones
chewing the fingernails of the fruit of my heart
privately dark
around the extender, the affirmation
more personal when it widens out
as another. Each sliver roaming into its own picture
on its insides
that can never be canceled
as it splits, undetected due to its contextual incandescence
offers as its own example, the varying greens
in which several teenagers in parkas berate a fat kid
or provoke the filter
instead of deviating to the personal gadget
that becomes murky the closer you get to it
and its grooved but clandestinely lucid
outline of intermittent
glade of irony and hair
that is microphone colored to the "different" attributes
but my own-- to be
hidden at the same time
something else has me
a few minutes ago, seriously becoming nightlike to open
joy's soiled mind
things. I would like one of bro's
choo choos. The one with the
leaves in the lines of a potential mind leaves
to comport oneself with intricacy
and it's still there.
What does it mean for anything to be optional?
Tonight was a jelly
in angles completely white question marks
less of me than in some
pantomimelike things make me ho-ho in me-shapes, through a variation of toes
where they are as soon as I drizzle
with honkyless thisishness futureward
in them. Blam!
Why don't we go from mood to mood
like a florist with frozen lips--
to be alive baa-like in pile form
mostly picked out? or with yes-colored parallel from the inside
a few minutes ago, seriously becoming nightlike to
shift zero-colored water
that can never be canceled
it will clog whose box?: PS
whoever gets the closest to sincerity without going over
erased glass cubes behind friends. I'm a
lubrication through a pronged absence
as if Grover had peanut butter in his fur
but it was female
to ear in an "anonymous" cocoon
increasing thickness and liquid hokum
until it becomes so specific
invariably, "directed to an anonymous"
logic of the exclamation point
with mind's headless sparrow
that the kids with their eyes blacked out
lurch us forward
as hooraying analogues with cheeks
and no deliberate things.

[peering] as deliberate lemons

my ["the" eyes] as trees as light
back on itself
I have become a bunch of isolations
facing a light
with mind's headless sparrow
like a statue with the genitalia kicked in enough
to make a sound like a weather person without an asterisk
which is fine. Although persuasions with topical rooms
inform grooves within inclusive clouds
caboosing and hatching
off which mannequins shine
inside it was something else
nnnn
but baloneylike
the osculature of instinct
a leap in aroma
pluraled in do
and machine of beige
lurk us forward.

[the vacancy] quarrels

leaves steaming sparks
in paraphrase, and[is]h to
be there in their [fingers]' figures
[as paraphrased]
pall jive and leaves
experience both.
People do not fail to begin or end
but cannot.
By that I mean that
a scanning appears
perfect
facing a light
that faces everything else
+1
with elation through central things
to ever disappear in incidents anemones
out into the future tense to
remain there furied in a vex of snow
or later, details crease and bouy.
What does it mean for anything to be optional?
People do not fail to begin or end
in the lobeyness of the food court
in angles completely white question marks
or a christmas of vapors
that tap on an immobile door
that can never be canceled
but I'm concealed:
its christmas on the public habit
but I'm concealed:
the future
as a series of discarded habits
with regular variations passing and
as it splits, undetected due to its contextual incandescence
or not. The future is too common
but autobiographical with a reported device:
Mc(Hart Crane)nuggets stuff paleness
the extra "u" that
results of a perspective, suddenly
inflatable aggregate curdles
in opinion
can come lollipoplike out of them
the length of the narrator's rubbery
diagonal and redundant starlight:
a monosyllabic arborescence
throws its itch
at any time
and perhaps surplus them.
Habits discolor with excessive verbs
the future with all its chins
that hasn't changed its self-describing tubing
with joy's soiled mind things. I would like one of bro's
rigid contrails and make-believe tweed.

[pearly] faucet
[throws] witch
against a one-way [mirror]
as enough of that
[to] compor[t one]self with intricacy
against a one-way [mirror]
panthery in a fest of convincing portrayals from
the kid in the wheelchair in CHiPs
to the "the"-funnel-shaped interior monologue in
the actual edited body, an impervious dimension where
like a family without a remote control, hued in me-colors
they multiply against the cursive reluctance
in long parts that belong to separate habits. . .
Phones make the air thicker
with elation through central things
an ice of duration
and fringe, the wrist of every coda
an impression of the rim
that fast food makes us scream
without touching the doorknob in your responses to them
and without the endless sneezeguard
we slink gowns towards
and its still there.

[and likeness insistence

carefully fricative
my "the" eyes as trees as light

or about "the" l

ight]
A single moustache-colored Carly Simonish hesitation
flickers of some popped synthesis
sifting glee's Jabba the Hut on his tiptoes
to remove her/his part of this reticular America
against the autonomous crevices
the alphas of when you begin to recognize a personality
that becomes murky the closer you get to it
and without the endless sneezeguard
that personality's velvet tongs extend over
the loose ends remaining that couples love
in zoom and wee
like nosferatuish fingernails on an incalculable bedspread
stifling hubbub-colored chrysalises
the sound of a telephone ring assembles
and patience
likely to appear to purr so individual
but actually part of the fur of the future.
Some kind of hearts meth anther
anonymously pubic like a battered porpoise
someone plays piano behind
and something interchangeable
gulches an anonymous sunlight
with broomhandle sticking out of it
whether in golden lines into it again. Then again
although his face blended in with the plants
McNuggets taste like exclamation points
privately dark
and case sensitive
but slinkier than human flesh that
the third fitting genitalia of the imaginary friend
that can never be canceled
without a whole lot of output
throws its itch
out into the future tense
until it becomes so specific
in long parts that belong to separate habits. . .
or not. The future is too common
to be paraphrased.
You may be fibrously
someone whom I was familiar with looking on
in the lobeyness of the food court
an eight legged gender
that faces everything else
and extended dirty rainbows
by the temporary hush
walking willingly into the wide black
as pale as an ear
breeze: unlike the light less
where the light was
two mature figure-like habit nodes
privately dark
repeat around
extra selection of towels of a mature instinct
to injure a pace where the mind can't go
into its likeless aisles
again. The angle at something involuntary
the chain of cheerfulness crusted
in group form [ganglioning
in boings] and colorful balloons of various declensions
improves with option about the muscle or
an instant pocked by habit like
formations, the formation in
outline of intermittent attitude tools:
advanced artifacts of clearness under new lines
except without sequence, arranged like leaves
describe: a gorgeous occasion separates them
and the alphine hooey of real persons veleurely
as it splits, undetected due to its contextual incandescence
conveniently in the outermost receptacle
like hair on a persona that doesn't know us or
someone with his pants down in a midnight Eckerd’s and gloves
someone must have noticed.
The ramble of the hot dog in the ostrich like device
reminds me of my face when
the occasion muu muus up behind it
in creases of oboeable banteretta
knocking around honey with
largeness meticulously paraphrased
like a florist with frozen lips--
every coffee table has a Clark Coolidge end
and friendship flabs across the likecicles salivating over the lake
that becomes murky the closer you get to it
until it forms a single episode in which a starless night lifts
by the temporary hush
of some arborescent inset into something darker
doing to me in throngs in

Eleven Episodes of the Same Thing

1. Periods get to the outline of omitted future. Riding around looking at

xmas lights having to go to the bathroom. A hulled happiness vibrates cues,
out into the future tense to "are" its furry new nettles. Noon l's.

2. The food slid thru me like a giant caterpillar through a balloon shaped like
an animal that food slid through in a urinal. The caterpillar is urgent. Things
go of ornament. A series of clear hearts the fat kid with great hand/eye
coordination. Among the bata. Batroom rhymes with sandwich in it.

3. What do you get for the person who has everything? Don't say true love
because I said they had everything. Predictably, the deliberate thing shone
like scabbarded underwear that the ocean shone under. The seagulls
alluvially looping in silver shudders. People remember pune.

4. My thumblike substance has lingered the neutral like a gerund in a

swimming pool. The air oompahd. Neuter-colored corridors facing an
anonymous light in which I hope we can be friends like rain on a disco ball.
Or if not, at least a zipper on a banshee.

5. Chimpy McNuggets fork the pole personality in human toos. They're not

the same thing. Part

iciples of the stars and teeth of the interior thum
 b. Burnt out slots in which slick black stuffed animals
hover with big bottoms and drip. We squish our preposition together.
Administer wiggle.

6. To mingle at the X's for eyes our handshakes twinkle like Doritos under
the sheets. People have chests for arms. For ares, very patterns. For patterns,
pester the poignant sphincters that be grippin from transparent knocked
urnes. A handshake is a part of the pee-yew panky. Part the spread-eagle glee.

7. We seem to be smirking at the pod. Our eyes are blacked out by an

unevenness of the hug just beyond the senses. The trees suddenly get heavier
with an earlike widening. They have an alive latency.

8. Underneath this shirt the color of a surplus nipple dropped in the ocean,
something that would be blimpish is factual in its undercabulary. I get out of
the shins in February. The lessons are shiny from covered in dolorhea. The
ceiling smells like a blimp from which alien genitalia hang. The lights are
food.

9. Mrs. Winners and its spike-colored booths is a freshwater aquarium full of

vocalists. Udders underneath. The future is separated by slippery habits.
The unanimous dipstick.

9. The xmas lights bleed unlike privately dark into them. The recognizes.
The likeness with their eyes blacked out in like two unidentified arms
accidentally enlarging divided things together. The lights dampen in I've
feathers.

9. The trees all made "me" sounds. Night all made feathers. Versions hose
in unanimous pleasure selving uncut gestures. Lush rest holes, burst whiles.

[The future] is too common

to have option
so
its [slides] are in starless estuary
in [them]
in long [parts] that belong to separ[at]e [habits]
like fried chicken cradled by the tooth fairy
in categories
behind them that
disassociated in stages from which
the rain fell in different rains
across the cloudy bulbs of the cityscape
until it becomes so specific
it chooses its silverness from among
the limbs of the sky more
than the future with all its blubbery fingers
that blend together in flexible pastures
until it becomes so specific
like bubblegum in a glass of wine
unusually erect like a velvetly imploding banjo
in a groving not
that is the same thing when its asleep
but my own-- to be
out into the future tense to
figures in an equivalent piped-in
thoroughness, its definite trickle
tickling the context with a simplicity a shivering flashlight
on your insides
like a bracelet around a pickle
whispering to it
from her/him and
the space bar sprouts deeper
as a series of discarded habits
in long parts that belong to separate habits. . .
McNuggets taste like exclamation points
from which no sound can escape and
that can never be canceled
through the arbitrary boundaries of the family
and out into the variegated recesses
and patience
as if Grover had peanut butter in his fur
but S shaped
and midnight had chatter in its fur
but S shaped
if things
blacked out by an unevenness of the hug
and is like
a hug that shadows itself
but baloneylike
going choir on
logjam of the exclamation point
and its still there.
Does Emmylou Harris gobble jello?
more equivalent than usual
punctuating the Tribbles with an ebony envelope knife
in other words: making attention an external growth
like a preposition in the sentence "Was it all Bobby's dream?"
Habits discolor with excessive verbs
an aural weather, a particular variety of narrowing
described from a purpose of rays already intertainted
underlined at the last second
by an evolving clown suit
rostrumified for a lifetime of enameled
personal plunging:
like an eclair on a back-hoe
a cloud of inference at its huggiest
to ever disappear in incidents anemones
according to circumstances
something else has me
the length of the narrator's rubbery drapes
the color of hot dogs and enthusiasm
in starry daylight
and earshot
chewing the fingernails of the fruit of my heart
to eject or nudge thing
from person to person
and machine of beige to
belong to a group skin
concluding as a misspelled skin
and its grooved but clandestinely lucid
extra arm that smells like a flower in a glove compartment
whether you with other body areas
mostly picked out? or with yes-colored parallel from the inside
moistened from instance
each finger like a zipper
in starry daylight
at this very moment with its unique edgelessness.
The bottom of my food is tinkling
whether with the gist branchings glow over
without a whole lot of output
like a hair removal kit hibernating in a potted plant
or pixie dust on the set of a western
or whether with the lumps of patient tattletales
walking willingly into the wide black
words that widen
living alone in an electronic glade
like winged monkeys with Annette Benning costumes on
that twilight's bulbous flutter barfs
intact in jointless drums
for flocks of emphases
withering the personal rain
upwards through nightlike maybes
or the future with all its chins
flagging through inches of ticklish
personality which no longer involves
an abstract spree of lumpy pylons palmettoing personality
candid drips
thugging in glow:
its muddy baritone even more remainder
nubbing with fingers
the way millions of bunny rabbits with no eyes
in opinion
like a family without a remote control, hued in me-colors
sit among me-colored beanbags
and its still there.
Let's go back.
People do not fail to begin or end
around the Big Value Menu
except that replicates
lubrication through a pronged absence
and a section from which you can never return
or veneer by association
deepness thongs in
formations, the formation in
convincing portrayals from our snackish hearts
fidget that frescoes over us.
Let's go back.

No, they don't

another one
near mush self
to grasp as spunk
the doggie bag for syncope
that hoses off
into the future
in same
the facting snowman
pinker than the sine qua non
an imitation of holes in
condensing to or more people
things each with a plural aura
like nerved cinderblocks
and we always have too many legs
though some on the inside
twist away
like a clown with excessive fluid sipping
the chair lip hair? The hair of pleasure in
inflatable aggregate curdles
dribbles at the intersection of sets
with a hair that comes in
baloneylike
each finger like a zipper
or continuing
my arm bone connected to my thing gown
down around someone's
choo choos. The one with the
facing a light
throws its itch
into the stars itchy fingers
by the temporary hush
that is the same thing when its asleep
around the Big Value Menu
and thumbs of
diagonal and redundant starlight:
words that widen
baloneylike
less of me than in some
fidget that frescoes over us:
two lakes separating
passing bits in two main rooms
until it becomes so specific
it joins at the husk you hear like yourself
as if Grover had peanut butter in his fur
and he tried to use peanut butter to get it out.
I'm getting under McNugget covers
in creases of oboeable banteretta
and something interchangeable
as it splits, undetected due to its contextual incandescence
to ensure what I shape to crisp
when you are how you always adjust your parent
figures like a chicken realism wet of
irony in choir
and human toos in preposition
in front. The ghosts of extra things
make broken sounds
nobody can never figures, be there
in their fingers weather
which Kenny Chesney can take a shot that like a statue of aspect only
except without sequins, oreod like leaves
there in their eyes’ comma
whose I dream
like suntan lotion on an oboe
cut in two.
Cutting a pro-rated cheese
we slink gowns towards
a grown man with a gobble
with on identity in it
on Toto's plenty Hee Haw box
and colorful balloons of various declensions
like groinless bees in a chapter about the open air
with groins in it, except
privately dark
like exclamation points peeled back and smothered
and something interchangeable
likely to appear to purr so individual
until it forms a single episode in which a starless night lifts
the interiors of opaque black balloons
less of me than in some
effect of the rubato of the
solitary in the grapple
that the kids with their eyes blacked out
but I'm concealed
leave a rehearsed ring:
the future is too common
to occur
and its still there
and extended dirty rainbows
fidget that frescoes over us
including someone who looks like someone
and its antonym
doodling occasion in droves
moistened from instance
inflatable aggregate curdles
as if Grover had peanut butter in his fur
still able to chest pass under fluorescent lights
and its grooved but clandestinely lucid
droves? did we have conversations
to mingle at the X's for eyes
in intermezzo in the block
and to be smirking at the pod
reminds me of my face when
the occasion muu muus up behind it
but it was female
against a one-way mirror
double the interior
doing to me in throngs in
but I'm concealed:
another example of the secting
and fringe, the wrist of every coda
hidden at the same time,
motifs and keesters coordinated through the third person
a series of ways to use potato-like vowels
against the autonomous crevices
the future
doodling in and out of
in zoom and wee
instead of deviating to the personal gadget
and its grooved but clandestinely lucid
unpronounceable puppet muck
that someone playing among the space bars when
like a statue with the genitalia kicked in enough
to be visible on rayed are
and inform grooves within reclusive clouds
flickers of some popped synthesis
my "the" eyes as trees as light
from a direction from which no sound comes
leaves in the lines of a potential mind leaves
hidden at the same time as it scrunches forward
with an identity in it
that plops and sprays more
like hot dogs full of sour grapes
than the future with all its blubbery fingers
as paraphrased
that faces anything else
from a direction from which no sound comes
according to circumstances
and leaves that tummy and slant
invariably, "directed to an anonymous"
fluorescence in the afternoon.

Someone is sneaking around outside your back window right now.

Ignoring is a stickiness of
the vanishing twin
and ignoring is a stickiness of
formations, the formation in
the future with all its chins or the future with all its chins
spread an air in telling is not states blacked out by an unevenness
of the hug
yet there is no difference until it becomes so specific
enlarging each grown-up and clenching
made so itchy by neon that it cannot be mitigated
from the tense
and accumulates privately dark
factually in an outline that has shrunk
back upon
a latency itself in jugs
someone must have noticed slimy and crony-shaped
in the lobeyness of the food court. . . and its still there. . .

Mc(Hart Crane)nuggets stuff paleness

the length of the narrator's rubbery
drapes
in group form
ganglioning
among the yabbadabbadooish
emergence to flab time frame
that means in every moment
there is a tree-like
description of a person
dilated with quiet
but S shaped
across the room: it revises personality
baloneylike
over themselves? in quivering
made so itchy by neon
leaves steaming sparks
as pale as an ear
leaves in the lines of a potential mind
leaves
rubbing buddy-butter
like exclamation points peeled back and
smothered
by a vanishing twin
that the vanishing twin
with elation through central things
has lingered the neutral
tighten into euphemism
from the "th" sounds that sill under
everything. It is
that extra shrug
tickling the context with a simplicity a
shivering flashlight
passing bits in two main rooms
facing a light
instead of deviating to the personal gadget
the one with the amputated rail
and goo pooling behind it.
The same thing happening over and over again
is not repetition. Goofily.
Who are they
anonymously pubic like a battered
porpoise
with broomhandle sticking out of it
with mints nobody can in their figures
fringe introspect
that the vanishing twin
in a computational snare
as a series of discarded habits
that I am a rose in
an insert
in it? Again, no one
is everywhere
that faces everything else
without a whole lot of output
means mannequins as milked habit
when together they are completely different
alphabets
 of some arborescent inset into something
darker
an insert
tightening criteria
whether you were there
and something interchangeable
carefully fricative
like two unidentified arms accidentally
enlarging together
with fact as a goal
that the kids with their eyes blacked out
opened it up
except without sequence, arranged like leaves
mannequins possess between their gender
forgetting
that the immanent silhouettes july out as
personas
and december back again
but to remove any chance
that no other person grew out to the rumor
with an identity in it
back on itself
the mannequins tinkle doorway into
and its still there.
People do not fail to begin or end
as in replaced in habit
offers as its own example, the
varying greens
against the autonomous crevices in choiry to habit there
and patience back on itself
double the interior but to remove any chance
to injure a pace where the mind can't go until it feels long enough
it chooses its silverness from among
slivers of giant mesh
like a family without a remote control, hued in me-colors
again, ear-shaped eyes
and eye-colored minds
to mingle at the X's for eyes
the quotation marks were too tight
two mature figure-like habit nodes
and human toos in preposition
and earshot
or not. The future is too common
to mature figure-like habit nodes
that hasn't changed its self-describing tubing
in long parts that belong to separate habits
the color of hot dogs and enthusiasm
is starlight
off which mannequins shine
where they aren't
as an absent photograph
and it's still there.

sharing taxes the

lar[genes]s meti[cul]ously paraphrased
[between] you
in them
k[no]cking around honey with
hearts noodles
to contort [ones]elf with [intricacy]
they enter
to go around
hugging powder
repeat around
and patience
wakes personality at the edge
as enough of that
as both of them
or an inflatable ability without yucks
vary like life size zones or an ability
a series of ways to use potato-like vowels
in scuba gear
around the Big Value Menu
that valves in and out
shirks of joy
that becomes murky the closer you get to it
and something interchangeable
like fried chicken cradled by the tooth fairy
whoever gets the closest to sincerity without going over
or later, details crease and bouy.
People have chests for
thoroughness, its definite trickle
its christmas on the public habit
of some arborescent inset into something darker
in opinion
where they are as soon as I drizzle
habit like a selfish star, privacy-down. Each habit
throws its itch
until it becomes so specific
or both
is that a yes
they all wear the same person
they shatter in frowns
an ice of duration
if things
the like on
in long parts that belong to separate habits
the eggnog is snoring
mannequin things
inherent with Goldie Hawn
to ear in an "anonymous" cocoon
underlined at the last second
in starry daylight
dialing a scented telephone
with their eyes blacked out
describe: a gorgeous occasion separates them
orchestriated windsockless anemone
and its antonym
ulterior beehives
in it. Again, no one
behaves against the
doing to me in throngs in
more personal when it widens out
its christmas on the public habit
its mixmaster on the laffahol
the grabby mass-napper
conveniently in the outermost receptacle
baloneylike
and to be smirking at the pod
low growth
our preposition together
and extended dirty rainbows
the mannequins
got up in leg spotted with seconds
again. The angle at something involuntary
has warm
mannequin misspelled across the
personality which no longer involves
and its still there
including someone who looks like someone
or veneer by association
off which mannequins shine
but S shaped
an alive latency
elastic vacancy
the electric veins oblonging airless trees
repeat around
larynxless hairnet
by slippery habits
rejoys in
an instant pocked by habit like
doing to me in throngs in
and its antonym
in no particular verdure.
Have you computed glum
to have option
versions hose in
personality which no longer involves
emphatica
and something interchangeable
to inclog glee's various v-shapes
the light lumped with the sea
the water has a neck
McSensuous
cliffing the slither such
down around someone's
over themselves?
load white sky

The Lobby
figures like a chicken realism webbed of
moving together--
there in their eyes’ comma
the exact long logs
that the kids with their eyes blacked out
It had to pet us through that thing
There seems to be mooing on a genderless tether
The Same
Does peep go the McGugget
No really
flickers of some popped synthesis
to comport oneself with intricacy
McNuggets taste like exclamation points
in long parts that belong to separate habits
How long is my McNugget
masks an underlying fear
trees large decelerating
itch all over the model iota
out into the future tense to
or continuing to
part of standard procedure
joined at the stuff
except without sequence, arranged like leaves
without them

The Personality
Much of the safety information presented in this brochure
is for people who aren't humid
again. Habit and occasion
loom intricately

The McNugget
The mind is its own twin
until it feels long enough

The Lobby
Accept that replicates
and patience
loom intricately
and shenaniganize handpump
diddling thawed
in interval
and tighten of the layer
Mr. Potatohead's Y-front
outline of intermittent attitude tools:
McNuggets taste like exclamation points
tasting exclamation points
accepts lengthening anonymous things
shopping carts abandoned in
eyeless xmas trees
and its grooved but clandestinely lucid
elisions to individual roccades
that the kids with their eyes blacked out
and cloacas kicked in
coalesce among cheesegrater colored skies
scabbing a Coke
like slabs of instant
in them
improves with option about the muscle or
p-noun
as paraphrased
inside it was something else
that the sliding glass doors unified
something lunar rid of verbatim
or veneer by association
the strings think in and
multiply insides.

I like glistening to all the hair there is

Doo-dah-like

Things snare smiles the facts

an extra s

I share an eye with everyone

Looks like we're

phoned.

Habit and occasion

cocoon together, flares to likeness
I was left alone in
and spray to
forget the plexus of sheer size
xxx
decides, electrics up in a cul-de-sac
extending the robo of winter
against a one-way mirror
receives whiffle mental flakes
baloney with little doors
realigning in
prosthetic arm sparkling from factual
as paraphrased
slivers of giant mesh
spacing off a woken
ellipses was a hump
intimate anthems clung
the future on
to mingle at the X's for eyes
doodling occasion in droves
so-and-so locked in
like a sock-puppet full of cough syrup

I am format in extra where I am

and caudate parts of a family
only initially
ceiling tiles
feeling up commas
Clorox and dumbbells
echo stump
that personality's velvet tongs extend over
left wet fat
the Land Shark whacks at
the extra "u" that
as it splits, undetected due to its contextual incandescence
but S shaped
to diversify
habit like a selfish star, privacy-down. Each habit
has its own lips
the night off
motifs and keesters coordinated through the third person
but up from above
de-cloaks over the
stock footage of rejoicing
and furniture and Kleenex
the blue eyes of the pillars
No, they don't
"(Lieu Eyes)" starts playing in the background
and out into the variegated recesses
and carpeted in owled panic
that is the same thing when its asleep
in another category
an instant pocked by habit like
a mannequin that swallowed the canary
in group form
except without sequence, arranged like leaves
they multiply against the cursive reluctance
off which mannequins shine
in a bathtub coated in vaseline
and astonishment!
budding jewels
in an inhuman banana
figures in an equivalent piped-in
personal plunging:
I live on my own twin
joined at the stuff
whispering to it
by someone else.
All the sky is leaves
and the broken is gray
logic of the exclamation point
[Telephone rings]
leery of the intended effects
I jive on my own twin
the fruit of Mr. T
whispering to it
certainly branching where it does
halfway down
with their eyes blacked out
afloral
in them.
The rhombus quacks.
The mints leave chairs
in starry daylight
indoors
The mist as sleeve
There must be a parallel
a series of ways to use potato-like vowels
and something interchangeable
most huggable
down around someone's
thorough hiss its definite trickle
not just the limbs to sleep as an adjunct
to which the limbs slip deep pills in
to quaver
illegible little decembers
cropped intermittently
and without the endless sneezeguard
joined aisle
in groin eyes
going choir on
to quaver
the like on
in night heaves, in them

We all touch our unanimous dipstick

and the big globe glowing out of control
forms with them
harnessed by stand-ins
to a chumping crescendo
about either one
it chooses its silverness from among
a pooped mindset
down around someone's
eight legged gender
that whitens out around the edges
that widens in cloisterly pop-locking
that mouse-ears on inertia
across the room: it revises personality
and goo pooling behind it
the panorama in the lodge
or its reflection in the
gravity was pink
enlarging each grown-up
someone tomorrow
vaseline in
immediate as a floppy
snows human eyes
it joins at the husk you hear like yourself
fudging the lodge
that you must hear
yourself, you must be
near mush self
muffled left.
The Lobby
The room was partially hair. Vienna sausage Hyundai male or female?

The Lobby
An instant pocked by habit like. A limp is light. A like a light. Line lineness.

The Habits
vanishing sunlight-like but with a dirty umlaut bent between male and female.
Between air that you must hear yourself.

The Same
joy of a city as light does ellipses, joy throws its everywhere itch entire hair.

The Habits
Lateral mimicry from outline to outline-- glass trips in odor-- acquires a different
limb made of sleep-- + 1-- then occasion as left-justified music.

The Habits
The word fitting genitalia of the imaginary friend

The Future
where people kept their hands dark to keep their eyes in

The Personality
The ventriloquism of nerved cinderblocks except without sequins, oreod like leaves.
The Personality
I like how I'm still there
is starlight
off which mannequins shy

The Habits
joined at the stuff
splinters
slimy and crony-shaped
practice
as a series
I was cloned by the way my rhythm walks
I'm a loom is hand
no shine nerf fork
There's a scene there.
We are a science cream
Me so corny
the one with the amputated rail

The boogey man's taking care of that for me

sparkle groins in it, except
the nearness practices a setting
a bell in the nuggets snuggle
slunk in
moistened from instance
in this
and this except that
the color of hot dogs and enthusiasm
crammed down separate starlights
like underwear in a gumball machine thrown in the ocean
the interiors of opaque black balloons
ping off of
in leaves that feel male in female feelers
but cannot

The Same
hiss the limbs to unanimous
harnessed pooped someone's gender
the edges without secret.
Room the goo each grown-up
someone tomorrow.
Lips get through.
The jones makes a mule
out of what they rub in families and
the future is too common
to blur
or make people thougher
I'm shower
I know a lot of people
Their cottage cheese is below them
and something interchangeable
and likeness insistence
and it's still there.

Sunset
until it becomes so specific
all Lionel Richie needs is one more soul
moaned candy
----------sometimes a bunny
gets a sexy vest--- himself hex--- a baloney
is a chest/ Thus, lullipop.
Thuck
an alive latency
light and light
and light
facing a light
Personality which no longer involves
John Q. Relaxed-Fit churns in
nor do they
they all wear the same person
and human toos in preposition
light in
around the Big Value Menu
figures in an equivalent piped-in
Yakkety Sax.

Sunset
the third fitting genitalia of the imaginary friend
through the arbitrary boundaries of the family
-=--- mist h
The black trees larynx them
Various small likes nexusing
nightleaves alive
on the other side of you
--------- check
cowboy boobs
in paraphrase, andish to
option ---------- everything wind
goes wood. Every
buffet has a lair factor.
Everything has a pun in its patties.

Sstarlight
You have to be elliptical to have a lifestyle
We are just inserted with sound
and out into the variegated recesses
the blue of the golden TV
anonymous holding golden holster
gown
a loster golden and log
as a series of discarded habits
and familiar golden narrator
Every buffer has a share factor.
The hairier the better

The Personality
People do not fail to begin or end
its christmas on the public habit
but cannot

The Personality
Every noun is shadowed by
another one
or more
 habit at

them that they

carbonate

and is like

before the
m

The Habits
Thuck
pall jive and leaves
joy's septic lariat
a cloister infected with elvisy
a chinese finger trap
a fastened is
my brain to
has a scene at last
with fact as a goal
implodes to make a silhouette
definitely a melody
that lards a peek
reassemble velvet windshields
and this except that
in privacy
baloneylike
baloney with little doors
and goo pooling behind it
someone must have noticed

It takes a word to know a word

without them
wand towards
the mannequin McNuggets fed
in lateral
in same
so its slides are in starless estuary
the grabby mass-napper
omelets between
like a microphone banana peel hugged by far
elastic vacancy
slopped over

The Same
The sun shivers the
trees
in privacy
its plump chandelier and
vaseline in
to max
the sound of one ear swapping
armpits with pants on
1/3 of a green black car air
not to decide
compound thigh
and steer
and is like
they're here
or is between
my brain to
them with habits
fastened is
and out.
Garnish with droid
Not a thing with droid
aleph toy urge.

(Lieu Eyes)
This story is a habit
as both of them
They all wear the same person
Someone all shares poised, all gravy
shirks of joy
flab hollow
The fills confused
the mule log
in lows of eyes
The shack of berets
sit among me-colored beanbags
until it becomes so specific
opened it up
the eggnog is snoring
in long electric strips
its snoring in
including someone who looks like someone
labeled in
carefully fricative swarm
has warm
to occur
but cannot

The Future
All the exits are mocked
in backstory lifting on the
magnetized flipper bangling indifference
thousands or rain
like the ankles of food
under an invisible doorbell
circles flat
and colorful balloons of various declensions
are black and slant
and midnight had chatter in its fur
with mints nobody can in their figures
and patience
v the double outline
back on itself
in an outline that has shrunk back upon
the like on
the light on someone else
where there is no light
and its still there
with all its fallible noodles
fogging weable people
carefully fricative
vathing
similar interferences
that people rain
in option
with elation through central things
widgeting away from
the sticky rail that says
"I'm a sticky rail!"
in starlight
and phases
solitary in the grapple
or continuing
into the stars itchy fingers
like Frankenstein ('s monster) with a hairy trombone
but it was female
from her/him and
from person to person
flickers of some popped synthesis
and thud
that hoses off
until it becomes so specific
on the insides
spread an air in telling is not states
unable to verify
an insert
or together
and something interchangeable
until it forms a single episode in which a starless night lifts
in opinion
like an eclair on a back-hoe
memorized into
to belong to a group skin
and eye-colored minds
off which mannequins shine
as a series of discarded habits
the length of the narrator's rubbery drapes
in long parts that belong to separate habits
against a one-way mirror
rivuletly
ored in pings
or robotically
more erotic
than slowly obscuring
the telephone-colored quantity
with shadows from other rooms.
The night-colored McNuggets pose
rain at the end of lifelike earshot
as both of them
the musical chairs of facial resemblances
resemble velvet windshields
off which mindlike things hang
habitatlike
and stuffed animals exchange a special saliva
that pauses
slopped poses
to mingle at the X's for eyes
toes
it joins at the husk you hear like yourself
between two giant inflatable parentheses
with fur on its insides
and nothing on its outsides
but the whistling of starlight
in starlight.
The future is separated by slippery habitats

The Personality
Ventriloquism for Dummies:
Every tiny word pinks a though up
I don't know
Zim's Crack Cream creaks through everyone
They all wear the same person
and its antonym
anonymously pubic like a battered porpoise
as both of them
too fudgy to be believed

The Future
Each time it ends with the same thing
The future resists something between it
until it becomes so specific
together again
Phones make the air thicker
Two people in Zesto's vanilla together
in fine daze
texture chime floors
grass in the cemetery and hamburgers
icily lichenness
went in or where it hit.
Where do you plug at in it
remain there furied in a vex of snow
and flubbed in purr:
head gone in head at thicket into song
with a hundred hands in the head still sleeping against it
in thin kink about
multiply insides
in still things with overly relaxed exteriors
and mints

The Future
Obscure inserts
out prissy at
intimate anthems clung
doing to it in throngs in
and extended dirty rainbows
consecutively relaxed
in it. Again, no one
includes themselves in the O
they shatter in frowns
the loose ends remaining that couples love
in fat back and continuum
except that replicates
the mind is a terrible thing to wait on
the cold is edible in things
the things putt legibly
but actually part of the fur of the future
lines to be believed, soon in TV-colored drizzle
and an equation of
the like on
candid drips
and familiar garbling narrator
inserts thingettes
if things
make a yes sound
by slippery habits
Realism has a rusty edge
elliptical by the hook in it
looks less than that
euphoria in a holster
in angles completely white question marks
without a whole lot of output
out of character
in sour physique
gasoline and mints

McGuggets storm full of snuck

upholster association
across the room: it revises personality
something else to me
if they were like that
to eject or nudge thing
to noon things
you hear a physical self
or an inflatable ability without yucks
log habit in a reverse way
the buffet has a growing sigh
an ampersand is fudgesicle bound
the like on
off which mindlike things hang
to make a sound like a weather person without an asterisk
that hoses off
an insert
made so itchy by neon
out into the future tense
and its inclement mechanism
again. The angle at something involuntary
sparkles in grays
that people rain
in an outline that has shrunk back upon
leaves in the lines of a potential mind leaves
but to remove any chance
and accumulates
a fractured
latency
that the kids with their eyes blacked out
in lows of eyes
has its own lips
the color of hot dogs and enthusiasm
enlarging each grown-up
not to look back
until it becomes so specific
joy's septic lariat
that no other person grew out to the rumor
by slippery habits
that a hole has
left wet fat
in opinion
in an inhuman banana
splinters
the length of the narrator's rubbery
medieval air conditioner
whispering to it
banana to banana
but up from above
all feel and
habit like a selfish star, privacy-down. Each habit
moistened from insistence and
McSensuous
emphatica
and likeness insistence
joined at the stuff
as a series of discarded habits
and fringe, the wrist of every coda
frigid with
Mr. Potatohead's Y-front
in group form
our preposition together
in still things with overly relaxed exteriors
All poems are an and or an or
or both
Andrew Nightingale

ALIEN PROPULSION SYSTEMS

Alien propulsion, a blue sky hovering

where there's capital. Money markets leveraging
time zones. The fronts pass over and hell money
prints itself. Jet streams open idle satellite links.
Pre-emptive information flows. The structures
feed on the inert foreign body. Getting nowhere
helps an alien to move. Aimlessness
fuses arrival and departure. Capital fills
the troposphere. Travel isn't always goal oriented.

Unknown forces, buoyant but akin to

a false consciousness. Foreign subjects
make apt purchases. Unleash forces that propel
uninhabitable bodies to mutilated excess.
Humiliation brings the spent home.
Back into exile. Limits on repetition
are patrolled by unprofitable deaths.
Autoasphyxiation is not possible in the mall.
Not among the plastic shadows.
Subjects late night shopping. Warranties
weeping with opalescent speed.

Reverse engineered, power becomes a network

of differentiated vectors. Advanced methods
made available discretely. The seat
where the traveller sits has been converted.
The vessels have been tested. The craft analysed.
Failure relies on gravity and a glass ceiling.
To rise is to decline fixed expression.
Craft cannot easily be replicated. The power
breaks down. No one position sources contacts.

Impossibly hard, yet weightless and bendy

like kitchen foil. A gaze that can transport.
A flash of white light picks up each passenger.
Takes them places far away. Gives them life.
Wishful thinking cannot penetrate
their chic shiny solitude. Every movement
is a kind of transmission. An articulation
of irreconcilable differences. Following
is not allowed. And kicking leaves no dent.

An autopsy, taking place on all these

broken machines. With propellant leaking
copiously everywhere. Broken vessels
are still vessels though they carry nothing.
Function defines them by exclusion. Dissection
recreates usefulness. New interfaces
are assembled between blade and cut.
New machines being proven by borderline leaks.
Playing proper part in society.
Autopsies are fully functional.
Successors driven by precise intrusion.

Death erotics, built on an attraction

to dizzying heights. The possibilities of
chief executives. Borne up by the chariots
of sharp pecuniary gods. Perhaps they have
good hearts. Suffer oversized livers. Perhaps
they bring us closer to the stars. We should
continue to sacrifice our children. They
still need gainful employment. Something
to aim for. A seat in business class.

Carbon wants, flowing freely into a void

of disambiguation. The triangulated void
is unrecognisable. It's been called
many different things in its time.
Acceleration tries to fill it. Failure
embodies it. It has given birth to
Structured Design Methodologies.
Complexity past the point of no return.
The void sees its reflection. Only
its own reflection. Can't be far enough away.

The others, tasting the physics of ready cash

grow lazy. They court the corporate classes. It's like
earning interest on someone else's current account.
Who would give that up. Someone else's chips.
Stolen chips taste better and trigger
powerful responses. Stealing time from
alien labour enriches. You can stay
healthy longer. Avoid bringing death closer.
Conspiracy theories excuse your morality.

Being here, as everyday users of

the anthropic principle. A self-consciousness
that's never superseded. Meritocracy is one way
of concealing an illegal propellant. Giving
the others a chance. Letting them fail.
The top of the ladder requires snake handling.
Moves not listed in the book. The torque
twists the mechanism. Right out of shape.
There is no going back.

Spotted youth, the guidance locks on

to something new. A First Course
in Marketing. Travel and otherness rolled
into techniques to shift product. A unit
powered by precession. A manufactured freshness.
The sense of newness leaves resemblance
as exhaust. Vapour trails of misplaced simulation
fading. These young men occupy themselves.
It can't be healthy. Discharging into
a discovered space.

Paradoxical hope, the acquirement

of alien systems for self-development.
Instantly something else becomes alien.
Perhaps acquirement is not the thing perhaps
it's wonder. How natural processes are distorted.
Used and manipulated. And yet
the manipulation is itself quite natural.
As banknotes are part of nature. Always going
to manifest themselves. Work the same schemes.
We give birth to aliens.

Your pocket, they say it lives in your pocket.

Dark matter in the fluff. A ten quid black hole
been through the wash. Now you can go shopping.
And become someone. Chaos chemicals interfere
with a good quiet runner. Nothing
is left on the outside. No epiphany
or unexplained event. The synchronicity
of shopping. At least that is left.

Blue-y whiteness, a white that is loveable

and blinding. Very hygienic quite unlike blood.
The user is washed to a place where nothing sticks.
Damage is a dead idea. Everything is ok.
Soon if a gelid mind can be uploaded.
Its scarred dangling limbs rinsed away.
Nothing will get dirty forever. Everything
is never touched. No blame in outer space.

Although unimportant, the exact procedure is

nevertheless quite simple.
An alien text is selected. Not an
arbitrary text but one that's esoterically
propelled. A text
to motor speculation. Otherwise I'm
immobile.
Travel
is controlled by those
infiltrating the Academy. Country roads
are lined with us hitchhikers. One
remove from rocket fuel. Close enough for me. Aliens
make my accelerant unstable.

At last, a shore is visible in the distance.

An empty platform sliding up. What happens next
belongs to another species with special lubricant.
A way to move smoothly. Like they're frictionless.
Say a soap bubble or a dandelion parachute.
They carry themselves gracefully through time.
Softly and without any explanation. Setting down
in silence. Must be made in Germany.

Incomprehensible mechanics, no less now

than they were before. It has all been said.
At least an episode of the X files
is entertainment. Broadcasts radiating
in perfect spheres. Inflected radio light.
Only this ends in a mess of obligations.
Too many payments send out tentacles.
Those lists of quantifiable transactions.
They move at will. Outlive
all my aimless speculation.

The sky, a disguise for winds that display

fearful resilience. Looking up must be
enough. Look up but don't try to harness the wind.
The wind says pointless things. Filling any sail.
It's movement and rest signal and carrier.
Beyond the ken of arbitrary constraints.
It bloweth where it listeth. Beats at my window.
I should not have listened.
BlazeVOX 2K6 an.online.journal.of.voice
Gautam Verma

2 poems :

Not the Magic Image-Game, Amigo

Graffiti
Not the Magic Image-Game, Amigo
 Not

the
Magic
Image-Game,
Amigo
not total alone
not oval opal
not oval tine
not whole tones
not fold walls
not lost salutes
not salt mines
not last capers
not false coins
not all told
not full blown
not lost watches
not fool’s gold
not will able
not good did
not said fellow
not bent elbow
not toll road
not last ties
not tall table
not bald pate
not hand width
not last lines
not sound bite
not still time
not did not
not with mine

not talk radio

not road rage
not auto pilot
not about face
not good bid
not last dance
not win some
not hand held
not loose ends
not whole sale
not out side
not while night
not blind date
not hind sight
not said talk
not fast hold
not just cause
not full tilt
not forth with
not while still

not full avail

not false trail
not rail pass
not last train
not fail safe
not fast erase
not first sign
not trace break
not past prime
not some tune
not hard done
not with might
not good news
not this night

not total eclipse

not slow elope
not steep slope
not back flow
not below zero
not freeze thaw
not over time
not black zones
not stone cold
not bleak home
not far west
not out take
not did able
not dead time
not can could
not what might
not with stood
not this time

not thick wicket

not set erect
not text edit
not dawn check
not down town
not cell block
not small pond
 not blood hound
not dead set
not foot fault
not did out
not line call
not bed fellow
not boat house
not old hat
not cat black
not so fast
not with that

not the magic image-game, amigo

not the queen’s gambit
not the strereo-typical hysterical cleric
not the paranoia of the paranormal
not the hectoring heretic

not the information mish-mash

not the sham equations
not the torrid toxic rhetoric
not the formation of nations

not the occidental accident

not the oriental routine
not the tourist itinerary
not the dean of accademe

not the socio-historical oracle

not the hectic work-a-day schedule
not the elaborate labor statistic
not the parabolics of ballistics

not the bailout not the ballot

not the ontology of longman’s anthology

not the caption not the pact

not the slogan
not the logo not the goal

not the roll-call

not the corporate protocol
not the corps of lance corporals
not the last port-of-call
not the demotic not the demi-god
not the myth not the method
not the enthymeme not the arithmetic

not the empirical imperative

not the logical paradox
not the scatalogical catalogue
not the pathalogical santaclaus

not the class calculus

not the rationale of the tan ratio
not the optionals on the landsend sedan
not the torrie oratorio

not the pretentious tenor

not the porous torpor
not the uprorious porter
not the portentious reporter

not the sinews of the news

not the ancilliary financier

not the regal regicide

the gallant egalitarian

the elegant eglantine

the espaliered rose

the jilted children
the chided chitin-suns
 not
the slotted plots
the salt marsh
the liquored malt
the shopping mall
the false start
the safe house
the fast car
the least known
the lost door
the last vote
the table top
the toppled pole
the plotted slots
the slatted laths
the spotted horse
the total loss
the nose blot
the blood hound
the bloated hose
the bottle neck
the loud mouth
the loaden coat
the postal code
the closed road
not

the iron ore

the organ groan
the growing grain
 the guard rail
the anger chain
the changing face

in the orange air

on the open range

the poor stiff so spiff & fitted

for his funeral

on hoof or foot from here on out

Graffiti
Graffiti
“till all is margin warm & flat” – L.H.
BLUE NOTES Ɖ Ɖ Ɖ
The Night Wrote

SOME DEEP BLUE

TO SINK INTO
SWIMMING FIGURE
SINKING FIGURE
SWIM
History usurps our voices the poem
would like to speak for itself does
it speak in the voice of History?
LLIISSPPSS IITT WWIITTHH HHIISS IILLLLIICCIITT LLIIPPSS
LOOK! THE COOL HAND
PAGES
& PAGES
IN THE BOOK OF
OVER

OF STONE
OF STEEL
STREETS
TURNING
 BBEETTWWEEEENN

OOFFFF--WWHHIITTEE && WWHHIITTEE

DDIIVVIIDDEE

AABBOOUUTT YYOOUU

HHAAVVEE II BBEEEENN SSIILLEENNTT

AALLLL TTHHEE WWHHIILLEE
SEMINARY SEMINAR

IN SEMINAL DISSEMINATION

A SEMEN
AMEN
The world celebrates itself being
mediocre celebrates its own medi
ocrity
OPRAH’S SOAP

OPERA SOCIETY
SSPPEELLLLSS TTHHEE SSTTAAIINN OOFF NNOO OONNEE’’SS NNAAMMEE
 If Torture, Pillage & Plunder

The Letters Served & Sentenced Here

UNHOUSE THE WORDS

EXPOSE

TO WIND & WEATHER

WAIT
ING
FOR
TOD
LIKE
A
DOG
SPRING
FALL
UÄtéxibk E~I

BlazeVOX [ books ]
BlazeVOX 2K6

Spring
 Table of Contents

Mary Beth Molinatti 221

Katie 222
Jay Snodgrass 228
Jane Nakagawa 232
Justin Vicari 240
nick-e melville 245
Ryan Daley 249
Scott Glassman 252
Rochelle Ratner 259
Peter Street 264
Lynn Strongin 266
Jon Leon 269
jf quackenbush 274
Jeffrey Pethybridge 280
JACKSON BLISS 285
Laura McCullough 289
Guido Monte 292
Gianina Opris 297
Grace Connolly 301
Frederick Pollack 306
 anonlinejournalofvoice

Mary Beth Molinatti

Ode to Target ®

Oh great beckoning symbol

Of consumerism’s delights
You beseech me to enter through
Your magical electric doors
And find a red cart to glide smoothly
Through your aisles

Your unfailing eagerness

To accept my debit card,
(Magnetic stripe facing down)
Thrills and excites me
As nothing else can

Your endless racks of garments,

Shelves full of cosmetics,
Movies and sateen sheets
Beguile me

Your love for me is equal

To my own for you
You accept me as I am

We are one
We have a perfect symbiotic
Relationship

You judge me not

Nor I, you

I love you, Target ®

 anonlinejournalofvoice

Katie

Memento Mori

Antony has lost at Actium.

The queen demands the asp
to escape Octavian’s hand.
He would showcase her in his triumph,
her feet in chains and sandals stained
from the dust of the Via Sacra and old lovers.

There is, she remembers now, one thing

she would have liked to see—the reminding.
In his own triumphs, Caesar said he almost laughed.
Standing behind the general in the chariot,
a slave will dangle a laurel wreath
right over Octavian’s head,
and whisper in his ear all the parade long,
“Memento mori, memento mori.” The snake
is in her hands. It is an Etruscan tradition she loves;
amidst the spoils he presents to the patrimony
and illustrious name of Rome, he,
the general, must listen to a slave
repeating, remember you will die.
The asp slithers up her chest, licks her neck;
it could be the kiss of any conqueror.
The Natural Look

"Just look at the colors the shapely earth raises up;

. . . Just like color in the paintings of Apelles."
-Propertius, Elegies 1.2

So the poet persuaded his mistress to resist

dresses, myrrh, make-up; the allure of artifice.
Do not think me cheaper, he wrote, for lauding
naked love and you,
or reverting to art to explain.
He arranged apples in her palms as she slept,
plaited her hair to his ideas.
We do like to highlight ourselves,

lay a frame around our nature.

My photographer friend and I hike
through aureate afternoons,
as thin shadows of trees stencil the hills
and inedible berries stain dirt.
She rectangles her thumbs and forefingers
before her eyes and scans,
clicks her tongue
as she tosses her net on light.
It’s difficult to be somewhere beautiful
and convince yourself you don’t want proof

of yourself. Lovers with car keys

or pocketknives carve into trees
abbreviated assurances of their eternal.
We persuade ourselves
that we will last longer
by tracing a finger over the cuts.
I think about words, she about color,
and on our faces we wear the wild civility
of the natural look—
trying to look like we don’t try at all.

On a rock that smells like water,

whose forehead is a moon over stream,
people have scraped words, satiric and lonely.
A question also is posed,
“Why do people write on rocks?”
by an artificer almost aware of herself.
To a Woman Whose Name I Will Forget

At the Ammon Radisson, you crashed

a wedding reception, children close by.
Your picture, where you spread open
your coat, got four stars out of five,
from Recommended Photos on Yahoo!.
The king has promised
that you will be brought to justice.
When I play your video
a GMC ad runs first; an engine
hovers, planks of steel clash,
then drills and hard-hatted workers,
the awesome melding of the metal body frame,
sparks, then doors, glass, color, shine—the truck.

Up Next: Iraqi Woman Admits to Jordan Attack.

Then, briefly, what I clicked to see—
the camera panning
down your chest, your hands
hold the ball bearings
and RDX wrapped in plastic,
the primer cord hangs. Beside you,
mad hands of the interpreter.

My husband detonated (his bomb)

I tried to explode (my belt)
but it wouldn’t. I left; people fled running
and I left running with them.

The more images I see, the more

I forget.
All undoes awe,
awe how the ancients knew it,
as abdomen-imbedded dread, before
it was reverence or the root of a word
we say now when we get a new truck,
before we could download anything,
before links and sound-byte clicks,
clicks for coupons and personal ads,
personalize-your-news opportunities,
before the populace lived in screens,
blogs and pop-ups, most popular
politics, most popular pictures—
Pop! and people died. Pop!
and nothing, and you blinked.
Mimesis

I fear tragedy as we almost sleep,

 around me his arms, or around him mine.
I fear the Fates for those who, busy being blissful,
are marked for tragedy. Why? Because why.
We separate to lie comfortably on our backs, touch hands.
I appeal to Aristotle—“Assume he and I are doomed.
You say tragic characters are of a higher value than comedic;
could this be a consolation?” Aristotle in all earnestness appears.
He tells me he likes that picture of me and Plato at the Parthenon
in Berlin; the old man’s solemn bust missing a nose,
his white eyes wise and lifeless, as I am open-mouthed smiling
like a frolicsome nymph feeling her ass pinched, exclaiming, “Oh!”
Aristotle tells me to remember my face and listen to the Beach Boys.
“Pet Sounds is aristos, and ‘Good Vibrations’ is the embodiment,
yes” he said, “I said embodiment of Friday night blossoming,
a first sight theme song, a saw playing itself in your head.”
He would have included them in Poetics, these beach boys, as
none knew how to surf, and the only one who could swim, drowned.
“But first, my cow-eyed lady”—he flatters with Homeric epithets—
“do listen to ‘Don’t Worry.’” Aristotle does not hit an attractive high note
as he pitches, “Oh, what she does to me, when she makes love to me
and she says, Don’t worry, baby, everything’s gonna turn out fine.”
My love turns over and I delve my nose into his chest.
How I adore even his armpit hair! He asks me why
I’m sighing and giggling in the middle of the night,
what funny or sad thing am I dreaming?

After Grief

I passed two old women

who held hands the way
I imagine widows do.
A muscular gust suddenly swooped
and pixilated the street burnt gold
within leaves and roof shingles,
flecks of stop signs.
The trees shook themselves.
One woman said, "Sweet Lord!"
as the wind lifted her thin hair.
Her friend saw and nodded,
surprised at her own surprise.
Their scarves wanted
to untwist from their necks
and wave as they followed
the blast to the road’s pinnacle.

My friend, let's walk together.

We love what we've lost
and we find more.
In a scotch-taped paper bag envelope,
I will bring you leaves
from my front yard. The birches let go
some that crinkle at the edge
like an expectant palm—
earth-brown crowns, brave yellow bellies.
The spindle-tree is sharp with afternoon reds
that blur into feathers at dusk.
So many of them. Sweet Lord.
There are so many tomorrows,
I can scarcely imagine.

Petra, Lost City of Stone

An old trick of monotheism—tickle that pagan fertility bone

with a downpour, after threats of drought.
On the last day
of the exhibit, I stroll through glassed chunks of a found world.
The broken-winged head of an unnamed messenger god
stares at sandstone sparks in my eyes.
 Today Iraq elections began.
Long before the common era of Christ, caravans marched
from Petra, ran mirage-walled routes to Gaza, Damascus,
the Persian Gulf.
The day is a museum and I sip from aqueducts,
bathe inside terracotta thermae, and bow before the Treasury.
No one knows how to call these gods
but they look familiar.
Bodies and votes are counted, in butterfly ballots and bags.
I chisel a city out of steep stone, its chipped cocoon,
I come in.
Petra loses herself as empires become hallways with dates.
A woman fans a Pan mask.
The Romans are coming, the Romans
conquer, the Romans forget. An earthquake slams the amphitheatre
shut like an old book that’s been open too long.
A missionary
in armor brandishes his sword skyward, “Accept him as savior
or no rain.” It’s time to leave,
and I gaze again at the nameless god.
His eyes, as long as my hands, were not meant to be white and blank;
statues were once gaudy with color, looked more human than pristine.
He was eroded intimidating.
The radio reports the government reports
of successful polls, and predicts the overnight lows.
Bell chambers
ring in the evening. Trade routes are changing. I don’t pray
anymore as I was taught to—
I send love straight across, not up
to go back down. Cursed be the middlemen for their thievery.
Tonight I’m talking out loud
not to myself, and it’s hard to hear.
I’m a pilgrim on a desert plain that was once an ocean floor.
 anonlinejournalofvoice
Jay Snodgrass

4 poems

CRAWLING GROWTH

Sealed like a love letter

And visibly desperate, you may not
Leave this place, Insect-Sun, in an envelope,
Nor scorn the shapes
Of my higher head, its
Murky sewer laser beamed
With love and strewn with chewed up
Carnations. These exposed crocus beds
Are a rhizomatic perversion,
The grass handlers gift of
Heavy ropes and highway.
I only hear this now
Because of the infiltrating breeze’s
Turned-down gift of righteous flesh.
PSALM OF THE ALGAE BLOOM

Every atomic second someone goes to the water

To give it all up, catapulting on wings of green-green,
Descendant to the clear horizons of onlooker crumbs.
Because the river is a taker and the ocean a folding leaf,
The archangel still smokes as the farm-shaped world
Blossoms with headstones inscribed to youth gone
To water. Bitter great, stone tabernacle defiantly
Offered to a life of railroad tracks and steamer trunks,
The delirious rubber neck of disputed memory mailed
With insufficient post to the fresh candle flickering
In the hurricane heart. There, a forest dream in the last
Thing I ever saw. I am last century’s hand grenade pin,
Twitching to pump out the levy. Wet earth in descended shapes
Smells like hands rotten through chains.
PRUNING

The TogetherBomb unwinds

Between streets. Some of us
Are still travelers un-usurped by grief.
Others are insurgents to the flower’s will,
The pose of blossom, wounded
Hibiscus in blue shades around your face,
Arching across the stream. And the cactus,
Turning in their rock beds, sing
Of ripeness to heat. In the metal strip
Of sun on water, Caucasian tongues
Drink eyes with nothing left then go
To navigable destructions. We’re taking
More, more sky, more walls transfixing
Disfigurement. There are no omitted doves.
The wires circle tight the strips of words
Geyser-ing up from the Laundromats
And tickled fissures in everything I see.
TRAFFIC LEAF

It’s your turn to look at the road wreck. Stay.

Collect your bits, your un-voweled prayer
To the shroud of yellow tarp.
Give rise to this wound, oh flowering meaning:
Words on branches stick to your shirt as you pass,
This changes you from angel to violin
And there’s nothing you can do about it.
The new sound learns to live in its impotence.
The linden tree cakes palms of pollen
Across the already streaked arch of the windshield,
The comic eyebrow weeps yellow tears
In synchronized clusters, these gooping eyelids
Return the brightness of sleep the way a candle
Waving ghosts makes the attention slow down.
 anonlinejournalofvoice

Jane Nakagawa

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 anonlinejournalofvoice

Justin Vicari

PHLEBAS THE PHOENICIAN, TO T. S. ELIOT

What poets say is accurate enough. In the whirlpool I lost my earthly sense and my things
went one by one. But I am not the Tarot card I have become, an emblem red as a wound on
white skin, found under some nameless sheaf by a neck-tied shuffler of blank pages at a desk,
startle slipped into an inventory list. I lost that grace you love like money.
But I did not die and live to prick
your stagnant fear of death,
making you pace the marble floor of the bank smooth as water you could walk upon, and
hide yourself in numbers. I hurtle through the eons like an astronaut, but that’s my own
business.
I didn’t do it to remind you
of what you already knew,
nor settle as an image in your poem.
No, a thousand times: my death was my own.
PATHETIC FALLACY

Rain slicks the street to a mirror of our moods.

Sweeney Agonistes looks on sadly
at the blood-kisses exchanged by women
for whom men are little more than passing shadows in the fog.

The penis is a split personality. Sometimes I’m in favor of a world that’s less safe,
it’s unpopular and what’s the point? Long hour of soft skin
in eye-glasses, loving a secret cult again. There the fury
sits drinking shot after shot, visions nearly out of order,
but she can’t afford to blunder, skirt undone and gorgeous-tattooed.
I couldn’t help them with their apocalypse-hoax,
wandering like the sea from one big nothing to the next.
Sweeney nurses stray thoughts of suicide
through the tattered holes in my will. I harden myself
to bend for the missile. What burns up for nothing?
I wouldn’t presume to say for sure.
FLOWER DRUM

The woman does sit-ups,

the man does push-ups,
and nine months later
the baby comes.
Happy little monster.

The Berber walks all the way across Africa,

fathering children
to the four corners of the wind.
Good Papa Berber.

Big witness to the 60-40 split,

you try and try to make the world believe you.
But no one talks to the world anymore.
Lonely lonely world, left to its own devices.
ULRIKE’S DAUGHTER

--Ulrike Rosenbach’s Entwicklung mit Julia (1972), a performance on video where the artist
bound her daughter’s body to her own with long white bandages

I remember when Mutti bound me to her:

the two rounds of warmth of her breasts against my shoulders,
the feel of her arm wrapped around me.
Her breath on my neck was heavy with movement
and the watchful camera, while I held mine in,
afraid the taut swathes would hurt my ribs
if I didn’t make extra room. In the end I floated
against her, held in place, and could not fall
out of my gauzy prison. A ritual
that ought to be practiced in our tribe. No
thought stays longer than the thought of
touch, no memory is harder to summon up,
or to forget. With the ease and comfort
of stocking feet or a palm-full of water,
we run on a loop in a Berlin museum. Our
double gaze defies the passers-by who yearn to be
the flesh of someone’s flesh. . . Is it true
they sold their children’s names, long ago?
Is it true the only phone lines exist in our memories?
ZIEGFELD GIRL

strutting tier on tier

all peacock eyes and glitter. Sideways she steers

a Marie Antoinette wedding cake, every

heart flutters to the metronome of her hourglass

where life picks me up and hurls me down

like a felt doll. Take it from me: even if she

puffs, poof! from the dry-ice mist and tears

away her mask, to show us how it’s done,

singing I’m boneless meat, blown

motes of face powder. . . the flesh could be

willing, but I’ll still never go-

go to Heaven in that falling birdcage, no

I’ll never be that Ziegfeld girl.

 anonlinejournalofvoice

nick-e melville
word or something
one word poem
a processed poem

Cheese
Peas
 anonlinejournalofvoice

Ryan Daley
FLORIDA OCCUPIES ITSELF HATING THE HOMELESS
OR
WAY TO GO UNDETECTED

this is what my ex is supposed to look like

that and the meaning of bad weather I talk

like I have somewhere to be

Rub hands [together

In a way
Means you’re busy]

It’s so easy to get the building wrong

In the wheelchair with the doughy companion

Why can their words not get moved

And erect
The air out of the matter there’s
No ice cream to cry into

Assume the “live” position of

The energizer bunnies
Of a failed pregnancy

Throw it in the bed

Of the truck and
The wind will
Blow it out.
DRACULA IS A BITCH

“I’m not afraid of no

Dracula” he
says as he curls
his toes and flashes
breadcrumbs

“let the heavens

come for me I will
attempt to feed us,
everyone”

since 12 days had

passed and no number
called, we got to
keep our fingers the man
in the oak chair laughs
his phonic response

“what a lout,” you seem to

say
outside
October applauded
Dial-ation with a Tango Complex

Rupture in tango schools

To seek a perfect onion
Seems like such a long way through a stocking

--So, so, in fact: when is it okay to pun this?

Admonish the tearjerkers into the nosebleeds

The ink lasts until you scream,

I’m getting the hitting
on all wrong

you want to make a

lot of ramen, don’t
you?

Social immobility of
Cave manhood

We all wearing hats

Casing the ambulance

Then straight. Until you

Can’t get directions anymore.
There you will find a telephone with
A purpose. Make sure
It’s on.
 anonlinejournalofvoice

Scott Glassman

so it . goes

in a stairwell
angle. source

45 degrees
dream. these

explosions
day. un-

toward

long. long. long

long. long. long

quiet

para syllo-
(gist) ic

annointing. deus
ex. recently re:

flect (-ed)
flaking of

ҳ/nd

on
if you look . here

read this. read this. read this

read this. read this. read this
read this. read this. read this
read this. read this. read this
read this. read this. read this
shatter . song

sticks. & stones

will break. my bones
& names. they
will. never. what

sticks & stones.

will break
bones. but names
will. & what

stones. will
break. sticks. will
too. do

you know who's

looking down

bones. break
sticks. & stones

break. us
will break. our bones
like names
The answer . is

no no no no no no
no no no no no no
no no no no no no
no no no no no no
no no no no no no

no no no no no no
no no no no no no
no no no no no no
no no no no no no
no no no no no no

no no no no no no
no no no no no no
no no no no no no
no no no no no no
no no no no no no
i am sad

8:34 am

i am sad

8:42 am

i am sad

9:15 am

i am sad

9:45 am

i am sad

10:30 am

i am sad

11:20 am

i am sad

11:22 am

i am sad

11:23 am

i am sad

11:24 am

i am sad

12:01 pm

i am sad
In division

there is nothing
you like about me
there is nothing
i like about you
there is nothing
you like about me
there is nothing
i like about you
there is nothing
you like about me
there is nothing
i like about you

what’s yours
is mine
what’s mine
is mine
what’s yours
is yours
what’s mine
is yours
what’s yours
is mine
what’s mine
is mine

is mine

see if i care
you do
i don’t
see if i care
you do
i don’t
see if i care
you do
i don’t
see if i care
you do
i don’t

say something
 like what
say something
such as
say something
like what
say something
such as

at least i was
honest
at least i was
you were
not
at least
i was
you were
i was
honest
you were
not
i was
honest
you were
not

let’s
talk about it
later
let’s
talk about it
now
let’s
talk about it
when
we’re not

invisible
listening
i am not
neither
are you
Rochelle Ratner

67 Percent Of Americans Sleep With Their Pets

In fact, over half the people queried confessed their sleep is

disturbed by a human partner, while only a third said their
pets inadvertently woke them. Even newly married ladies
admitted their mates were bed hogs. Fourteen percent of
the men couldn't decide if a pet or a woman was more
inclined to keep them awake nights. And, in Little Rock, a
homeless man was caught trying to smuggle a sheep out of
the zoo in a trash can.
Close shave for bakery workers

She wants one of those small round French breads – boule

she thinks it's called. Only she wants one that's evenly
browned, the last one she bought here really wasn't crisp
enough. The girl reaches in the case to show her. No. No,
she wants one a little darker, how about that one there, on
the next shelf? As if at her bidding, the bread rises toward
the girl's hand. The bald young man who'd been placing
pastries on the bottom shelf stands up.
Stabbing Pain

It's nothing to worry about. He's sixty-seven years old and

has had headaches for as long as he can remember. Two
Advil, sometimes four, or the new Advil Migraine, and it's
pretty much unnoticeable. The problem is, he's developed
an ulcer. Newly retired, and he develops an ulcer. Kiss
Advil goodbye. Say hello to headaches almost every
afternoon. The strongest over the counter drug he can take
is Tylenol. Doesn't do a damn thing. Finally he lets his wife
convince him to see a doctor. The doctor starts him on a
low dose of Elavil. When that doesn't help, they decide to
take x-rays, just in case there's a problem. The doctor's
office calls and makes another appointment. He walks in to
find two other doctors sitting there, one a neuro-surgeon,
the other a psychologist. They show him an x-ray with
three needles embedded in his brain. They say they've read
about cases such as his before: needles inserted in the soft
spots of an infant's head to stop his crying. Usually fatal.
Usually undetectable. Then they ask him to tell them
about his parents. He begins, of course, by saying how
much they loved him.
Drunk drivers' penalty in Taiwan: Pay fine or play mahjong with the elderly

Her mother, who would be 95 were she still alive, played

mahjong. She remembers, as a ten-year-old, coming home
from school to find four women seated at their dining room
table. Then five women. She was told to call three of them
"Auntie." The fourth woman to join the group really was
her aunt. That was a bold step her mother took, inviting in
someone new the other women might not like. As it turned
out, they liked her better, and there were games, lunches,
and shopping trips her mother was excluded from. She
recalls her mother sitting at the table lining up those tiles
as if they were dominoes. Her mother depressed for
months. As a little girl without many friends herself, she
couldn't have cared less about her mother. She crossed two
continents just to get away. Downing three drinks, driving
ninety miles an hour, just to get away.
Man Launches Online Campaign To Get Dummy Back

He thinks of himself as a swinger, always in the fast lane.

Work hard, drink hard, play hard. Usually the lady he's
with at night doesn't mind going back into the city with
him the next morning. But this dummy surprised him,
showing up at three a.m. in her own car, then refusing to
even let him go down on her.
 anonlinejournalofvoice

Peter Street

Bomb Damage

Something was itching my eyes to stare

over at the machines .

Only I seemed to hear the bleeping

yet my whole family was standing there
and everyone who had ever lived,

the whole universe even, all screaming

not to look. Yet the bleeping seemed

to bounce off every childhood picture

and get-well card
in the Zagreb hospital:
like a ball to my feet.

Then I made my mistake

and looked at a face,
a kind of no-face with holes for eyes
nose, mouth,

legs missing from the knees down

still stuck to all those bits of shrapnel
somewhere, which banged her life apart.
A little girl, bandaged

in mummy, almost pretty.

Some nurse had taken an age
getting each lap perfect
so proud that when we look

we might still see a person,

someone whole.
Going Back To Then
For Sandra Simpson 1967

I am me
that’s not meant to be a rude thing
but I don’t want to be you
not anymore

I dreamed of nothing else but being you

the pain burned holes in my hurt
I just wanted you to look at me

say hello, smile. Yes a kiss

would be too much to ask.
So instead you waved,
the kind that said

yes, we can be friends

nothing else.
 anonlinejournalofvoice

Lynn Strongin

SUMMER Sabbath

Sky will sicken, then turn slate

twigs crack underfoot like guns.

I cry, ‘Winter where are you?’

’O human, when first snow comes, I will wrap you in.’

After infinite waiting tops of trees turn oat-yellow

holocaustal sunsets haunt Bergie:
rope-golden Centurion Gary oaks saved by the Preservation Society:
to tie up the boat of breath. Ripples quiet from a shot stone;

And the heart starts to mend

Which fractured like thin shield of bone.
LOVE POEM (found 30 years later)

Tulp,
here’s your linseed & chamois. your palette:
I’ll freshen the tub &
scrub all our wood surfaces down. Tallow white the sky, the cello burnt umber.

Come out of the clothes’ rack

pulling shirttails from jeans,
Aprils bleeding
colors a chalk dust of them, on smocks.
Hanging out windows.
Spring! Tulip:
Chasing April will be like climbing out of a burning building.
Cannot move fast enough, my Sappho.
Now come close, good night. Lips touch. Kiss then of the rough
muslin.
CONJUGATING LATIN VERBS

Could life get better?

American Slang Dictionary at the feet.
Cook Street a modest, melodic address.

I was the kid who knew things: Couldn’t be contained: A Polish girl my best friend.
Blue wheel doing cartwheels against cardboard sky white as skull.

Fame spread like wildfire out of Brooklyn.

Later with the lit lamp, comes the unmade bed: Passion, talent and Bedlam.
 anonlinejournalofvoice

Jon Leon

from Diphasic Rumors

A patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty

54

Rumors define us. "I will compose a fancy

rhyme, a song of praise to you." Personal history
was of no interest. History was paramount. 5.6
already know about the human condition. 5.6
don't need more human condition stories. Attack
Attack Attack Attack Attack Attack Attack Attack
Attack Attack Attack Attack Attack Attack Attack.
Furies panhandling in blocks up to down. No promise
of improving conditions, relocating primary hostilities,
or finding a pump to levy.
55

All omissions intentional. Or shall 5.1

say, "The tactics & strategies employed by this
new branch of credit/prix have come
crashing down on us." Myself, 5.1 associate
some negative sleight-of-hand. I think what
we were doing during .. what ___ think (have me), [R O P E]
what ___ think. On the opposing guard sides--
T H I S I S R E N I T E N C E. Really could
___ fall beneath his oppressions no longer. The hero's
in the fog, has lost ___ faces. In that Line, possibly.
56

There were ("walk in the rays of a beautiful sun") beautiful

homes surrounding the project yard and on the corner
a beautiful store where I would go when I was seventeen.
Lead in (z) bones. The Steps of Odessa.
Lead in (z) blood. The commissary was open 24 hrs.
There 5.6 could buy small cartons and later
fill them with apple juice. Part of [this] was recurring.
If the angry nationalists were angry humanists.
5.9 boat was rebuilt. Built back from scratch.
We boarded 5.9 vessel. Constructed a monumental Battleship.
57

If the need for duty were to arise. 5.6 see

5.5 as behaving truly. A particular sacrament
given from all intersectors, the parts in sight
in lighting ___ candles. An aviator kismet led by
the tracking panel, and it is destiny. So news, such
noise – not sooner we heard. A relaxing Day, fine.
"Confusion, the caps of mountains capped by air."
Precipitations touch frolic canal. Blunt proof. World's
History, example in fumes – twisting elbows, drought stricken.
More cadets, more joviality looking for beat within blue shadows.
58

I don't think anyone likes or even ever

did like ------------ do you remember
that interview he did for French television I
remember him snapping his fingers to the Beach
Boys and that he owned a large house in California
which if I recall doubled as a set for some of his
films which often talked about or signaled some conflicts
like the problem of the relation of individuals which
has ever since meeting my birth parents at birth interested
me and I think some others who are poorly

Jon Leon is author of Boxd Transistor (Whole Coconut, 2006)

(http://www.coconutpoetry.org/leon-chapbook-coverpage.html)
and the forthcoming TRACT (Dusie Press Kollekiv, 2006).
He lives in San Francisco where he curates LIVE
ACTION ARCADE with the poet Allyssa Wolf.
 anonlinejournalofvoice

jf quackenbush

God Machine in Blue

The translation "Almighty" is error

in error the wrong word gets used here
Almighty is just way off

color like sufi color like light

in muraqaba saalaa flicker like lighter
fluid in color plastic flint switches

I dream Akkadian sometimes

And in I have wings and I highly
texture too my beard that is that longs

like lion feet too plus wings

I am the gate prowling sphinxotaur
et plus with sharp sharp teeeeth

talk dentition here

God of the open waste
God of an high mountain

we are desert people

nomads whisper 99
whisper the Ishma'elites where drownt Levites sing

hallah sing Eyeh El Shaddai

transliteral telegraphed on third
rail live wire postage

I am he who is
what of the open waste
Adonai of the throwaway.
The Liar Paradox

part one

01. even dogs want things.

02. "philosophy ought to be written only as

03. this is not a list

04. [scene missing]

05. the emotional attachment of others to still more other

06. a storm drain installed in place of the rib cage, mid torso

07. a form of poetry." ~Wittgenstein

08. The hollow middle of the sun is.

09. cats don't.

10. what makes it here in what this box of cuttings is.

11. this is a photograph of him

12. why are dogs wants?

13. list like ships in autumn leaf torn sails

14. leading questions like dogs' leads.

15. i still remember long division, no remainders

16. dogs' leads or cat collars if of each disjunction what follows

17. to prime the pump then & spit gasoline.

18. peel the backing off a mirror & it's only

19. She sees everything & sees that it is good.

20. still wants something else.

21. what then?

22. even dogs want things.

part two

23. some ferns are good for soothing nettle burns

05. we kept them body cold in the fast run water.

28. even dogs

10. blades of grass to wreck lawns mower.

38. & here we are in tourniquets.

11. the image of the virgin mary in grilled bread & spit

49. an image of her behind the water face.

13. even dogs want things

62. hate is an ugly thing.

08. This sentence has no truth-value.

70. watch the picnic tables watch the trees.

07. If a chessman could talk.

77. [scene missing]

14. lead pipe lay down & take

96. here to find god in the margins

15. commit these to ground us ground our

part three

23. how far from how far left to rub in white man?

24. behind doors somewhere in

25. on tabula rasa like tonsures & black beetles

26. “midnight to six man”

27. “all night drug prowling wolf.”

28. sometimes want things.

29. misogyny as a defense against

30. closed doors somewhere conceal in America

31. better to eat blotter & lose competence

32. lose competence to care for

33. defense against closed doors

34. awful things are right now behind closed doors happen

35. happen now right behind to someone you will someday

36. this has happened before.

37. she fucks like the undersides of freeways.

38. & live under their freeways in tents.

39. echo hollow like black rubber bands hum against the concrete

40. this is to fuck her there

41. competent to care for oneself wipe one's own ass brush one's teeth pour one's own eye
openers at 5:30 am competent to

42. this is to take her back with black rubber

43. now fern eyed & foam on the creek still

44. even dogs want things.

part four

61. In the morning, I will tattoo your face on my face in the mirror.

62. we are in made to wear ready wear suits of Maori skin I will see him with
63. there are on truth tables still traces

64. & left we have pencil shavings & that

65. in everyday things like this watch, & a coin, three paperclips, fourteen

66. there were fingernail clippings in the ashtray as you drank soup from the mug

66. fourteen magpies’ feathers tied with thread & pinned to a wall

67. I want to say “le corbeau” & also the thread color but I don’t like the rhyme.

68. back to back the words that sound like themselves & in

69. fourteen red wrapped rook feathers, learned to rhyme from French

70. trace truth value tables in the tree's bark & traces teeth brood

71. still & quiet in deep rivers just beneath where cold

72. volcanic ash in clouds like bellows

73. dog want of things what?

74. hum & hollow in water drips under overpasses

75. where it runs & carry on in parliament

76. pencil shavings smell sweet like cedar

77. take a picture so we’ll have one

78. a rook is a carrion bird red wrapped in cedar smells

79. “don’t slouch!” now towards

80. & here are some things else

81. here are arrays & there are also

82. like streets in rain, dogs want & want

83. the smell of underneath smells washed

84. & streets that run rain with washed away

85. under the run off is her tongue in my

86. under the run off is to hold

87. quiet behind close doors to hold

88. the overflow valve in place of organs

89. too much water too

90. so eat communion eat

91. slouchers & hiss in crow holy nights full

92. with dogs with rook feathers red shred

93. fourteen what in empty pages

94. even gods want things

95. marginalia in a book by wittgenstein

96. marginalia in a book by gertrude stein

97. investigate these tenser buttons here of this

98. & miss me under when it is cold at rain where

99. even dogs want things

 anonlinejournalofvoice

Jeffrey Pethybridge

Serra at Work

Astronaut-like in an asbestos-suit
to caliber the forged steel-cube’s
white-hot edge matter worked from the molecule
up to a 77 ton ode

to Charlie Chaplin no poem is

ever that pure that absolute
among the skateboarders and das Geschmier
its weight a force a mass reforming the city

Whipping a wax-pencil over

butcher-roll muscle-memory
more than instinct intends the hand
a skater whose leaps and arcs over

the frozen lake seek shapeliness

and yet the process of seeking
itself becomes a shape of leaps
and arcs the skater makes over
the frozen lake in time the leaps
and arcs the skater and the place
become one shape begun in wax-pencil
and muscle-memory the frozen lake

the mind that sun-reflecting lake

a field walked measured by walking
the simple and sensuous confidence
of walking through a field or frozen lake

After the censorship a litany

of insults the griping judge’s campaign
the senator’s griping campaign
too the hearings and trials

and rulings founded on property rights

over the poorer angel of speech
after the wreckage of work
wrought and the engine of anger has cooled

now bitter no longer the spark to work

the ethic of work remains so too its image
poor angelic Giacometti plaster
dusting his hair and trousers and boots finally
taking a night-meal though cancer has wrecked
his stomach but he must eat to work against
his death not yet finished its work in him
this is no romance but how work rebukes

Slow boiling pith to pulp paper-scraps

run through a blender the whole soup slathered
over a salvaged screen-door and deckle
fan humming to dry the sheaves to gather

the mind’s violence his mantra work

comes out of work and the perception of work
contesting the world’s gross inordinacy
that work is alchemical

and in its solving-actions

experience and the contents of experience
become known to man as a chemical-
soul remade in objects in persevering

actions as downtown a park grayed

by paper-ash and carcinogenic
dust will not be torn out of mind
so this work this autumn paper-making

*
Walking the sleek architecture
of the Pulitzer arts building alone
except the sandwich in my pocket work-
book with its obdurate gap

of actual work notes for future work

heard confusion for Confucian

rain on sidewalks their cracks glancing

lights under the façade of tenements

like a Tibetan thangka last finishing

the icon’s eyes animating
dedicating the image
from Kafka’s notebook

now the sirens have a still more fatal

weapon namely their silence
a vivid-waiting
livid awaiting then the shock of tar-like

impasto paint-stick circles on handmade

paper the shock of recognition in-
cohate yet not trailing to in-
coherency resolved in words

slow boiling pith to pulp the park grayed

by paper-ash and carcinogenic
dust and the second work of art
taking place as words are taken down
reckoned the first work of the poem attention
a concentration capable
of reckoning all the dates and silence
is part of the process

Moving furniture three days a week now

in coveralls and gasmask to throw
a ladle full of molten lead
an arc and an aleatoric art
 Everyday Corporate America
By

JACKSON BLISS

I ask myself the same question everyday. Why are you doing this? Why spend your

day in a little corporate cubicle like a cancer-study rat, writing your one line emails to co-

workers and ordering CD’s from amazon.com? Why pretend you’re civilized? Why follow

corporate protocol when you know it’s one step away from cult status?

I don’t have a great answers to those questions. That’s why I keep asking them.

They’re like canker sores I can’t stop touching. But for some reason, I’m not totally unhappy

with my life. I’m surviving. Sometimes I even forget I’m a cancer-study rat.

It has something to do with my 25-step ritual:

1. Wake up early
2. Drink some coffee
3. Take a shower
4. Shave
5. Iron one of three white oxfords given to me as a gift from Christmas from my dad.
His attempt at preparing me for the starchy-shirt world.
6. If I’m lucky, eat a muffin (if not, I drink some “juice”)
7. Walk to the #1 local subway station
8. Fight with Chinese Grandmas who expect to sit down when I steal their seats
9. Fight with Chinese Grandmas who expect to sit down when I exit
10. Walk to 1200 4th avenue
11. Wait for the “35-55” elevator
12. Hum uncomfortably inside the elevator, pretend I’m not thinking of Robert
Coover for fifty-five floors
13. Say good morning to all the stupid fuckers I work with as I enter my office (i.e.
my cubicle with benefits)
14. Shuffle, bend, fold and randomly mark paperwork without actually reading any of
it
 15. Look up baseball stats, Russian Transvestite porn, dirtygurlz.com, laundrymat
addresses and google the word “lint” before checking my account for Louis Farrakhan emails
16. Take a cigarette break (I don’t smoke, but it’s ten minutes and I’ll take it)
17. Send business faxes to my home, or to non-existent fax numbers, sometimes, for
the hell of it, to my Dad’s office, who gets really confused
18. Doodle on a notepad, masquerading my grocery list as a supply list
19. Eat vending machine snacks (the Fritolays are the best deal but have the least
taste—a classic junkfood conundrum)
20. Go to the bathroom and beat off
21. Go back to the rubic’s cube (aka my personal corporate office cubicle).
22. Shuffle more papers, fax my grocery list to my home fax, and then to my Dad
23. Make some phone calls, preferably to psychic hotlines without time limits
24. Email some coworkers about the stack of papers I haven’t read yet
25. Voilà, it’s time for lunch already

Sure this lifestyle gets old pretty quickly. And sure, I have my ambitions like every

other college-educated entry-level corporate sellout here. But I have secret hobbies. And

they keep sane.

For one thing, I love watching female mud wrestling. There’s nothing more beautiful

than angry white trash babes in bikinis slopping around in a big pit of mud to the sound of

“The William Tell Overture.” Makes you feel like you’re in a Benny Hill clip.

Another thing, I wear a garter belt and panties underneath my wool trousers. I don’t

know why, something about it just feels right. It must be the lace rubbing against my

stomach and dimpled buttocks. Maybe it’s the delicious feeling I get that I’m a lady in a suit,

a white collar worker making covert, illegal and important business transactions in a hot

boysenberry thong. Everyone here thinks I’m Marty the Baseball fanatic, Marty the lonely

alcoholic, Marty the ex Marine, the meathead, the man’s man. If they only knew.

Still another hobby hidden in my sleeve is my love of urine. I drink it. Willingly. I

know that might sound gross at first. But it’s not what you’d think. Urine is simply what

happens to water when it’s lived a little. We’re so used to pristine water that we forget that

purity is not a color, it’s a concept. And as far as urine is concerned, it’s far wiser than a

glass of Evian. Its color reflects its experiences the way wrinkles display our age. It’s kinda
tangy too, if you eat enough processed sugar, that is. It’s also heavily fortified. Metabolic

waste? Oh, that’s just a technical title.

The only problem with slogging down the piss is that it’s tricky trying to slip a new

glass past my colleagues. I love apple juice, I tell my colleauges, but no one seems

convinced. I fear it has something to do with the fact that I always bring my own piss in this

big Crate and Barrel glass, Saran Wrap covering the top with a rubber band. Another

problem is that the glass is always a little warm too. I like my A.J. heated, I’d tell them

before, but now they don’t listen to me when I ramble on about that. For all I know,

everyone thinks A.J.’s the guy who pissed in my large Crate and Barrel glass. We all get

along well enough, just the piss-in-a-glass thing that dampens the mood.

Someone will be telling a funny story, and the instant I bring out the good ole’

jug’o’pee, everyone stops talking. They just stare at me, right when I’m about to get my first

taste. To say the least, it’s a little frustrating. Occasionally, I even have to play along, and

pretend it’s apple juice. I’ll pretend to spill my drink (remember this trick, it will come in

handy later). Damn, I’ll say, I guess I have to buy another apple juice from one of the park

vendors, I shout out loud so they can hear me. The hard part isn’t the acting though. The

hard part is that I have to drink apple juice afterwards. And it tastes terrible.

But every one of these little secrets pale in comparison to my greatest extracurricular

activity. Without a doubt, the most important “secret” hobby of mine also happens to be the

one I’m most passionate about. You see, I am a lint artist.

Sure, most people just throw away their dryer lint. But I actually do something

artistic out of it. I create multicolor landscapes out of your Jockey’s. I’ve recreated the

Sistine chapel, made several world atlases and constructed 1,000’s of impressionistic

landscapes from my girlfriends’ Underoos. I even sent Minister Farrakhan a portrait of

Malcolm X I did from black and white tube socks. Needless to say I never got a response
from him. I guess he hasn’t forgiven Malcolm yet.

If you’re wondering why I date women and not costume designers (which I have by

the way, and they wear nothing but black half the time), I’ll tell you. Women have the most

colorful laundry. Hence, they make the best colors for my master works of art. That’s why I

always pick the ones in bright pastels—it means they’re in touch with their inner bitch, they

might consider mud wrestling with me and I can’t wait to do their laundry either.

They don’t have to know that my lust for them has more to do with their Laura

Ashley pink grapefruit dress than what’s underneath it, but I make up for that with the

enormous size of my penis (inflated with collagen for enormous woodies that rival hummers

in size and mobility). As we lie there on the bed afterwards, holding each other, secretly I’m

planning a way to spill something on my shirt so I’ll be forced to do laundry. And while I’m

at it, why not throw some of your stuff in too, honey? I’ll suggest matter-of-factly. Ah yes,

that trick again.

But in the end, my little secret genius doesn’t hurt my girlfriends. Actually it’s the

topic of wine parties and chat rooms. “Did you see Marty’s lint mural of the five senses

above the fireplace?” Women love men who understand art. They love men who understand

women. And all their laundry is always clean too. As for me, with each new girlfriend I get

the thing I want more than anything: the right colors, the right medium, to express a talent

only God, in his munificence, hands down to his worthiest and most hopeless martyrs. I am

called to duty by a higher source. Yes, I have a weakness for mud, urinalysis cups and cross-

dressing. But only dryers and belly-buttons can give me what I really need, only they

understand my affliction for experimental art in this age of corporate censorship and instant

pay-offs.
 anonlinejournalofvoice

Laura McCullough

IN THE CHURCH OF UNIVERSAL ANGUISH, ALL ARE WELCOME

When the congregation files in on Tuesday night or Thursday morning

(never on Sunday, but on the days they have lost, like Monday, when
they had to call in sick because they were so ill used in spirit and drunk
with expectations they just had to sleep in on Sunday and call out on
Monday and now drag themselves to church) they carry the one language
they know in the fingers of a song, or the butterflies they attract to pitiful
and magnificent gardens, or in the good hem (it is hard to sew a good hem
by hand; it demands consistency), or the knowledge of the beauty of breasts
or the small indentations behind knees. Whatever their language, they bring
it in paper bags or paint cans or in their calluses or rough tongues or swollen
feet. There will be no sermon and no choir. The doors will close. It will start.
Biting their nails, someone will speak around nubbed fingers, and though no
will understand, they will all understand and begin to dance in place, and then
the noise will start. Outside, trees will bend toward the door. Inside, wooden
walls and pews will vibrate with the memories of having once been alive. No
one will notice. No one will care. They are busy forgetting why they are there.
IN THE CURVE OF A FORK, VIOLENCE

"Hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent
where there is the lowest degree of culture." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The fish is already dead, so there is no reason not to eat it. At the counter, the woman
stands in her apron. It is a handsome apron made by her son because she likes to cook
and he wished to honor this. It was better than a lanyard or a mug, but it does say MOM
across it. He did not embroider that. That would be too much. The father hugs her from
behind. He squeezes one breast. She is annoyed, but also likes it. The fish is ready, she
says. I hope you like it. He doesn't like fish. None of them do. They want to eat fish
though because everyone says eating fish is good for you. This is a fancy fish, fancily
prepared: there are thin cucumber slices stuck all over it like scales. They are all disgusted
by the smell in the house, but the family gathers around the fabulous fish. They will take a
picture of it. They will call the neighbors. Later, their best friends will have a fight: why
don't you cook a meal like that, someone will say. It will not be a question. That night a
small anger will take root, and soon the whole neighborhood will be riddled with it like
vines taking over a tree. Someone will forget to take out the trash for several days,
someone will ignore their lawn until it grows up enough to raise eyebrows. Someone's
toilet paper roller will go unfilled for a week. This will be good for the children, though.
One of them will discover mudpies. In the dirt under their fingernails, they will bring
home a million unseeable beings. In a bedroom, a spider will make a deal: it will happily
kill in order to be let live.
 THE USELESSNESS OF WORSHIP

A bench. Two people. A woman and a man. Two men, two women, it doesn't matter;
they are just two people. Their knees touch. Their knees ache. Their knees are full of
water affected by the moon's cycles. Something is leaching out of their bones. Their
joints are swelling. If you squint your eyes, you will see the two people's bodies begin to
blur. They are like one soft canvas with two pictures painted on it that has been left in the
rain in the park by an anonymous painter. The colors are running. Run by these people.
Your eyes will be filled with moving light and grace. This is why people jog in parks, you
know, to fill up their empty joints, but why would the painter abandon them? Sacrifice
them to us this way? If someone doesn't determine the exact moment when the canvas
should be brought back inside, it is possible the paint will be washed away and nothing
will be left. Who should intervene?
 anonlinejournalofvoice

Guido Monte

AHA n.1: Echoes

(Qoèlet, Grief, Blake, Leopardi, Baudelaire, Puškin)

notes
The author thanks Laura Costantini and Andrej Arena (for the help with the
translation), Manuela Catarcia, Federica Corona, Marco Ferrante,
Alessandro Pericò, Silvia Spacca (for the researchwork on the echoes).
The Sanskrit term aha embraces all the letters of the alphabet in her depth,
symbolically embracing the whole universe.

works...from the only Book ever composed

Biblia Sacra Vulgata, liber Ecclesiastes (legenda:eccl.)

Andreas Grief, Kirchhofsgedanken, Einsamkeit (legenda: eins.)
William Blake, Poems from the Rossetti Manuscript;
 The Songs of Experience (legenda: poems)
Giacomo Leopardi, Canti (legenda: canti)
Charles Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal (legenda: fleurs)
Aleksandr S. Puškin, Polnoe Sobranie Soþineij v destati tomach
(legenda: poiesie)

********dabró pajàlavat’^^^^^^^^^

echo n.1 : vahana (wind)

eccl.1, 2; poems ; eins.; canti; poems ;fleurs; poiesie

vanitas vanitatum
omnia vanitas-
You throw the sand against the wind,
And wind blows it back again!
Betracht’ ich: wie der Mensch in Eitelkeit vergeh’,
amaro e noia la vita, altro mai nulla…
and know not what but care -
Plus tard, un Ange,entr’ouvrant les portes, viendra ranimer,
fidèle et joyeux, les miroirs ternis et les flammes mortes...
i tomit menà toscuiu odnozvucnii gizni schum

[meaningless within meaningless

it’s all meaningless...
You throw the sand against the wind,
and wind blows it back again!
I see man turning into something vain,
that’s our life: a bitter bore, nothing else ever
and know not what but care -
later an angel, opening the doors,
will quietly come, to shine rusty mirrors
and awake our dead fires...
I suffer the life dull noise]
echo n.2 : aeviternum retournar (nothing new)
eccl.1, 9-10; eins.; fleurs

nihil sub sole novum

nec valet quisquam dicere ecce hoc recens est
iam enim processit in seculis quae fuerunt ante nos
Wie, auf nicht festem Grund all unser Hoffen steh’ -
désormais tu n’es plus, ô matière vivante! Qu’un granit entouré
d’une vague épouvante, assoupi dans le fond d’un Sahara brumeux

[nothing new under the sun

no new things
they all existed long before
like hopes on bad grounds –
you living matter yet,
quite astonished rock
asleep amid some obscure Sahara]

echo n.3 : lete (no memory)

eccl. 1, 11; canti; fleurs

non est priorum memoria

un vieux sphinix ignoré du monde insoucieux,
a pensare come tutto al mondo passa
e quasi orma non lascia

[of things past no memory today

sphinx forgotten by cold worlds
while everything is fading away,
quite traceless]

echo n.4 : voit (emptyness)

eccl.2,17; canti; fleurs ; poems;; poiesie

Et idcirco taeduit me vitae meae

nè di sospiri è degna la terra
Et mon coeur s’effraya d’envier maint pauvre homme
courant avec ferveur à l’abîme béant, et qui...
préférerait en somme la douleur à la mort
et l’enfer au néant -
to seek for new joy I met with scorn...
gisin zacem ti mne dana?

[and I got tired of my life,

in anworthy of sighs land
I was envious with wonder
of infinite upset men, running to the open abyss,
preferring sorrow to death, hell to nothing –
to seek for new joy I met with scorn...
why must I live?]

echo n.5: duònus (good)

eccl. 4, 2-3; poems; eccl.; canti

et laudavi magis mortuos quam viventes

 they stumble all night
et feliciorem iudicavi
qui necdum natus est
al gener nostro il fato non donò che il morire

[and I saw the dead,

they stumble all night,
they were better off than the living,
but best of all the never born...though -
one choice left: to die]

********da svidània^^^^^^^^^

guidomu2001@yahoo.it
Guido Monte was born in 1962. About him on the web, see also:
http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article.php?lab=Genesis, http://www.mid.muohio.edu/segue/index.htm,
http://www.litterae.net/Trad%20Virgil.htm, http://www.happano.org/pages/fragments/63.html.
 anonlinejournalofvoice

Gianina Opris

MiA
[the poem which is not one]

JOSE-PHINE

She is awakened by the sound of the laughing sea-gulls. She rests in bed hugging a

pillow - looking around and finding the image of Madame Butterfly and her almond shaped

eyes {blue hands}. Golden butterflies.

“My dog’s name is ...” This thought interrupts her. “When my family moved to

Denver. We had to leave my dog. Then we found out ... he is dead. When we went back to

Mexico. They had killed him. He was dead. I cried. My little sister cried too. I cry.”

“How do you feel about this story?” She remembers asking the children she was

working with that morning. Poor Beautiful Girl. She doesn’t forget these meaningful stories.

They are a part of her everyday. Delete. No she can’t delete memories.

She is not exactly like the woman trapped in a wheel chair. She has long dark black

hair. Frog eyes with long eye lashes and uneven eyebrows. Always in the company of her

skinny cat. Her hair is never combed and her ear is painted in white enamel like a “C” but

backwards.

“Do angles comb their hair?”

Pour Josephine
 ____________________________

WING AND HAND-OUT

There she is at the park near the lake by the green benches. By the runners jogging

by. It’s the statue of an angel with a broken wing. The tall trees above the statue’s body

provide a magical shade. A lavender landscape. Her right arm is standing up tall and strong.

Her hand makes a fist. “Why those sad eyes looking down to the ground?” Dear Dog gets

excited. She moves to the left corner of the bench. Sits alert. Waits as if ready to pray. The

angel’s upper left top wing is broken. A flat cut out. Or unfinished. Her left hand is taken.

She struggles to see this type of woman. This angle of stone. One side of her being

emerges strengthened and the other doesn’t. It’s cut out. Surviving. Quiet

now................She shines.

____________________________

Song:

“To be sung

Urgently, sweetly, with bliss, and sometimes with desperation.”

For Carole Maso

When she shuts her eyes she reaches for a purple flower with the silver button in the

center. She finds it in a box. She looks at the photograph frame with the skinny winter trees

and the cold. Snow – white. The boulevard around the one story house with the roof covered

with March snow. The road with two people and a dog. A boy. A mother. A Labrador.
 ____________________________

She writes a note.

A letter.
A union SPARKLES.
Preparation
Days
/P/
To
{pretty women}
Learn: stones could give birth
Generation
Permission
Paz: Peace
Cosmos ... where’ r u ...?
Working ants.
Waxy taste!
O
......................................................................................................................................................
......................................................................................................................................................
............... Shonagon [ Dear Shonagon]
Thank You.

____________________________

WEARING WATER

“Now where are you?” turning around. “Death... where is your hat? Your fire?

Your tail?” “Why did you come here today?” “Do you need a lesson about Victory or do

you want me to comb your hair?” “Are you in need of a new hat?” “Are you going to

respond...or not?” “ARE YOU HERE TO TAKE THIS SHADOW?” She closes her eyes.

Death intrigues her. Death is a seed now. This body of water is loving lavender.

The death’s skull contains great substance now. The Icaco plants don’t die even though the

darlings are dying on the street on IC -20/20 near Estes. She starts a chant ~~~

“Why do some people have sight but can’t see the beauty in patience”

“Men. Men –beheaded”

 “The purple babies who live in the land need to be revived later next spring”

“She doesn’t want to wear her silver necklace with the coca leaf pendant from Perú to a

bloody wedding”

“Can you read letters?”

“Clean the book shelves like no other”

“Read E. Bishop & dry peach roses in May”

“I need a bicycle” the death sings ~~~ “My feet are not running fast enough” she

seems to hear in panic. “Death doesn’t know me. No one does” she has trouble hearing

now. Later alone she sits on the floor by a chair and sings ~~~ “I am cleaning ... cleaning

a body with an encounter –this body becomes what it truly is.” A fluid of love ~~~ always

taking her away from her practices and filling her up with poetry.

____________________________
 anonlinejournalofvoice

Grace Connolly

3 moments/mid

Do you still find it that way?

devious

parties

"he's the most beautiful boy

I've ever seen"

night

stairs

stars that were really just army

contraband army

monsters

you only ever terrified me for a moment

lets pretend it's over.

america/ a disjointed fairy tale

without a gadget like a busted hacket busted up face

is the news i have to

wait.

it isn't like that anymore.

wait.

a cap a pie a cap a cap

a pie

like a blackbird

slowly sinking in

jack jack

alone in the corner

guarding that country in europe his

border and thumbing all practical

logical approach

its too messy to freeze

too far away to float.

so don't.

wait. a classic breather.

toad

cat

a fairy tale

I'm old.

wait. noon. a book and then some notes. a highlighter

and pencil that will not quite

provoke.

wait.

comfort. a classic load of sorry.

wait. notes. can lift regain

re

compose

wait.

so dont.

its not like that container

it didn't

forgot that day there

in the back of the car in the tupperware in the

this will be good later and ill save it for tomorrow and ill eat it then

well guess it was more of an eat it never

mold.

Poe. will be never be my here.

wait. Poe

will never be my hero

wait

you grate will never come unopened it fields like hair

it melts like air and tell me I'm float. tell me I'm float.

I honestly don't care.

apathy. I can't be constantly.

I am

frummed it

found it

flown it and around it

I am flabbergasted by your frivolous fancies

and I don’t fancy you now

I don’t fancy you at all

I am gasping and lacking I can’t lead

don’t tell me I’m not supposed to anyway

I am burning and my throat is closing and something desperately needs

to be said and I don’t know what

I am caught

I am coughing. Caught in. A Coffin. A web

I am reaching. I am breathing. somewhere here. within

I am surrounded by constant walking and

its alarming that the tension

my neck is

going to fall off

going to fall off

sweet jesus

my legs are crossed and I cant

I’m locked

I am locked

I am caught in

gelled in and shaking and

my legs are in a state of disrepair

I am constantly controlling and maybe I don’t

want to be rolling like this on no drugs

on no floor

what was I led here for? apathy?

I can’t be led here for apathy. I can’t be constantly.

Laugh at me. That’s right laugh at me. Go ahead laugh at me

Laugh at me right now

I cant be jotted. I am knotted, knotting down.

 anonlinejournalofvoice
Frederick Pollack

Good to Go

There is a sensation that comes with completing

anything — whether downsizing
a firm, or clearing a drain
that was stuffed a month, or acing
a test or closing a deal
or a poem. It’s the
clean T-shirt feeling,
and feelings from a walk in it, even far
into fall — not so
strenuous as to waste
a shower or feel anything
but a breeze; but the breeze
is there. The temperature sinks,
leaves loosen,
the sun comments on each leaf,
and lucky thought doesn’t think beyond
the light-effects, the task completed
over and over in the mind,
the body.
Thinks of no larger end.
Other people in the shortening twilight,
with dogs or without,
walk slowly or quickly
and belong to each other or not
as much as need be, being without need;
and the cars pass in admirable order,
and everything seems possible
since nothing for the moment occurs that isn’t.
 2

Blood on the stool, and an occasional throb

in the lower right quadrant
(from whence appendix vanished long ago),
then an intermittent bar
to breathing in the upper
left. Casually to speak of “tests”
demeans the weeks between them,
which increasingly become a performance,
which increasingly frays.
The beige and blue of waiting rooms
with their loud televisions
for mouth-breathers.
The “referring physician,” a cold and knowledgeable child.
Then: ass in the air for barium; then
the voyage up-colon, live
on monitor; pause and silence
for each excision —
thinking how The Death of Ivan Ilyich
is marred by the promise that pain stops
and light and the afterlife take over;
how one should have achieved
more, how little one cares;
how that simplest shield against circumstance,
more difficult for the sophisticated
to conceive or procure than for any
child of the poor or scary (a
gun), wasn’t
procured, so that
now there will be only pain
and an expanding condescension.
Both occur in that room
where one ingests
chemo, but only one’s
intolerable. Choked apologies, assurances,
gruesome triumphs of the spirit,
the smell, and a new twanging, all
night, of the nerves in some limb …
There is no point to this process,
any more than to this passage, no
theme. The one thought from the bed
that goes up and down,
terribly, beneath the hasty hands
of the nurses — apart from
the total futile wish
for home — is how one
should have achieved
more, how little one cares;
how amazing the twanging and stabbing
become, with the least breath
inflected with shit and a reflux of betrayal.

I gave up on democracy in ‘80.

More abruptly and consciously
than I abandoned The Revolution.
People ran, dark shapes, in the streets — so many
they had to represent the times.
They chanted the slogan of Mrs. Thatcher:
“Only the individual exists!”
I thought I noticed a contradiction
but, typically, kept it to myself.
I sat in cafés with my friends,
who, if they had any gumption,
brains, talent, contacts, were preparing
to sell out,
while the rest of us dreamed of camps —
honorably freezing in the Gulag,
or gassed,
or baked in the huts reserved for us
in Nevada.
(In LA, Phylis, whom I hadn’t met,
thought “No more we, only me,”
with the simplicity her thoughts have
when she is very sad.)
A young torchbearing enthusiast
confronted us, me especially,
in the coffeehouse.
He told me to get with the program.
Spoke with visionary smugness
of the fall of the Soviet Union
and all walls.
Proclaimed à haute voix that he and
his cohort would no longer
live for me, fight my fights
in the future, like the kids I should have had.
I started to stammer denial, my young jowls shaking.
He said I despised the people.
I realized he was right,
and hugged this alarming recognition
to myself as the place closed, and the lights dimmed;
paradoxically it protected me
from the rest of what he said
and the next several decades.
The days go by.
In 1065 years, quantum tunneling
will dissolve the pitiful remnant
of my hopes.
 Refuse

They were welcoming me home.

— Cold, but my greatcoat (bare
of self-awarded medals)
was thick. I removed
my beret at the strains
of the anthem. “I Have a Friend.”
The wind snapped
my beautiful flags.
How many there are, I thought, and how few
designs are immediately clear:
that Atlas figure, balancing two worlds;
that somber wheel; that sword in clouds.
They gave me something to look at,
taking the salute.
To think about, as a thousand voices beat
the wind back with the interminable Hymn.
Something, I mean, besides my House,
with mountains and sky behind it,
and the portico and broad embracing steps
where robots sang.

A great-aunt cried repeatedly

towards the end, “I don’t UNDERSTAND!”
and bowed her head and clasped one hand
in the other, tightly.
The gesture struck me —
the words were already mine —
but Mother hurried me away, I think
so we might not commune, compare, define.
Alone, great-aunt grew calmer.
The whoosh of the freeway,
where her loveless children passed,
died. The plates on her shelves grew sparse
and split into two piles.
The fridge turned humble, with a crown of coils.
The palm-trees withered and an elm appeared,
and from her window, cramped and high
and intimate again, she watched
a line of jobless friends and suitors inch
forward for sandwiches
among the coal-carts and the boys playing stickball,
and sighed, and (though it was shabbas) crossed
her faded carpet towards the radio.

The “I” was decaying, the Faustian Western “I”,

and summoned these to be its gravediggers …
At first you stare at them, but when
they hand you that seamless,
transparent, indestructible block you look
at it. The polyp, the original cancer cell
that would have killed you,
your enemy’s secret face in a true mirror,
the broken spring that kept you from your love,
all in a paperweight, a souvenir.
I threw mine out.
Stocky as former-East-German weightlifters,
with that world-lighting smile the masses trust,
they talk to people and,
always from blocks away,
I see people weeping, embracing them.
And then those visitants, our guests or hosts,
sincerely, grandly wave them through
a kind of hole they open in the air,
out of the world.
I roam the streets avoiding them
as the streets empty.
I like to think myself a wanderer,
but can one “wander” in a city?
There are only good neighborhoods and bad ...
Perhaps, as population lessens,
the latter become mysterious
and wandering possible.
I fill my head with thoughts like these
to maintain human dignity,
till one of the aliens (if that’s what they are),
observing me, does not approach,
but smiles and massively winks,
as if amused at what I flee him for.

4
In Ocho Rios, mansions rise
through trees above the town,
which appears pleasantly funky from the rail.
The liner docks; crewmen at liberty
bear boomboxes to the greasy beach,
while a few tourists without tours
follow a pink path lined
with razorwire and, beyond it, timeshares.
And suddenly everything is there,
but only one of anything that matters:
Macdonald’s, Pizza Hut and Burger King,
a police station, a failed-looking resort
behind the older type of wire fence.
The rest exists in bulk: people, babies;
cars motionless in streets the Brits repaired,
perhaps, before they left;
Hindu jewelers; skeletal cows and dogs;
vague compounds where each stall sells
identical crap. I wonder: why giraffes?
Who was it first decided on
hand-carved, red-green giraffes?
At which point, one of the beggars on that stretch
of pavement, limbs and eyes
awry, gives me a three-toothed grin and says:
“You need not look so icily upon
our works, for they are yours.”
I stand amazed. “A homeless man back home
would not speak thus.” “Because it’s not his role;
he is a kind of policeman, guaranteeing
your effort. Here, where you enjoy its fruits,
you can regard me as a man.”
 Terra Amata

From time to time I meet the Kid

roaming from settlement to settlement
with a knife.
“Why not an automatic weapon
like other juvenile killers?”
I ask. His pressured response,
full of rehearsed and bitter private jokes,
conveys little,
but I gather he thought of a knife
at the time of provocation
(where fists were unthinkable, let alone
knives). It must be a knife.
“They got me after school,” he chants,
“I’ll get them after life.”
I remind him we aren’t dead.
He refuses to listen.
Has found no trace of his tormentors
but seems to assume he’ll stumble across them.
Maternal types in the villages, meanwhile,
shelter and feed him.
The outdoor life seems to be doing him good …
in any case he got away from home.

Occasionally, too, I see the Lad.

Given time, he worked things out.
He divides his time between a gym, clubs,
and auto showrooms.
The last of his cohort to drive … but
there is no cohort here;
only the memory of one,
and girls, and places to take them.
“All I need, now I’m handsome.”
(All local jocks and studs have been made nerds.)
He boasts about the number
of his conquests, their skills and jealousies;
the fact that they have no alternative
does not strike him as qualifying
his triumph, but as triumph.
He drums his hand on the door
of a Lamborghini,
beside a perfumed shadow, and roars away.
For my part, I work at
whatever the neighborhood Council
suggests. I have no skill
for plumbing or carpentry,
preventative health care, pacifying
three- or inspiring twelve-year-olds,
but after a month or so I pick some up.
Then on to the next.
The point isn’t efficiency.
The process of heroic construction
is mostly one of repair.
Our gleaming city
is an occasional trick of light
on greed-exhausted brick,
a heavy evening mood
that is part love but mostly yearning for it.

And other people …

I try, as I always have,
and succeed!
One who grows faint on scaffolding
will feel my supporting arm,
a crying stranger find a sudden shoulder,
her husband a needed word.
In this world of trolley-cars and kitchens
I cook, and clang the bell
to warn the children playing three blocks ahead.
Through hot or frigid nights
of our regular seasons,
I purvey literature.
But at times, behind eyes
and the mind installed behind them,
I see another mind,
which wants only to serve
something unworthy,
to sink in the despair of television,
and — if it senses
I do not seek release
but have found it — to murder me.

My friends are generally far away

and happy. They write and paint
the works that trickle down.
But some … well, Richard
decided the time has come
at last to find his bear,
and walked the whole North Woods but failed to do so,
and blames me.
Jim has become as alarmingly young as his women.
Anne has begun to preach
to my good comrades here;
she thinks it’s dreadful that they aren’t free.
Because she is, they do not hear her.

Beyond the town, between the villages,

the land rises in waves
of mountains and returning trees.
Death too seems more
a matter of space than time, here:
a place, thick-walled and heavy-eaved,
wherein sits the old sage
from old etchings,
who looks by damaged light into a book.
It changes when you approach it.
It contains savage truths.
 Zombie Jamboree

(see Anthony Burgess, Enderby)

After long silence, Enderby’s muse

returns. Her dictations,
however, are peculiarly tentative,
soft and self-interrupted,
a babyish scolding.
He struggles, mumbling.

It’s his fault. He drove her away

that time she appeared
nude and golden
in his bed in Tangiers, and said,
in her harsh way, “When I give
I give big. Darling.” And he
( — you wonder, reading a Brit,
how sex ever arises
beneath that glum impacted wit)

could only visualize,

as if from above, his white pulpy buttocks,

and gibbered “no no no,”

and she, amused, rose

and dressed and, patting
his hand on the way out,
said: “Minor poet.”

(It isn’t the greatest novel

but it contains the whole point of fiction.)

An incredible snafu leaves

Bush completely on his own
one wintry afternoon in Europe.
Back home, heads roll. Back home goes to Def-Con III.
The Premier or Prime Minister or whatever
of Europe stands with Bush on the steps
of his palace and peers,
embarrassed, about, and offers
the use of his own Executive Guard
and limo.
The President shakes him off and decides to walk.
He knows the American Embassy
is just a short distance up
this boulevard. He’s pissed
but unafraid. Perhaps
being used to his unobtrusive Secret Service
makes their absence less evident. Or
he draws on his deep personal faith
in Jesus. That’s what it is.
He enjoys walking,
the chill air, the weird pompous buildings.
He encounters Europeans. They
wear leather coats and zebra shirts and feathers in their hats,
which conceal implanted antennas.
(When they aren’t chattering to each other,
they appear to be talking to themselves.)
They recognize and surround him.
They remonstrate and gesture.
Cheney, back home, is moved to a safe location.
Bush knows what they might want to rag him about —
ŏ Iraq
ŏ the Kyoto Treaty
ŏ Palestinians —
but he doesn’t speak European.
Despite their noise they seem to bear
some strange metaphysical weight
that isolates them from each other. Also
they’re smoking, which slows them down.
Bush wonders if he’s in danger.
The thin lips twist
mirthlessly; he squares his shoulders.
He recalls that he has been born again
and is justified in the Lord. But
the crowd parts, enfeebled
perhaps by that; perhaps
by that metaphysical weight.
The backwash of adrenaline leaves
the President melancholy,
and, nearing the Embassy,
he looks up at the sky —
unsure if the lights he sees
are the white bellies of birds,
the Pleiades, or an airstrike.

3
It was after the Great Society
but before the Conservative Revolution.
If he thought about it at all,
Nixon’s aim was to gut our department
through overburdening and underfunding —
taking credit for our benign
programs while they survived
and for cutting them when they failed.
Meanwhile I pretended life was meaningful,
with an adding machine that took up half my desk.
In the space that remained, I set up my pad
and phoned the firms on my roster.
“Is this Dick Grinder Inc.?” “Yes!”
“Is this Bert Blender, Financial Officer?” “Yes!!”
(That plump, delighted voice
which never asked my name.) “Bert,
we’re calling about the people
we’ve sent. How’s Lateesha?” “Fine.”
“How is LaTonya doing?” “Not
so fine … we had to let her go.
I’ll mail you the paperwork.” “What seemed
to be the problem?”
“I think she said something about her babies
who went to live with her cousin,
but the cousin’s boyfriend shot
her boyfriend, and Mama
(I’m not sure whose mama) bitch-slapped
the cousin, and someone ran out of the house,
and the boyfriend’s cousin couldn’t
make bail, and then the plumbing blew up
because somebody flushed a diaper — ” By
now we were helplessly giggling
but I said, “Now Bert,
we need to feel our employers
understand the needs of our placements.”
“I do! I’m very sympathetic,”
he cried, and went on to tell
how he often sat on the stairs
(which no one used) in his building
and thought about the Bomb
and wept, and how he couldn’t
rely on any support,
not only at the office;
and continued this way for some time.
I doodled and muttered,
“I know you’re trying to run a business,”
and agreed to review LaTonya
at some future date.
Then I finished the form and inserted it
in a binder down the hall.
Whatever became of those binders?
By now, they rest in the landfill
beneath all our cities
with every human sigh.

The traffic moves, revealing

what stopped it:
four — now five — police cars
surrounding a nondescript Accord.
Is it drugs? The car
itself? Stolen,
or chased down after speeding?
or something unimaginable …

The driver invisible,

the cops not yet emerged,
there are only the flashing lights,
the five cars and the one.

They are — here comes the metaphor —

a herd of postgraduates parsing Derrida.

As the sun sets over Haight-Ashbury,

Bill and Connie return with munchies.
They shriek their adventures, their near escapes,
as we throw ourselves on the chips.
It takes them a while
to return to our state
of various undress
across the two joined mattresses and floor.
We are all most interested in Connie’s
progress, but
she wanders topless to the window
and loses herself in what she sees.
And Sam loses himself
obsessing about which political grouplets
will converge tomorrow on the city
to march against the War.
Some lose themselves in the music,
some in the lights on the ceiling.
I babble about creativity,
always, always about creativity,
the vision I have not found,
the one I imagine I’ve found …
And so, another opportunity
for sex until oblivion
is only partly seized.
But Connie does not return
from the window, and, gradually,
I get up to join her.
Beneath the moon, the diner is closed. The dealers
have vanished from the alleys. Even
the mad, discharged soldier
has left our corner.
But the street from end to end is filled
with the grey people of the future.
Both terrible and silly
they make their nothing noises,
back to back and belly to belly.
 Clinton at the Tomb of Pessoa
This common sleep of men, the universe.
— Fernando Pessoa

On his way to Berlin

to peddle missiles, and to Moscow
to confront Putin with them, Clinton stops
in Lisbon.
Guterres the Prime Minister and other officials
accompany him to Belém,
whence the great explorers
and the first intercontinental traders
and slavers sailed.
Among the arcades
of the Hieronymite Monastery, in an alcove
in an otherwise smooth wall, the President encounters
something modern:
stacked granite cubes.
Gold letters
on three faces make separate,
signed statements; a fourth offers
another name
and dates. The Prime Minister
murmurs the name; someone explains
the heteronyms. Clinton
doesn’t quite get this, but stands
with his head bowed, as at church, anthems,
and cultural events. And for a moment

the President confronts

a slight dapper form,
and a face whose look of alarm
convinces him that, in this limbo,
he won’t need
the Secret Service. Introducing himself,
he extends a hand. The ensuing murmur
is decorous, the English excellent.
“I know one poet,”
says the President. “Back in my home state
of Arkansas.” To an apologetic, blank
response he states: “It’s an agricultural province.
Though since your day
agriculture itself
has become industrialized. Anyway, I’ve always felt
it must be wonderful to be a poet.
To speak with such emotional honesty.” “My work
wasn’t like that,” says
Pessoa, and explains, briefly,
the heteronyms. Clinton listens
closely, ponders.
“I guess I don’t see
the point,” he says. — “It wasn’t
by choice,” says Pessoa. “It was the only way

I could write.
I presume that in your time
everyone, even the statesman,
thinks, even speaks, as a whole.” — Clinton
grins; asks,
“Well, what did they talk about,
those multiple poets you became? Love,”
he adds, anticipating
the reply. — “One, a classicist,”
Pessoa replies, “invoked abstractions,
the occasional stone negligee, and one,
a vitalist, spilled his vitality
toward the infrequent shopgirl, but neither meant it.”
“Just as well,” says the President,
surprising himself, but thinking None of this
is recorded, and all of it
is deniable; then adding,
“Or tragic, perhaps,” which also surprises him.
Recalling the dates
on the stone, he suggests it was
politics the heteronyms
sang. The thought even
tickles him: one praising Trotsky,
another the local dictator (what was his name) — But

Pessoa says
he was a monarchist,
with little passion to spare
for either the workers’
or human progress, and his mild
oblique stare
discomfits Clinton. The latter realizes
the audience is ending, and asks a perhaps
inevitable question. But the poet
shakes his head: “I lacked
religious faith …
if there was a Redeemer I missed him.”
“Missed him,” echoes the President, feeling
foolish. — “Where I
am now, where we are sent,
is a receding point
from whose perspective nations
(those constructs, as I called them,
between the physical verities
of individual and species),
and pretensions,
and the distances between selves
and their lies, and between selves
and other selves dwindle,

and all that subsists is the gaze.”

 Author Notes

Laura McCullough holds an MFA in Writing and Literature from Goddard College. She has been a New Jersey
State Arts Council Fellow, won a Geraldine R. Dodge Scholarship to attend the Fine Arts Work Center in
Provincetown, and was the 2005 Prairie Schooner Merit Scholar in Poetry at the Nebraska Summer Writers
Workshop. She attended the 2005 Bread Loaf writers conference as a contributor. She has published poems
widely in literary magazines and journals such as Nimrod, Hotel Amerika, Gulf Coast, Nightsun, Iron Horse
Quarterly, Boulevard, The God Particle, Poetry East, Confluence, Exquisite Corpse, Word Riot, Tarpaulin Sky,
and others. Her first collection of poems, The Dancing Bear, was published in February, 2006 by Open Book
Press with jacket blurbs by Stephen Dunn, Li-young Lee, and BJ Ward. She delivered a paper, “In Defence of
Shelley: the New Science of Mirror Neurons and its Implications for a Theory of Poetics” at The Mid
American’s 2005 Winter Wheat Writing Festival in Bowling Green. She teaches full time at Brookdale
Community College in NJ where she chairs the Visiting Writers Series.

Guido Monte was born in 1962. About him on the web, see also:
http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article.php?lab=Genesis, http://www.mid.muohio.edu/segue/index.htm,
http://www.litterae.net/Trad%20Virgil.htm, http://www.happano.org/pages/fragments/63.html.